Do similar personalities make for a perfect match?

Generally speaking, we tend to have something in common with our romantic partners, whether that be similar interests, backgrounds, or personalities. Whether we grow to be more similar with time or choose someone with similar traits to ourselves, however, is still an open question. New work by Jessica De La Mare and Anthony Lee from the University of Stirling suggests that we do gravitate towards potential partners with personalities similar to our own – but only for certain traits.

For this investigation, the team recruited 383 cisgender, heterosexual men and women online. After completing a measure of the Big Five personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and openness), the participants viewed 100 dating app profiles from members of the opposite sex, which consisted of randomly paired facial images and personal descriptions. 

The faces of these fictional suitors were smiling, AI-generated, and covered a wide range of ethnicities. Descriptions were written to emulate generic dating profile text, but were deliberately phrased to convey different levels of the Big Five personality traits. For example, profiles of extraverted individuals contained phrases such as "I love theme parks and last year I went skydiving. Give me a message if you're a fellow thrill seeker looking to share some exciting experiences!" These personal descriptions were independently rated for each of the Big Five personality traits before presentation to participants.

Participants indicated whether they would like to match with each potential partner, opening up the chance for further communication, by selecting no on the left of the screen or yes on the right, similar to popular dating apps. 

Though you might expect more open or extraverted people to swipe right more, analyses showed that participants' personalities made no difference to how many matches they made. Overall, participants swiped right more often on profiles that had been rated as more agreeable and emotionally stable (as determined by a reverse-coded score of neuroticism), as well as those seen as more introverted. 

The team also observed that participants did tend to choose people with similar personalities to their own – but only for some of the Big Five traits. Those who had higher levels of agreeableness, openness, or extraversion were more likely to match with profiles perceived as more agreeable, open, and extraverted respectively. This finding is in line with previous research. 

However, people didn't seem to particularly gravitate towards profiles with levels of emotional stability similar to their own. Instead, emotional stability was favoured by all participants. This makes sense, as emotional stability is generally a desirable trait in a partner, prized by those who don't possess it as well as those who do. 

They also didn't seek out matches displaying similar levels of conscientiousness to their own. While other studies have found that couples tend to have similar levels of conscientiousness, the authors of the current study suggest that couples may grow to become more similar in conscientiousness over time. 

In terms of extraversion, the team notes a couple of caveats. Though participants high in extraversion themselves favoured extraverted profiles, this may be down to the nature of dating apps. Tinder and other apps are often seen as places to meet one night stands, in which case an extraverted personality may provide an advantage when gathering matches. There may be differences in whether this trait is sought out when participants are searching for a longer-term relationship. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, matching with extraverted profiles also may have been influenced by how appealing extraverted social activities (often involving mass gatherings) sounded. 

The team highlights several other limitations to the work. Firstly, personality traits were considered one at a time. In real settings, personality traits are present all at once, and are likely to interact in different and (sometimes) exciting ways, which may not be captured by this research. The study also focused on heterosexual relationships using WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) participants, which limits how generalisable these findings are to other demographics. In addition to limitations listed, it's also possible participants felt their choices would be seen, which could have potentially influenced the types of profiles they selected. 

Future research could investigate how personality traits overlap or work together to form appealing profiles, as well as look at whether these findings change based on gender or in non-heterosexual relationships. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112185