Marriage seems to be a major commitment that involves a lot of time, money, and energy while having devastating consequences if it comes to divorce.
Choosing marriage partners is very risky business; however, people seem to trust their flawed intuition instead of putting the same rigorous testing that is used in other ventures. Before buying a house, buying a car, joining a company, starting a business, or hiring a new employee, people usually test in at least some way instead of relying on their intuitions.
Why do we not use the techniques that we have learned from psychology and other fields to better predict our partner’s future potential? We know love can make us stupid and blind; therefore, why don’t we test ourselves more?
So, my real question would be: Which scientific experiments would you suggest running on potential marriage partners?
For example, increasing room temperature while having them work on a task to see how they are when they get aggressive and irritated. Or, an assault of personality and EQ/IQ tests such as they do for businesses.
Because it’s not good enough yet, and because people in our culture don’t like applying rational analysis to relationships. It smacks too much of stories about old-time families coldbloodedly calculating which arranged marriage to shove their children into to gain the most status or profits, I suspect.
Books like these, with questionnaires, make an effort, but nog very succesfull. I guess most people would rather use such tools to convince themselves that whomever they’ve fallen in love with is compatible with them.
There are plenty of reasons against it, but one major one is this: most people never buy the best house on the market. The best house goes to the person who made the best bid, and 99% of people are forced to compromise on less than what they were dreaming of. According to the OP’s system, marriage will work the same way. People won’t get the best possible spouse, but instead, they’ll get the best possible spouse that someone better than them didn’t get.
Now, you might say that admitting your relationship is based on compromise is a mature and logical way to behave, but I think people need to believe, on some level, that the people they’re married to wanted to marry them more than anyone else. A compromise-based society seems like a sad, sad thing.
Besides, no one wants to hear that they’re fourth-rate marriage material. The truth hurts.
“Before buying a house, buying a car, joining a company, starting a business, or hiring a new employee, people usually test in at least some way instead of relying on their intuitions.”
Id say most dont myself. When we were house buying it seemed like the majority didnt get the place inspected, and bought on the day for instance. Most business fail inside a fairly short period from memory, suggesting that not a lot of research is done there either. Most employee reviews weight subjective impressions very heavily by focussing on the interview, etc etc.
With marriage the person is usually seen for a fairly substantial period before it occurs, family met, etc etc. If anything of the examples you’ve given Id say its the most tested rather than least.
Otara, it may be tested; however, it is tested more subjectively than objectively. While the other situations may not often be tested well, I suspect that they are often tested more often tested objectively than only subjectively. For example, corporations use a whole slew of personality tests done by researchers. We often read car reviews online while comparing specs and safety features. ect. Even if my examples aren’t the best, I would say that marriage is one of the least objective decisions people make while it should be one of the most objective.
We know we are blinded by love and sex; however, we ignore this and enjoy it like a drug.
I always thought that there should be a requirement for a term limit marriage before a permanent marriage, with a ban on pregnancy until you are in the permanent marriage phase. Sort of like a trial account … I think that if people had a 3 or 5 year trial marriage before going permanent with no sprogs it would reduce the cost of divorce. The way it would work would piss off the damned fundies of all religions, but screw them [=)] You do the trial marriage and one of the things that happens is mandatory birth control as there are to be no sprogs in the trial [so you dont have to deal with child custody and crap like that if the trial fails] Also, there are no joint purchases or accounts - no buying of houses, condos, expensive cars, boats or jewelry. At the end of the term, the marriage is dissolved, and they walk away or decide to go for permanent marriage.
You can tell a lot about a person while living together that you can not tell about them when just dating, even if you do sleep together. You need to live together to get out of the ‘honeymoon phase’ where you are on good behavior
Most people could probably marry any one of thousands and still be happy if they put the work into making the marriage work. People think they met the “one” and are amazed at how lucky they got when there is no “one” there are many many many ones that could make you happy. Decideing on one is a string of events that could have gone another way at any event.
