title: Birds of a Feather Do Flock Together.
abstract: Friends and spouses tend to be similar in a broad range of characteristics, such as age, educational level, race, religion, attitudes, and general intelligence. Surprisingly, little evidence has been found for similarity in personality-one of the most fundamental psychological constructs. We argue that the lack of evidence for personality similarity stems from the tendency of individuals to make personality judgments relative to a salient comparison group, rather than in absolute terms (i.e., the reference-group effect), when responding to the self-report and peer-report questionnaires commonly used in personality research. We employed two behavior-based personality measures to circumvent the reference-group effect. The results based on large samples provide evidence for personality similarity between romantic partners ( n = 1,101; rs = .20-.47) and between friends ( n = 46,483; rs = .12-.31). We discuss the practical and methodological implications of the findings.
authors.affiliation: 1 Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.|2 Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
authors.forename: Wu
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Youyou
authors.affiliation: 3 Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Stillwell
authors.affiliation: 4 Department of Computer Science, Stony Brook University.
authors.forename: H Andrew
authors.initials: HA
authors.lastname: Schwartz
authors.affiliation: 5 Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
authors.forename: Michal
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kosinski
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D033062:Friends / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D010551:Personality; D012747:Sexual Partners / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: close relationships; personality assessment; reference-group effect; similarity; social network