How Do We Select Our Life Mates - Research Paper Example

How Do We Select Our Life Mates? of the of the Social researchers study numerous human behaviors. One of themis the selection of ideal life mate. Both researchers and ordinary people pay paramount importance to this issue. The reason is obvious. Social sciences have put forward many theories and concepts in order to explain how one selects his or her life partner. One of the theories that contemporary social science uses is called Five-factor personality traits model. This model uses five distinct characteristics to describe an individual’s personality. This assignment conducted a survey to determine self-portraits of 190 respondents through a set of questionnaires. Survey questionnaires were tailored to characterize respondents per Big-five model theory. The respondents then described the portrait of their expected life partners through the same questionnaires. This assignment conducts a literature review on mate selection process; uses the results of the survey to test several correlations between respondents’ self portraits and their mates portraits. The assignment presents the results of the findings. How Do We Select Our Life mates? Introduction The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” – this is said in the 23rd verse of the Genesis 2:23. The next verse, Genesis 2:24 says,” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is to his wife, and they become one flesh (“BibleGateway.com”, n.d.). This is how everything started and until this day we ponder with the question how to select our life mates (Kim,n.d.). Choosing a life partner is one of the crucial decisions that all of us face in the lives. Unfortunately, neither our schools nor our society provides us with the foresight and knowledge needed to make the best possible choice (Kim, n.d.). In the process of adolescent development, an individual creates an identity, which contains a set of self-defined commitments (Klimstra, et.al., 2012). Two unique personalities with two separate identities in future create the nucleus of a new family. It can truly be compared with the birth of a new star. That is why; both social science and society spend enormous time to find the answer which two personalities may be the best combination as a couple. The science has been struggling to find a theory that may be attributed to the mate selection process. Could it be ideal mate personality concept, dark triad concept, or big-five model of personality? The scope of this research does not constitute the goal in focusing on merits and demerits of various concepts in mate selection process; it rather analyzes the correlations between mate selection and big-five model of personality traits. Mate selection from cross-cultural and historical perspective strongly varies from country to country and culture to culture (“Introduction to Sociology”, n.d.; Figueredo, et.al., 2006). This process even in the same culture with the passage of time makes evolutionary or revolutionary changes. For example; sixty years from now in the USA this selection process predominately was based on how one’s parents felt about him or her, how stable his or her economic resources appeared to be, how healthy the person appeared to be, how good/moral his or her character appeared to be (“Introduction to Sociology”, n.d.). However, today it is not a selection but a search. Nonetheless, both selection and search have criteria. To identify the search criteria, this search conducted a qualitative survey focusing on the attributes of big five personality traits. Personality can be considered as a metric that describes a person’s character through quality, which makes one individual different from another individual. From the viewpoint of psychology, personality represents a dynamic concept that describes the growth and development of an individual’s entire mental system (Bedi, 2011). Even though, from the psychological viewpoint, one person’s mental system differs from another person; nevertheless a common denominator may be assigned to each person describing personality traits of a person. The Big Five describes the common denominators that may be used to categorize a person, both man, and woman. This denominator may be further extended for mate selection procedure. The Big-Five Personality: Its Attributes The big five personality traits describe the primary traits of a person. At the same time, each attribute may receive values, and thus combination of the values of big-five attributes defines a character. The big five personality attributes are openness, conscientiousness extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (McCare & John, 1992). Openness measures an individual’s ability to be open to any experience that might be helpful in accomplishing particular goals. Conscientiousness refers to the characteristics that demonstrate consistency and reliability of an individual while working with others. Extraversion defines comfort level of an individual in interaction with other individuals. Agreeableness characterizes a person’s behavior towards others while interacting with them. Neuroticism defines ability to control emotional outcome at the time of crisis (Digman, 1990). The Big five attributes can define traits of a personality that are associated with the achievements in various areas such as workforce and educational (“Education Testing Services”, n.d.). The big five personality traits are widely used in the contemporary business management. A company manager has to communicate with the company employees, and each of them feels, thinks, and acts in a particular way. At the same time, the manager has his own values, attitudes, emotions, and culture. The communication will bring fruitful results when both personalities are understood and measured. Managers high with extraversion exhibit more friendly, sociable, affectionate, and outgoing behaviors with the employees. Managers with high values of agreeableness are likable by the subordinates and supervisors. Manager with high values of conscientiousness are organized and self disciplined. A positive openness trait refers to innovative planning and decision-making (McCare & John, 1992) characters of a manager. Studies have evaluated how different qualitative values related to the big five attributes may impact academic achievement (“Education Testing Services”, n.d.). The influence of big five in motivating, managing, and developing a relationship has well been documented in various researches. A relationship requires two persons where mutual understanding serves as a key to unlocking elusive human qualities. Human qualities, at the same time, are characterized by personal traits. Personality theories study correlations of traits of two individuals to unlock the qualities that would establish a perfect match at work and in personal life. This research focuses