The effect of personal attributes and mate preference on marriage and relationship an experimental investigation

The Effect of Personal Attributes and Mate Preference on Relationship and Marriage:An Experimental Investigation ZHANG MAN Bachelor of Economics, Nankai University A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR

The Effect of Personal Attributes and Mate Preference on Relationship and Marriage:

An Experimental Investigation

ZHANG MAN

(Bachelor of Economics, Nankai University)

A THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

(BY RESEARCH) DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE

2013

This thesis work is the original work of Zhang Man, Performed independently underthe guidance of Prof Zhang Jie (supervisor), Economics Department, FASS, NationalUniversity of Singapore, from May 2012 to Aug 2013

Zhang Man Zhang Man 07/08/2013

And then, sincerely thanks the co-chairs and other committee members for theirpresence and helpful comments to my thesis.

Additionally, I gratefully acknowledge to all the teachers and classmates who taught

me and helped me in these years, and have to say I like all of you from my heart!Moreover, I should give many thanks to the administrative managers and staffs in ourEconomics Department of FASS for their kind assistances

Last but not least, thank you, mother and father Thanks for emotional and financialsupport all the time I will try to make me better and better because I am definitelysure that you always deserve a better daughter Love you, ma and pa

At this moment, any words fail to express my heartfelt gratitude to ‘the big family andfamilies’ of our Economics Department in FASS of NUS, but I still want to say thatthank you for gifting into my school life such a precious memory

Table of Contents

Pages

Declaration 1

Acknowledgements 2

Table of Contents 3

Summary 3

List of Tables 5

List of Figures 5

Sections: 1 Introduction 6

1.1 Justification of Research 6

1.2 Objectives of Research 8

1.3 Research Background 10

2 Precondition of Research 14

3 Modeling and Algorithm 17

3.1 Modeling 17

3.2 Matching Algorithm 21

4 Experimental Investigation 24

4.1 Individual Information Gathering 24

4.2 Results and Analysis 27

5 Conclusion 33

Reference 34

Using data from the individual investigation and Speed Dating Experiment viaGale-Shapley Algorithm, we study the relation between personal attributes and matepreference, and shed light on their effect on mate selection and relationshipsatisfaction The design of our investigation and experiment can allow us to observeboth the selection decision and matching results The relationships and marriages ofthe couples who were assorted for age, appearance and character were shown morestable and happier Furthermore, the most stable and happiest matches are moreprobably based on the similarity of personal character

Thus, personal attributes and mate preference interact with each other by the threemain similarities during the process of mate selection The effect of personal attributesand mate preference on romantic and marital relationship is significant

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Comparison of Matching Model Simulations……… 11

Table 2.1 The Relationship and Marriage Investigation in Five Cities* of China… 13Table 2.2 The Relationship and Marriage Investigation in Rural Area of China…….14Table 2.3 The Relationship and Marriage Investigation during 2000-2004 in China 14

Table 4.1 Cross-individual Correlations for Personal Attributes

Sample Group: Married & Dating……… 26Table 4.2 Cross-individual Correlations for Personal Attributes

Sample Group: Experimental Matching……… 28Table 4.3 Rating on Matching Stability and Happiness in Average……….30

List of Figures

Figure 3.1 An Unstable Matching Assignment………20Figure 3.2 A Stable Matching Reassignment (Optimal Solution)………20Figure 3.3 Three Rounds Stable Solution of Matching Assignment………22

1 Introduction

This research attempts to shed light on the relation between mate selection and twomain factors: one is personal attributes and another is mate preference, and to furtherour understanding about why individuals accept and reject romantic or maritalrelationships and how to ensure the stability and happiness in relationships

The whole thesis is composed of six sections Section 1 introduces the justification,objective and background of this research Sections 2 and 3 provide the preconditionsand algorithm to support the following experimental investigation in Section 4.Additionally, Section 4 lists and analyzes the experimental results for establishingevident basis for the explanation and guidance on individual relationships throughcorrelation analysis in the following Section 5 At last, Section 6 presents theconcluding remarks