I think you’re confusing whats possible with the examples you’ve given and whats commonly done. There are many objective tests and data available, but the examples I give show they are often not actually used in practise. So it shouldnt be a surprise to not see them used in marriage either, particularly given there isnt even a strong claim to substantially better predictive ability in that area.
If you want to know what experiments have been run already there is a fair bit of literature in the area. My understanding is its pretty much considered a dead end in psychology, and you can mainly expect to see it on dating sites or the like.
If you just ‘do what seems good’ as tests though, you’re really just replacing one form of intuition for another.
Otara, I understand what you are saying; however, I am not talking about what is possible, but what seems to be more common. It is quite common for companies to run new employees through personality tests before hiring, yet it is not common for lovers to do this or anything like this. I know people are impulsive; however, compared to something like business, marriage seems far behind. I think a large number of people would be insulted if asked to take research tests before marriage, yet it is common practice in businesses.
First of all, don’t knock intuition - we’ve been developing it for hundreds of millions of years. Logic, OTOH, has only been around for a few centuries, and is still in its beta stage.
Second of all, you seem to be assuming spherical humans; spherical, frictionless humans in a vacuum. In other words, your approach will work for the humans you think should exist rather than the humans that actually do. That kind of thinking has been tried many times before, and it never works.
I must admit google shows Im a bit out of date about how commonly they’re used in the US nowadays.
One obvious other problem is that an employment test can afford to be conservative in many settings - you miss out on one good employee in return for avoiding 10 bad ones, it can be worth it. For marriage, not necessarily unless your available pool is large. Normative testing can be very useful to an employer with hundreds of employees, and not so much when you’re only taking one person.
There are tons of marriage prediction sites available online too. So people are interested in them in theory, its just that they’re (rightly) believed to be basically useless. Perhaps it they werent, they might start being used more often?
You would never be able to test for things like changes in interest or attitude over time.
Then there is the little boss man who never listens to reason when it comes to 38Ds.
We’re a super match. We were long-distance for a year before we managed to be living in the same country, so we had a lot of time to talk and ask each other the big important questions. Of course, like any pair of human beings, we still need to work on some things, and emotion and “gut feelings” played a big part in our decisions to stay together and get married. But science (and the Internet) brought us together.
I wonder if any research has been done on the lasting power of relationships started through questionnaire-based online dating sites, to see if the “scientific” method of choosing a mate works any better than picking up that cutie in the produce section.
Just because it is common for employers to run candidates through personality tests doesn’t mean it actually works. Have there been scientific analyses of whether these tests actually help companies find better employees or avoid worse ones? They’ve been sold a bill of goods, and I have my doubts whether it is anything other than woo masquerading as science.
I’m not saying personality tests are not science, just that the application and effectiveness of them in this scenario seems questionable. I certainly may be wrong and am just making a guess based on what little I’ve seen on the subject.
Why does it matter? Because it goes back to the point that a lot of people disagree with your opening post when you state that people use rigorous test for big decisions like buying a car, hiring, etc. They don’t. Most people use intuition and emotion with some small amount of objective information.
Cite, please? I’ve never in my life taken a personality test from any company interested in hiring me, and I’ve probably applied for fifty-odd jobs in my life. Even if companies do give personality tests, that doesn’t mean those tests are worth anything. Companies do a lot of things that only waste their employees’ time and money.
About a generation ago there was a big hullabaloo in the education world surrounding the use of personality tests on learners. Supposedly we would give these tests to students and sort them into various categories such as visual/audio/kinesthetic learners, logical/emotional learners, creative/non-creative learners, etc… Much time and money was spent on giving these tests to students, with the eventual goal of assigning students to classes based on their learning style and creating assignments and materials for each individual style. Then educators figured out that personality tests are junk and that the entire concept wasn’t improving student performance at all. Now the whole idea has been dropped.
I’d reject any partner dumb enough to demand those things, that’s for sure.
While I am less than persuaded that tests for employment, education, or marriage are all that useful, I doubt that “educators figured out that personality tests are junk.” It seems rather more likely that school boards never came up with the funds to hire or train teachers to apply the test results to students in actual classroom situations than that the concept was wrong or the tests were flawed.
