How Well Do You Know Your Partner?

One aspect of intimate relationships that has caught the attention of scientists in recent years is authenticity. This term refers to people’s willingness to be open, honest, and forthright with their intimate partner. Common sense suggests, and research confirms, that being authentic with your spouse is an important key to a happy relationship.

But how accurate are couples at perceiving their partner’s displays of authenticity? In other words, can people reliably tell when their spouse is being honest and forthright, or when they’re hiding something and being deceptive? This is the relationship issue that Palo Alto University psychologists Robert Wickham and Melissa Bond explored in a recent article in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

In particular, Wickham and Bond investigated two aspects of authenticity that, at least in theory, need to be perceived accurately for relationships to work well. The first is known as intimate risk taking, and it refers to a person’s willingness to reveal private thoughts and feelings to their partner. Couples grow closer by making intimate revelations to each other, but there’s considerable risk in doing so. Namely, if your partner is insensitive or dismissive when you open up to them, it can be damaging to your own self-esteem as well as to the relationship as a whole.

The second is unacceptability of deception, and this refers to a person’s unwillingness to deceive or mislead their partner. Relationships built on deceit are doomed to misery for both partners. But even in strong marriages, sometimes spouses have to reveal things about themselves that they’d rather not. This can be because it’s embarrassing to themselves or because they fear it will hurt or anger their partner. Nevertheless, sometimes we simply have to be truthful and accept the consequences.

For their study, Wickham and Bond recruited 107 heterosexual couples to fill out a set of questionnaires. First, each person rated themselves in terms of intimate risk taking and unacceptability of deception. Next, they rated their partner on these same characteristics. For instance, each person responded to statements such as, “I am totally myself when I am with my partner,” and then to parallel statements like, “My partner is totally him/her self when with me.”

Afterward, the researchers subjected the data to a statistical technique known as truth-and-bias analysis, which serves as a method for measuring accuracy and bias in human perception. In a nutshell, it compares the self-ratings of Partner A with the perceived ratings of Partner B, and vice versa.

On the one hand, if each partner’s perceived ratings correspond to other partner’s self-ratings, then these perceptions are accurate. On the other hand, if each person's perceived ratings of their partner correspond with their own self-ratings, the couples are likely to be projecting.

Projection occurs when you assume another person has the same thoughts, feelings, and motivations as you do. To the extent that there’s a core of human nature we all share, projection is an effective approach for guiding social interactions. But it can also make us blind to unique but important characteristics of our partner.

The results of the study were mixed. Overall, people tend to be accurate in assessing their partner’s intimate risk taking. This makes sense, after all, because we directly observe the intimate revelations our partner makes to us. If our spouse is the silent type who rarely lets us know what’s on their mind, we can clearly see they’re low on intimate risk taking. In contrast, if they frequently reveal personal thoughts and feelings to us, we know they’re high on this characteristic.

It’s a different story, however, for unacceptability of deception. After all, we have to decide for ourselves whether to believe the things our partner tells us. They may be telling the truth, but we don’t believe them. Or else they may be lying, and we trust what they say. Furthermore, if they remain silent on an issue, we may never find out they were hiding something from us.

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Thus, it should come as no surprise that perceived unacceptability of deception was based on projections rather than accurate assessments. In other words, people who were open and honest with their spouse assumed their spouse was open and honest with them. Likewise, people who admitted to deceiving their partner also assumed that their partner deceived them.

Ironically, as Wickham and Bond point out, projection doesn’t necessarily lead to inaccurate perception. This is because people tend to seek out partners that are similar to them across a range of personality traits. Thus, if both you and your partner are similar in unacceptability of deception, then your projection of your own openness and honesty onto them could lead you to a fairly accurate perception of them after all.

Finally, Wickham and Bond also found evidence for a systematic bias in people’s perception of their partner’s unacceptability of deception. Specifically, people tended to rate their partner lower on this trait than they rated themselves. In other words, honest persons assumed their partners were also honest—only just a little less so than themselves. The researchers called this tendency “protective skepticism” and viewed it as a healthy acknowledgment of the uncertainty in judging whether your partner is deceiving you or not.

The take-home message isn’t about any kind of behavior that you can change to make your relationship a happier one. Rather, it’s about becoming more self-aware of the limits in your ability to perceive your spouse’s personality accurately. In particular, we need to be on the alert for occasions when the assumptions we make about our partner’s intentions are actually projections of our own thoughts and feelings rather than accurate perceptions.

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