1.1 Justification of Research

At any point of time in human society, most of individuals will experience or areexperiencing or experienced their own marriages in their limited lifetime It has reallylong been the goal of social scientists to better know why individuals accept and reject

a romantic or marital proposal Simply through this statement, we can be aware of theconsequence of marriage and its impact on both individuals and society at large Thus,the first reason of this research is directly and briefly embodied in the marriageimportance which is indicated on its individual effect and society effect

Additionally, by a common-sense view about the marriage that is most of individuals

do not want to just be married but desire a relatively stable and happy maritalrelationship with their partner in a long-term, it would be reasonable to assume thatindividuals like making their marriage decisions by happiness and stability most atleast In other words, they must be keeping the best interests of their mates andthemselves during making the marriage decision To some extent, it cannot be toomuch saying that a happy and stable marriage is far more significant than anythingelse in determining personal well-being (David Brooks, 2010) Thus, exploring how

to make sure of the marital happiness and stability would benefit most individuals; it

is also the key point of the research

In the view of Economics and Law, the points of marital happiness can be based onthree points The first one is the compatibility of supply and demand with theemotional feelings between wife and husband; the second point is the satisfaction ofrights and duties in their current marriage; the last one is the expectation for theirfuture marriage In this thesis work, the further experimental design is based on thesethree points to evaluate the marital happiness and stability

However, as supposed that the happiness of marriage can be evaluated, an optimalmarriage may not be only decided by the maximization of marital happiness in fact,because marriage is multi-angle and multi-dimensional For instance, parents andfriends tend to be involved in one’s mate choice even marriage, so that they must bewilling to make some suggestions on one’s relationship and even marriage in theirview In a way, it can cause a kind of information asymmetry from multi-angle views

And, the other factors, such as individual preferences for the mate selection, will posedifferent emphases of a relationship or marriage To simplify the complexity andreduce the multi-angle and multi-dimensional interferences, we are going to introduceseveral rating questionnaires and speed dating experiments for gathering individualinformation in this study, and then use the results to do the analogy analysis on theindividual relationship and marriage It would be an essential part of this research.

1.2 Objectives of Research

As the historical records of anthropology, the complexity of marital relationshipsubject was established as early as the word ‘mariage’ in Middle English first

appeared In The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization (1936), Edvard

Westermarck defined Marriage as a relation of one or more men to one or morewomen that is recognized by custom or law According to the marriage definition in

Notes and Queries, Kathleen Gough (1959) modified the definition as a union

between a woman and one or more other persons such that children corn to thewoman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners However, the otheranthropologists such as Duran Bell (1997) then criticized this legitimacy-baseddefinition of marriage Definitely, marriage is a very complicated study subject Theenormous argument and criticism over marriage definition is still circulated inacademic circles all these years And, it seems like no one can tell what exactly themarriage is because of its complicacy, though lots of famous scientists indeed do great

contribution to marriage research.

Thus, here for a reasonable simplification in analyzing the complicated subject, thispaper intends to observe the notable factors in a marriage and detect significantinternal and external effects on the marriage market through experimentalinvestigation and correlation analysis, and then on this basis examine the causal effect

of personal attributes and mate preference on the mate selection behavior bysimulated experiments (Speed Dating Experiments) In the view of economics, theexperiments would be focused on spanning a variety of main aspects of marital andromantic relationship and estimate their effect on the matching in a dynamic duration.Thereby, we are able to provide a relatively comprehensive evidence and guidance onhow to use personal attributes and mate preference in combination to get morehappiness, stability and satisfaction from a marital or romantic relationship

The main purpose of this research is to collect relatively accurate and sufficientpersonal information from 31 pairs of married couples and 48 dating couples and 50young singles, and investigate the impact of personal attributes and mate preference

on their current relationships It would be expected that the experimental data and thetractable dating and matching results, to some extent, can accurately illustrate thecorresponding relations among personal attributes, mate preference and the quality ofmatching which is evaluated by stability and happiness Moreover, the research result

is expected to be significant and persuasive to clearly explain the effect of attributesand preference on mate selection, and provide a good guidance to make moresatisfaction on a romantic or marital relationship for more individuals

1.3 Research Background

Gary S Becker (1973 and 1974, summarized in 1991) applied the economic approach

to analyze the most sensitive and fateful individual decisions, such as choosing aspouse in matching process, and exposited the transferable utility model of themarriage market, a benchmark model at present Since Becker’s path breakingresearch on marriage, many economists have estimated this benchmark model ofmarriage and systematically studied the clear condition of marriage markets However,there are relatively fewer studies on individual mate selection and marriage decisionmaking in the well-known documents of marriage economics

