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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Imagine that you are watching the latest romantic comedy or your favorite comfort hallmark holiday movie, and one person is a struggling musician and the other is a high powered lawyer. They could not be more different, but through a series of improbable, yet so cute circumstances, they realize they're perfect for each other and the movie ends out as friends. And this idea that opposites attract is entrenched in our culture. And many people think this is true, that people who are very different are more likely to fall in love or form some type of relationship, or that that's a successful way to have a relationship to find that opposite. And so today we'll be digging into this a bit Does research actually show that opposites attract?
Karla:Oh, I'm excited. We'll see.
Emily:My name is Emily Stark, and I'm a social psychologist.
Karla:And my name is Karla Lassonde, and I'm a cognitive psychologist. And this is Brains versus Beliefs Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Emily:Today, we'll be discussing the popular myth that opposites attract in relationships. And this belief is seen throughout Western media. It's popularized through books like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. When I was looking into where this misconception came from, it's difficult to trace this back, but some explanations look to the work of sociologist Doctor. Robert Winch in the later 1950s.
Emily:He conducted research and he focused on what's called complementary needs and how that plays out in successful marriages. So what that means is that people seek out partners who are different from themselves in order to fulfill a need that they lack. So someone who is aggressive and dominant may fit well with a partner who is more calm and submissive. If you think about it like puzzle pieces fitting together, that was Winch's idea. And then this expanded into this idea that we're looking for partners who can meet our needs because they're different from ourselves.
Emily:I do want to note that other researchers have not always replicated this. So other types of relationship studies don't always see this clear pattern of complementary where like one partner might be high on a personality trait and another person is low on a different personality trait in a way that makes them fit together nicely. So some studies don't show this pattern of complimentary matching. Other studies find, oh, it really depends on the personality traits you look at. So again, this has not been a fully established research idea, but it was one of the first places I could find where people are talking about this in accord with, oh, what makes the relationship successful?
Karla:Well, there's some part of it that makes sense because if I'm more of an aggressor, I talk a lot, I'm maybe an extrovert. It can be like I'm competing if I have a partner who's also extremely dominant, extremely extroverted. And so you can see this notion that it would work to have a dominant with a softer spoken partner to be somewhat complementary.
Emily:Exactly. And that is why I think this has caught on. This idea has really been extended well beyond Winch's initial research as like confirming that opposites attract in relationships. And like I said, at the outset, we see this across so many different types of media. We see it in fairy tales, comic books, Disney movies, popular sitcoms, and we cannot have this episode without mentioning Paula Abdul's 1989 hit Opposites Attract.
Emily:In that video, she was dancing with a cartoon cat, which I think is taking the idea of Opposites Attract maybe far, but it's a great song.
Karla:It is a great song. And in fact, since we were recording and leading up to this episode, who doesn't have this song in their head? Exactly. Right? Will stop short of singing, Emily.
Emily:Know, we do not have the rights to play it on the episode.
Karla:We shouldn't do that anyway. And if we could take this fanciful idea of Paula Abdul and then swing way in the other direction, I did find something from science and there's a law called Coulomb's Law and it's all about, if we can go back to maybe your science classes in high school, this electromagnetic charge, where if you think of batteries or you think of large magnets, maybe even in a comical way, where we have positive attracting negative. We see this in electronic particles. We see this in magnets.
Karla:And so positive versus positive is going to repel negative versus negative is going to repel. And sometimes these sorts of hard and fast laws in science can creep their way into popular culture. So perhaps opposites attract come far from, you know, Paul Abdul's hit to something that has been in stone for a long period of time .
Emily:Absolutely. I definitely remember playing with magnets and you put the two positive poles together and they push away. Yeah, stuff like that gets layered in our minds and it means we don't question it when these ideas of opposites attracting come up in other places. Like I mentioned, Disney movies, we see a prince or princess falling in love with someone of a different social class is common. We think about like maybe Cinderella.
Emily:Or whether it's social class, whether it's personality traits, we see this repeatedly where people are romantically paired up. They match up characters that seem really different from each other. Think of all the teen movies with like Nerdy Guy and Popular Girl or Popular Guy and Nerdy Girl. Again, it's reemphasizing this. We see neat freaks who learn to love their messy partners.
