Self-Perception In Romantic Relationships

Bonnie and Clyde, Adam and Eve, Beyonce and Jay-Z – these are six individuals, but perhaps more conspicuously, they conjure up an image of three couples, each better recognized as a unit than is any individual member of the dyad alone. Indeed, when individuals become romantically involved, they often morph into a single entity in the eyes of others; for example, celebrities Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie earned themselves the single moniker of “Brangelina” when they started dating, exemplifying this phenomenon of thinking about romantic couples as a unit rather than just as separate individuals. Yet, despite rife anecdotal evidence such as these compound couple nicknames, psychological theory and research have paid relatively little attention

to this seemingly common way in which people see couples. Do people sometimes, or even typically, see a couple as a meaningful unit—in addition to, but distinct from, seeing the couple members as separate individuals? If so, how do couple-level identities influence people’s perceptions of both their own and other couples?
Guided by these questions, the present investigation tested the overarching proposition that a couple-level identity emerges for a pair of individuals in a romantic relationship, and that the characteristics of this couple identity consists of more than a simple combination of the two couple members’ individual characteristics.

Assuming that couples are cognitively represented as distinct dyadic units, these mental representations should influence how people perceive both their own couples as well as other couples in the social world. Thus, the present studies adopted both a self-perception and social-perception approach to examining dyadic-level

identities.
The Couple As A Natural Cognitive Unit: Categories, Taxonomies, and Typologies
The psychological literature offers wide-ranging theory and research on the perception of others, focusing both on individuals as well as groups (e.g., Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2001; Hamilton & Sherman, 1996).

Between the individual and group levels, however, couple units are also frequently encountered social targets in everyday interpersonal life, but research has much less to say on perception of these social entities. Of the work that has addressed this general line of inquiry, disparate strands in the literature support the general notion of couple-level identities A particularly relevant strand is work by Sedikides, Olsen, and Reis (1993) who reasoned that, considering the ubiquity of couple units in the social environment, creating a single mental representation of a dyad benefits perceivers by enabling cognitive parsimony. Couple units should therefore hold a unique status within perceivers’ mental space, leading people to naturally use relationship categories when encoding information about couples. Consistent with this, when participants read a randomized series of details about hypothetical individuals, they tended to encode those facts according to whether the individuals were described as romantically paired. Thus, when participants were able to cluster the individuals into couple units, they demonstrated better memory for previously learned facts about those targets in a subsequent recall

task.
Such findings provide a foundation for the present studies in which we elaborate on the content of couple-level identities—that is, the traits, characteristics, and evaluations people associate with couples. For example, are couple-level traits more than just a combination of the traits of the two individuals? Research on couple types offers preliminary answers. For instance, Forgas and Dobosz (1980) describe an implicit relationship taxonomy, defined by dimensions of desirability, love/commitment, and sexuality, that perceivers use when making judgements and evaluations of romantic couples (Forgas & Dobosz, 1980; Levinger & Snoek, 1972). Similarly, research in the marital counseling and family psychology literatures describes typologies of couples that clinicians commonly encounter with their clients. The ENRICH typology (Kouneski & Olson, 2004; Olson & Fowers, 1993) distinguishes five types of married couples – vitalized, harmonious, traditional, conflicted, and devitalized – to aid counselors in identifying relationship strengths and vulnerabilities. As a final example, Gottman and colleagues (Gottman 1999; Gottman & Levenson, 1992) identified four types of marital conflict styles – validation, volatile, conflict-avoiding, and hostile – with a focus on examining which styles predict divorce. Such typologies converge in supporting the notion that people do associate couples with unique couple-level characteristics. Yet this work is limited in its focus on couple prototypes and its application primarily in counseling contexts. In the current investigation, we aimed to take a more general self- and social-perception lens to examine whether people in general – not just professionals working with couples as clients – possess rich mental representations of both their own and other couples?