Taking it to the next level: Can personality predict marriage?
Two years ago around Valentines Day, myPersonality showed that married people are the most happy, followed by those who are engaged, followed by those in a relationship, followed by single people. In other words, people who take their relationship to the next level are happier.
But apart from their inner contentment, what distinguishes married people from single ones? Perhaps we can get some insights from their respective personalities. What kind of people get married and stay married?
We constructed a statistical model to see what predicts being married (vs. being single), using age, sex, and the 5 personality factors of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We had 173,252 single people and 113,046 married people in our sample, and the results are summarised in the table below.
| Predictor | Direction of prediction | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| Age | Older = More likely married | Not surprisingly, age is the best predictor of marriage. For every year older that people get, they’re 1.15 times more likely to be married. So, a 30 year old is slightly more than 4 times more likely to be married than a 20 year old. This isn’t interesting in itself, we just needed to remove any age effects. |
| Gender | Females are more likely married | This probably just represents something about how men and women identify themselves on Facebook. Perhaps women are more likely to say that they’re married, or less likely to say that they’re single. The important thing is that we control for gender in our model. |
| Openness On a 5 point scale (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) |
Conservative/traditional people more likely married | For each point that you go down the scale the person is 1.18 times more likely to be married. |
| Conscientiousness On a 5 point scale (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) |
Conscientious people more likely married | For each point that you go up the scale the person is 1.15 times more likely to be married. |
| Agreeableness On a 5 point scale (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) |
Competitive people more likely married | For each point that you go down the scale the person is 1.05 times more likely to be married. |
| Extraversion On a 5 point scale (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) |
Introverted people more likely married | For each point that you go down the scale the person is 1.04 times more likely to be married. |
| Neuroticism On a 5 point scale (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) |
Stressed out people more likely married | For each point that you go up the scale the person is 1.03 times more likely to be married. |
So there are reasonable (and all statistically significant with just a 0.1% probability of error) effects for the big 5 personality variables even after we control for age and gender. The biggest effects were that traditional and conscientious people are more likely to be married.
Of course, it’s possible that marriage might somehow cause people to change their personality to be more traditional and conscientious, rather than traditional and conscientious people getting and staying married. But on the other hand, just in case, and with Valentines Day coming up again, to show that you’re marriage material then we suggest that men should organise in advance to ask their Valentine out with 40 traditional red roses, and arrive on time to take her to a nice conventional romantic dinner.
There you go. Dating advice from your personality test!