Emily:And that could relate to that complimentary, like, oh, you need someone to manage your if you are maybe a little more disorganized. Absolutely. And we see, like I mentioned, those Hallmark movies, these career focused men and women who perhaps then change their minds or appreciate a different lifestyle when they're paired up with someone who's different from them.
Karla:Yeah. I mean, calling out our age a little bit, Emily, we saw these examples in Disney movies and we talk about the Hallmark trope. However, there is a lot of this in the influencer culture where we see relationships experts and, you know, not to fault influencers because there are science influencers and psychology influencers, but maybe they don't have any credentials, but they're going to rest on this idea that opposites attract, finding people that call themselves like a relationship alchemist based on polarity of positive versus negative and complementary traits. It's taking this idea and monetizing it. And if a lot of people believe that it's true and it's ingrained in our culture, we really have to think about the implications of something like this phrase opposites attract.
Emily:Absolutely. It did not take me very long on YouTube to find a huge range of clips of people with, again, their relationship influencers. They're out here giving advice on relationships. And as you can hear in this clip, they are promoting this idea that opposites attract.
Clip:I'm often asked, do personality styles play out in relationships? And the answer is overwhelmingly, yes, they do. In fact, we are drawn to our personality opposite. Many times we are mirrors of each other as we know.
Clip:For all of the coaches out there, we attract what and who we need to learn more from.
Clip:It is a fascinating idea that opposites are drawn to each other.
Clip:Couples who seem to have no overlapping areas of interest. Oh, yeah. They live in almost separate worlds. You know, one might be into, say, sport and business and their partners involved in church and music. Yep.
Clip:And yet somehow they were drawn to each other. Opposites do attract.
Emily:Okay. So researchers have studied this in several different ways. So one example from a paper published in 2023, they did what's called a meta analysis where they're taking studies that had previously been done and combining them. And they pulled together over 200 studies that measured attitudes, personality traits, and other characteristics of dating and married couples. And they also included, in addition to these previous studies, they analyzed data.
Emily:This was a British data set that measured over 100 personality traits in approximately 80,000 couples in The United Kingdom.
Karla:Big numbers.
Emily:Yes, this is extensive, lots and lots of different people. And what they found was across these previous studies and the data set they looked at, traits like political and religious attitudes, level of education, certain ways of measuring IQ showed very high positive correlations. And a positive correlation means that people were similar to their partners. So they found evidence of similarity. They also saw evidence of similarity when they looked at rates of smoking and drinking.
Emily:So meaning that people who consume different types of substances tend to partner up with people with similar habits.
Karla:Lifestyle choices.
Emily:Yeah, which again, it makes sense. And they even found that traits like height and weight or medical conditions, those were smaller correlations, meaning they were less strong, less predictive, but yet still positive. So still seeing that similarity was bringing people together.
Karla:Got it.
Emily:I should note that this study only examined heterosexual couples. And that is a problem with a lot of research on relationships is that it tends to leave out any type of relationship that's not a typical heterosexual straight relationship. There are some researchers who have really made an effort to include sage gay and lesbian couples in their studies. And Doctor. John Gottman is one person.
Emily:He is a relationships researcher. He focuses a lot on conflict. And he has found that same sex relationships are comparable to straight relationships in many ways. And at least when looking at like attraction and relationship satisfaction, he does not always find really strong differences when looking at same sex couples compared to opposite sex couples. He does, to be clear, he has not specifically looked at do opposites attract?
Emily:And I wasn't able to find a study that was directly examining that in same sex relationships. But again, based on this, I don't really see a reason why you would have this like striking difference in these principles of attraction based on whether the relationship is a same sex relationship, heterosexual. It seems from other research that these processes are actually pretty similar. Okay. And then also, a study done by eHarmony in 2013.
Emily:EHarmony has been very open to collaborating with researchers. They have researchers that work for the company. And they have done some publications of research coming from their dating tool. And they find that similarity led to more successful relationships. And again, they're looking at a lot of data, a lot of different pairs of couples.
Karla:Yes. It's awesome to think about the psychology being used in dating apps. Yeah. And why not? It's really important that you would look at this data set of convenience, right?
Karla:And also think of it from how these dating sites are designed. They have algorithms just like Google finding out what we want to shop for and giving us things based on our demographic, it makes a lot of sense that dating apps are set up for matches, right? Like eHarmony, to see that we are looking at similarities based on algorithms to find them best match. It makes a lot of good sense. In other words, the dating apps are not set up to find repelling, non complimentary traits because it simply doesn't end up working out.
