Is it me, or are you a less than ideal partner? For psychologists
studying how people manage romantic relationships, that’s
not an easy question to answer. What if one of the partners
is deeply afraid of intimacy? Could she be acting in ways that
undermine the relationship? Or is her partner contributing to
the problem?
In a new study appearing in Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, researchers at the University of Illinois explore
these issues by looking at the choices people make in simulated
online dating relationships. By standardizing the behavior of
the romantic “partner,” the study clarifies how
each participant’s outlook influences his or her choices
and satisfaction with the romance.
The online study took participants through a series of scenarios
about a relationship with a fictional partner. Each scenario
ended with two options, from which the participant chose his
or her response.
“The interesting thing is that all the participants were
reacting to the same person, the same scenario,” said
psychology graduate student Amanda Vicary, a co-author on the
study with psychology professor R. Chris Fraley. “And
yet the pattern of their responses was quite different.”
Vicary and Fraley modeled their study on a 1979 Random House
interactive fiction series, “Choose Your Own Adventure,”
which allowed the reader to select from multiple options at
critical points in the story. Each choice directed the reader
to a new scenario.
This approach appealed to the researchers because earlier studies
of individual behavior in relationships asked participants to
make choices based solely on descriptions of isolated events.
The sequential nature of the new study was more like an actual
relationship, Vicary said, in that it involved ongoing interactions
with the same partner.
The online study began with an assessment of participant attachment
styles. A series of questions about how much the person trusts,
confides in or relies on a current or former romantic partner
allowed the researchers to profile the participant’s level
of security or insecurity, anxiety, or intimacy-avoidance in
romantic relationships. Fraley is a creator of this Experience
in Close Relationships-Revised (ECR-R) inventory, a tool for
measuring participants’ attachment styles.
After completing the ECR-R inventory and reading instructions,
participants answered a series of 20 relationship questions.
Each question described an event in the relationship and gave
the participant an opportunity to select one of two options
for responding to the event. One of the options enhanced the
relationship; the other undermined it.
The study included three experiments, each involving a different
group of participants. In the first, all participants read the
same story and selected from the same options at the end of
each scenario. In the second, a participant interacted with
either a supportive or unsupportive partner throughout the exercise.
In both experiments, the participants’ choices had no
influence on the behavior of their partners or on the scenarios.
In the third experiment, however, their choices did influence
the simulated partners’ responses. If the participant
made a relationship-enhancing choice, he or she got a positive
verbal response from the simulated partner and then moved to
a new scenario involving a supportive version of that partner.
Making a negative choice elicited a negative, rejecting response
from the partner and a new scenario in which the partner behaved
in an unsupportive way.
The researchers found that a participant’s attachment
style (that is, secure or insecure, anxious or intimacy-avoidant)
was a good predictor of the pattern of his or her choices.
“People who are highly insecure are more likely to interpret
their partners’ actions in a negative way and then choose
to respond in kind,” Vicary said. The more secure individuals
more often chose the positive, relationship-enhancing options.
As they progressed through the list of scenarios, most of the
participants increased the rate at which they made positive
choices. The anxious or avoidant participants increased their
relationship-enhancing choices more gradually than their peers,
however. This was true even in the third experiment, when their
choices elicited immediate feedback in the form of a positive
or negative response.
“It is interesting that even when highly insecure individuals
experience responses as a direct function of their actions,
they are still relatively slow to adopt beneficial relationship
choices,” the authors wrote. “It is possible that
insecure individuals simply do not realize the detrimental impact
that their actions have on their relationships.”
Not surprisingly, participants who interacted with supportive
partners were quicker to make positive choices and tended to
be more satisfied with the interaction.
The researchers also found that the nature of the choices each
participant made determined his or her satisfaction with the
simulated relationship: The more positive choices he or she
made, the more satisfied the participant was with the relationship
at the end of the experiment.
“This finding is noteworthy because it demonstrates that
one’s own internal dynamics affect relationship satisfaction
independently of the behavior of one’s partner,”
the authors wrote.
