Authors
Lindsey L Hicks, James K McNulty, Ruddy Faure, Andrea L Meltzer, Francesca Righetti, Wilhelm Hofmann
Publication date
2021/2
Journal
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Volume
120
Issue
2
Pages
335
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
Do people realize the evaluative feelings that are spontaneously activated by their partner? If so, do they use those evaluations when judging their romantic relationships? To answer these questions, we investigated the association between automatic partner attitudes and judgments of relationship satisfaction in 7 studies. Study 1 was a meta-analysis of 86 correlations that revealed a very weak association between implicitly and explicitly assessed relationship evaluations, and Studies 2a–2c revealed that people failed to accurately report their automatic partner attitudes even when specifically asked to do so. Consistent with the idea that such inaccuracy emerged in part because motivational factors led people to override their automatic attitudes, Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic partner attitudes better aligned with relationship judgments when people were incentivized with money (Study 3) and had …
Total citations
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