Archive

Archive for the ‘relationship status’ Category

Taking it to the next level: Can personality predict marriage?

February 12th, 2011 2 comments

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!

Categories: big five, relationship status Tags:

Relationship Status and Life Satisfaction

February 11th, 2009 4 comments

With Valentines Day coming up, perhaps you’re wondering whether couples really are happier than single people. myPersonality had a look at the relationship between Facebook Relationship Status and Life Satisfaction. Unfortunately for the single people out there, those smug couples you see really are smug for a good reason – they do tend to be happier than single people.

As can be seen in the below graph, the happiest people are those that are married, followed by those that are engaged. Surprisingly, people who say that their relationship is “complicated” are just as satisfied as single people. That suggests that even if a relationship goes wrong, it won’t be any worse than not having one at all. So our advice is that if you’re interested in someone, tell them! What’s to lose? However, there’s no point just ringing up that person you spent a drunken night with last week, as being in an open relationship also won’t improve your life satisfaction.

Graph to show relationship between Facebook Relationship Status and Satisfaction with Life

Method & Results
Read more…