Mind & behavior · 1995
When couples evaluate attractive potential dates, who reads their partner’s thoughts and feelings least accurately?
Partners who were close but insecure about their relationship were least accurate when evaluating highly attractive potential dates. The study involved dating couples evaluating pictures of highly attractive or less attractive opposite-sex people. It does not establish that partners deliberately misunderstood each other.
Details
Dating couples rated and discussed pictures of opposite-sex people they might later interact with in a dating context. Couples evaluated either highly attractive or less attractive people. They then inferred their partner’s actual thoughts and feelings using video of the rating and discussion task.
Closeness, relationship insecurity and evaluating highly attractive people were each linked to lower accuracy, and their effects added together. Partners who were close, insecure and evaluating highly attractive people showed the lowest accuracy. The analysis indicated that feeling the relationship was threatened helped explain these links.
The research explored whether partners might be motivated to misunderstand each other in a threatening situation, but the findings do not establish deliberate avoidance. Nor do they show that close partners generally understand each other less well. The abstract does not report sample size or effect sizes, limiting judgments about the strength and reach of the finding.
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