on evaluation of correlation of personality traits in mate selection. Mate Selection: The Basic Concept Social psychology conducted many researches to study people’s preference criteria in mate selection. In order to find the answer, these studies explored mate selection criteria through sex-role socialization hypothesis, evolutionary theory, “birds of a feather”, and associative mating concepts (Furnham, 2009; O’Keffe, et.al, 2012). The sex-role socialization hypothesis explains that the preference criteria of a woman mostly depend on the interest in socio-economic resources, and of a man mostly on physical attractiveness. Evolutionary theory explains that the females view the mate selection priority through the social and material provisioning for offspring, and men view it through fertility. The “birds of feather” and associative mating concepts describe that people prefer partners who are similar to themselves (Furnham, 2009). However, the results of these researches display that similarity, complementary, and assertive mating ideas are the common denominator in mate selection. The above ideas, at the same time, display the influence of personality factors on mate selection. This is how personality factors start playing roles in mate selection process. Researches show that the top five desirable traits for both man and woman are sincerity, faithfulness, tenderness, reliability, and communicative (Furnham, 2009). These five traits, in fact, reflect two different attributes (or variables) of the five-factor model. These attributes are agreeableness and conscientiousness. The high agreeableness is attributed to an individual through good nature, cooperativeness, and trustworthiness. The high conscientiousness is attributed to an individual through the ability of being responsible, dependable, organized, and persistent. Contemporary studies have also studied the use of similarity and complementarity concepts in mate selection (Figueredo, et. al.., 2006). The objectives of these studies were to find out selection preferences of an ideal romantic partner when compared to self-rated personality. The researchers used five-factor model of human character to assess respondents’ self-ratings; then the concept was extended to assess these persons preferences of ideal romantic partner and actual romantic partner. Researchers in these evaluations used individual personality assessment methodology of NEO-FFI as the tool. Objectives of the Assignment The set forth above discussion explains that human behaviors can be listed through human personality traits, which can be categorized through big-five model. This assignment conducted a survey to study the mate selection criteria as viewed by the 190 college students. The openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness attributes of the big five model can be classified as positive traits. The objective of this study is to examine how positive personality traits are correlated in self-rating and mate selection; how neuroticism trait is correlated in self-rating and mate selection process. The study also examines differences between self and mate ratings related to positive traits and neuroticism. Method Participants. There are 190 participants of which 67 male and 123 female. They age ranges of participants are from 17 to 86 with a mean of 23.54 years and a standard deviation of 6.56 years. The small variance indicates that the majority of the respondents are with ages close to the mean. Out of 190 participants, 57.4% are single, 37.9% are in some kind of relationships, and 4.7% declared other status. Materials. The survey was conducted with 20 questionnaires; they are structured using Big Five inventory also called NEO FFI. The questionnaires consist of three sections: self-rating, mate rating, and demographic information. The first fifty percent of total respondents first answered self-rating questionnaires and then mate rating; the other fifty percent did the opposite. This is how potential biases associated with self and mate ratings were avoided. The reverse coding through opposite wording was used to prevent response acquiescence. Counterbalanced order of questions with a randomized arrangement of positive and negative questions was also used for bias control. The questionnaires were adopted from John and Srivastava (1999). All questionnaires contained consent document. The questionnaires are attached in the Appendix 1 of this assignment. Procedure. Prior to the taking participation in the survey all participants signed consent documents. Each participant completed the survey without time limit stress. Each question stands for explanatory variable. The respondents were requested to answer to these questions by assigning values from 1 through 6 against each question. Thus, each explanatory variable may have a nominal value from 1 to 6. The big-five model has 5 attributes: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The 20 survey questions were tailored to represent the 5 attributes of the big survey models. That is why; respondents’ answers of survey questions enabled to determine self-personality traits of the respondents, as well as, the personality traits of their choices of partners. The survey results present raw data of one-sample set with different paired variables. Let us denote X as self big-five attributes and Y as mate big five attributes. We can then declare the following: X1 = Self openness Y1 = Mate openness X2 = Self conscientiousness Y2 = Mate conscientiousness X3 = Self extraversion Y3 = Mate extraversion X4 = Self agreeableness Y4 = Mate agreeableness X5 = Self neuroticism Y5 = Mate neuroticism Using the survey data the research studied: Descriptive statistics Bivariate correlations (Between X1 and Y1; X2 and Y2; X3 and Y3; X4 and Y4, and X5 and Y5) of above personality traits through Pearson r coefficient Self and mate ratings differences through a paired T-test Results The descriptive statistics of self and mate ratings are displayed in Table 1. Using previously described notations and values from Table 1 the following personality relations are obtained: Y1 > X1 = 4.63 > 4.41; Mate openness > Self openness Y2 > X2 = 4.70 > 4.17; Self conscientiousness > Mate conscientiousness Y3 > Y3 = 4.09 >3.79; Mate extraversion > Self extraversion Y4 > X4 = 5.02 >4.50; Mate agreeableness > Self agreeableness X5 > Y5 = 3.35 > 2.31; Self neuroticism > Mate neuroticism. Overall, respondents preferred mates that scored higher than themselves in all positive personality traits while scoring lower in neuroticism. Pearson r test demonstrates the following: Relation between X1 and Y1; self and mate openness, r(188) = 0.475, p < 0.05; positive and moderate Relation between X2 and Y2; self and mate conscientiousness, r(188) = 0.391, p < 0.05; positive and low Relation between X3 and Y3; self and mate extraversion, r(188) = 0.350, p Read More