The most relevant literatures among the rare records would be Gillian Hamilton andAloysius Siow (2001) that estimated the contributions of social heterogeneity andassortative matching, examined the frictions to aggregate marriage behavior byanalyzing the data of Quebec in the 18th century They found that a simple randommatching model of the marriage market, in which there are gains to assortativematching and women may leave the marriage market at a higher rate than men, canexplain the data of Quebec Moreover, their estimates suggest that women faredslightly better than men in the impact of differential fecundity on the welfare EugeneChoo and Aloysius Siow (2003) estimated the transferable utility model whichrationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions in marriage market.They resolved two problems early in preliminary study: One was an observationproblem in equilibrium transfers which are seldom observed in modern marriages.The other was an individual identification problem in the wide marriage market,

which would be further discussed in detail later However, unlike in the Choo andSiow (2003), the types of women and men should be identified respectively by theirpersonal attributes and mate preferences in this research work For a more accurateindividual identification, the Personal Code Test referring to the Taylor HartmanTheory (2007), and the Multiple Speed Dating Experiments referring to the FiveFactors in Mate Selection and Marital Satisfaction (M D Botwin, 1997), should beintroduced into our research, because these two investigations would be used toevaluate both impacts of personal attributes and mate preferences on the mate choices.Additionally, the personal code can be adequately shown by individual characteristics

to some extent The personal characteristics figure prominently in unstructurednomination of what individuals want in a mate (Langhorne and Secord, 1955).Furthermore, personal traits would be able to make individuals structuring anddesigning instruments to assess mate preferences (Buss and Barnes, 1986; McGinnis,1958) For instance, both women and men state clearly that they want a mate in theirrest of life, who are more likely to be dependable, sociable, kind, understanding,stable, and intelligent enough to realize their own mate preference, such as physicalappearance, economic resources, education background, etc (Botwin et al., 1997).Preparing for a good experimental simulation of the relationship interrelation, weviewed the DYNASIM model, which originally developed by Urban Institute

(www.urbaninstitude.org) and then successively renovated by Zedlewski in 1990 and

Favreault & Smith in 2004 The comparison of results about several matching modelsimulations is shown in Table 1.1, from which we can extract some useful information

for our following experimental investigation and trackable simulation.

Table 1.1 - Comparison of Matching Model SimulationsModel Year and Reference Matching Variables

DYNASIM Zedlewski,

1990

Age Difference, Education Difference

Matching Process: Singles randomized First pair evaluated using exponentialprobability function Paired if random number less than probability, otherwise repeatfor up to 10 potential partners If no matches, then pair those with highestprobability

SAGE Cheesbrough & Scott,

2003

Age, Education, Marital Status, Pregnant

Matching Process: Monte Carlo simulation comparing transition probabilities based

on logistic regression models using retrospective partnership histories from survey.APPSIM Bacon & Pennec,

2007

Age Difference, Education Difference

Matching Process: Similar to DYNASIM Singles randomized First pair evaluatedusing exponential probability function Paired if random number less thanprobability, otherwise repeat for up to 10 potential partners If no matches are madeand the total number of couples has not been met, then pair those with highestprobability

Source: jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/1/6.html

As illustrated in this table, the matching algorithm of the DYNASIM model is mainlybased on two individual differences, the age difference and education difference.Unlike in the DYNASIM model (Zedlewski 1990), we intend to put more personalattributes which can be identified into our further investigation and simulation.

