Interpersonal attraction and agreement: A study of marriage partners.

Abstract

3 hypotheses were tested in a study of 60 middle-class married couples: (1) that the spouses' assumed agreement exceeds their actual agreement, (2) that assumed agreement is positively associated with marital satisfaction, (3) that actual agreement is correlated with marital attraction only in areas where agreement is instrumental for promoting the pair's goals. Ss responded to a variety of marriage-relevant items; they ranked 2 sets of marriage goals, and described both partners' real and ideal behavior. The 1st 2 hypotheses were supported; the 3rd was not clearly confirmed, but it appears applicable for explaining results from other studies. (23 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)