Similar Traits Don't Always Lead To 'Happily Ever After'

WASHINGTON POST - Nov 21 - eHarmony.com have built businesses around the belief that people with similarities make better matches in the long run. OppositesConnect.com is betting the reverse is true. Two years ago, Dyrenforth, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, examined data that had been collected by demographers in Australia, Germany and Britain. In all, 11,625 married couples were included in the study. The traits Dyrenforth looked at were extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability and openness to experience - often referred to as "The Big Five" by psychologists. She found that people with high levels of all those characteristics were more likely to be happy with life in general and with their relationships. Emotional stability seemed to be a crucial component for personal happiness. People who have spouses with high levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness and emotional stability were more likely to be happy in their relationships and with life as a whole. As for sharing common characteristics? It didn't seem to matter much. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST

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Comments

[Fernando Ardenghi]

The paper is:
"Predicting relationship and life satisfaction from personality in nationally representative samples from three countries: the relative importance of actor, partner, and similarity effects."

That research has 2 weak points:

1) The Big 5 test to assess personality of spouses. The Big 5 test is an oversimplification. One extravert (a bold, fearless, high-energy type) may differ considerably from another (a sweet, warm, sensitive type), depending on the extraversion-related primary scale score patterns.
I had been suggesting to use the 16PF5 (or 15FQ+) normative test since years and discard the Big 5 test forever.

2) How they calculate different similarity indices at page 5.
"One important issue in providing a clear interpretation of the similarity literature is that there are a variety of ways to measure similarity, and the choice of method involves both theoretical concerns and statistical complexities." at page 3.
"Perhaps the most important novel contribution of this work is the systematic examination of the ways that various similarity indices are associated with relationship and life satisfaction. In past work, researchers have debated which index should be used when examining the association between similarity and relationship outcomes." at page 11

Researchers in the Personality Based Recommender Systems arena are also testing different formulas to calculate similarity, useless at all because they use the Big5 to assess personality of users.
"Using Personality Information in Collaborative Filtering for New Users"
"Design and User Issues in Personality-based Recommender Systems"
"Emotive and Personality Parameters in Multimedia Recommender Systems"
"Personality based user similarity measure for a collaborative recommender system"
"The LDOS-PerAff-1 Corpus of Face Video Clips with Affective and Personality Metadata"
"Addressing the New User Problem with a Personality Based User Similarity Measure"
"Improving the believability in the interaction of synthetic virtual agents: Towards Personality in Group Dynamics"
Book "Recommender Systems based on Personality Traits: Could human psychological aspects influence the computer decision-making process?"

Moreover, this is the list of milestone papers not even cited in
"Predicting relationship and life satisfaction from personality in nationally representative samples from three countries: the relative importance of actor, partner, and similarity effects.":

* Charania & Ickes (2009) paper: "Personality influences on marital satisfaction: Integrating the empirical evidence using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) model"

* Rammstedt & Schupp (2008) paper: "Only the congruent survive - Personality similarities in couples. Personality and Individual Differences"

* Barelds & Dijkstra (2008) paper: "Do People Know What They Want: A Similar or Complementary Partner?"

* McCrae, Martin, Hrebícková, Urbánek, Boomsma et al. (2008) paper: "Personality Trait Similarity Between Spouses in Four Cultures"

* Barelds & Dijkstra (2007) paper: "Love at first sight or friends first? Ties among partner personality trait similarity, relationship onset, relationship quality, and love"

* Bekkers, van Aken & Denissen (2006) paper: "Social Structure and Personality Assortment Among Married Couples"

Latest Research in Theories of Romantic Relationships Development clearly shows: compatibility is all about a high level on personality similarity* between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.
*Similarity is a word that has different meanings for different persons or companies, it exactly depends on how mathematically is defined.