In short, prior studies indeed provide valuable evidence on the matching model ofmarriage, the behavioral difference with different gender in marriage market, personaltraits, and mate preference However, most of prior studies emphases on themathematical modeling and computing simulation No prior study has undertaken asystematic research on how to provide individuals with a clear and practical guidance

to make a successful marital or romantic relationship, through individual investigationand the vector analysis of personal attributes and mate preference Therefore, thisempirical study attempts to fill the gap among the previous literature

2 Precondition of Research

Love is an eternal theme, especially when the topic discussed is the Marriage Formost people, it has to be admitted that love can lead to a marriage And, the initialcause of love must be a kind of chemical reaction motivated between female and male,called attraction Certainly, there are some other special cases, such as arrangedmarriage, also leading to a marital relationship

However, in the modern age, more and more people can intuitively find that there arefewer and fewer parents select the person whom their children should marry Here, it

is necessary to provide some evidence for this intuition According to the data fromseveral relationship and marriage sample investigations, it is obvious that a dramaticdecline exists in the number of arranged marriage while the number of free-lovemarriage is continuously increasing in both urban area and rural area The details areclearly shown in Table 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3

Table 2.1 - The Relationship and Marriage Investigation in Five Cities* of ChinaSample Size: 4858 Couples

Proportion

Types

Before

1937 1937 – 1967 1967 – 1997 After 1997Free-love Marriage

(100%) 4.99% 32.98% 62.03% nullArranged marriage

(100%) 54.72% 44.34% 0.94% nullSource: Family Survey in Main Five Cities, Liu Ying, Chinese Family and Marriage Study [M] Beijing: Social Science Reference Press, 1987.

Table 2.2 - The Relationship and Marriage Investigation in Rural Area of ChinaSample Size: 2866 Couples

Proportion

Types

Before

1966 1967 – 1976 1977 – 1986 1987 – 1996Free-love Marriage

(Rural Area) 32.8% 37.9% 48% 56.8%Arranged marriage

(Rural Area) 67.2% 62.1% 52% 43.2%

Source: Xu Anqi, Family Investigation in Urban and Rural Area of China, Social

Science Press of China, 1997, September.

Table 2.3 - The Relationship and Marriage Investigation during 2000-2004 in China

Types

Proportion

(100%)

Free-love Marriage(Average)

Arranged marriage(Average)

Source: Zhang Shouzhi, Marriage Database of China [N], Health and Lives Report,

Shanghai Social Science Research Institution, 2004.

Logically, we may easily reach a prevailing view that free-love marriage has alreadyalmost replaced the arranged marriage at present because of love, the primordialnature of marriage Therefore, ‘Free-love Marriage’, which can imply the freedom tochoose one’s spouse, is obviously the first precondition in this experimental research.Next, the second precondition should be that some people can be realistic and haveclear awareness of themselves and others In accordance with this premise,participants in the individual experiment would be divided into different groups in the

same processing period That would be also referring to individual mate preferenceand marital decision-making Actually, in the process of mate selection both womenand men can show their personal attributes to the others In the meanwhile, theywould express affection to the ideal candidate with considering their mate preference,so-called ‘Rational Behavior’, or without considering their mate preference, so-called

‘Irrational Behavior’ here, due to their own personality Since the process of mateselection is a two-way choice under the free-love condition, the second premiseregarding awareness of own attributes and mate preference is an important element inthe experiment

However, a good research result may not be achieved through the experimentalinvestigation just with the two preconditions yet How to ensure the marital possibilityand feasibility is still a difficult problem to the experimental design and control atpresent, especially when previous theory or hypothesis condition is not sufficient.Thus, the Marriage Possibility Index should be innovative to introduce as the thirdprecondition into the following study

3 Modeling and Algorithm

3.1 Modeling

According to the purpose of this research, it is needed to establish a model to simulatethe interaction process in individual relationships, consequently refining the dataanalysis of experimental investigations It should be two kinds of simulations because

of the experimental subjects The first one is counterfactual simulation, which will beapplied to observe the married subjects; the second one is tractable simulation, whichwill be applied to observe both dating and single subjects

Moreover, it has to be performed under the hypotheses for the simulations, and thehypotheses should be able to shed light on the following questions initially for thisresearch work (1) How does it work between individuals and marriage market? (2)

To understand the individual identification problem, the statistics of the female andmale types would be imperative to identify the individuals in the marriage market (3)How many personal attributes could be observed and compared in the process of mateselection? (4) What is the correlation between personal attributes and mate preference.(5) How much of distinguished features in mate preference can be put down to theindividual heterogeneity or experience heterogeneity? (6) Is there any utility matchingalgorithm can be used to simulate the interaction during the mate selection process? (7)How can we assess the happiness in both marital relationship and romanticrelationship? (8) How can we make marriage and relationship more effective, happyand health? With all the eight highlighted points, it would be a right time to start