Emily:Exactly. They are not pairing up opposites. So why do we cling to this idea that opposites attract? And I mean, I talked about a lot of media, so you know, we see it play out over and over again. And we just assume that it is true.
Emily:I think also, especially when talking about straight relationships, there's an emphasis on gender differences. I mentioned the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which imply that men and women are completely opposite and fully different. So, if you are a woman partnered with a man, you might already be in this space of thinking that your partner is completely different from you. So that could also just generally reinforce like, Oh yeah, opposites attract. So, and it really implies that, again, at least straight relationships are focused on managing these differences.
Emily:I mean, on gender is complex and understanding differences, but I think it's fair to sum it up by saying overall, men and women are not as different as this perspective suggests.
Karla:Yeah, or they're looking for the same thing in a successful relationship, right? And so you can have different traits in terms of your gender, but in order to come together, there's these certain core values, wouldn't you say?
Emily:Yes, and core values is one of the things that people actively want to have similar in a romantic partner, so that we seek out people that we agree with. Research also finds another core driver of attraction is familiarity. So if you are similar to me, you may already feel familiar. And maybe that is also because we're engaging in the same activities, we like the same types of things. And so familiarity often leads to friendship.
Emily:If you imagine your best friend from grade school and you had your last name start with the same letter, I mean, maybe you're friends because you always had to sit next to each other in school if we had alphabetical seating charts, your So lockers were next to each other, we see familiarity leads to friendship, it can lead to romantic attraction. And that similarity can lead to an impression of familiarity. So, we shared some examples of some influencers earlier, but I was grateful to find that there is some accurate, more accurate relationship advice being shared Yeah. On the So here's a short clip from another podcast called twelve Week Relationships Expert. And they're talking about like debunking this idea that opposites attract.
Clip2:You marry your opposite or the idea that opposites attract. We are cosmetically, no. Cosmically pulled together like mex. I hate this one too.
Clip2:You don't like opposites attract.
Clip:Opposites do not attract. You have compliments. I think people, you know, they mistake it for liking, well, if this person's really talkative and the other person's more reserved, that's opposites. It's more of a compliment and personality because they probably have same values, they have a similar life. So in terms of their communication styles, maybe it looks opposite, but there's just a complementary lifestyle.
Clip:Opposite means, like, you go to church, I smoke crack, and we come back together and we're like, dude, opposites attract. Right? Like, I had a whole experience too, man. Let's talk it out. Like, makes it no sense.
Clip:That's opposites attract.
Emily:They're discussing that idea of compliments. So acknowledging like, yeah, we might be different in some ways from romantic partners and then maybe that can allow us to fulfill different needs or roles in a relationship. But it is still important to us to share those core values and beliefs.
Karla:Yeah. I mean, when we think about this, do you think about your maybe grandparents or even great grandparents and this law of proximity where you're only able to have a dating pool that is restricted to where you live. People weren't moving from one part of the country to the other. And so now we don't have these proximity values. We can meet people online.
Karla:So you can see why it would be confusing for people to understand, like, how is it that I find the perfect match? How do I find a partner? And so you had mentioned these these deal breakers, and we think of what relationship deal breakers are. I mean, maybe it's that you are a Vikings fan and you you don't necessarily wanna go to a Packers game. That could be a real opposing deal breaker.
Karla:And as funny as those sports norms are, are real core values that people, they desperately want to be aligned with. When we think of religious beliefs, we are currently seeing a lot of political differences come to light, especially in Gen Z. Men women are kind of scaling out to have fallen different sides of this political spectrum, where it can be quite difficult if this doesn't match, if I don't match in terms of someone's religious beliefs or political beliefs. Culturally, we can have a real problem finding people to date because those deal breakers have actually been broken at this point.
Emily:Yes. And that's why it's important to have an accurate understanding of what can help lead to success in relationships. We want to be wary of problematic self help or relationship advice, especially if that can lead us to seek out unsuitable partners or stay in relationships that aren't great for us because we might be just believing this myth that opposites attract.
Karla:Yeah, we could be just like self sabotaging.
Emily:Yes, right. Relationships are difficult enough without these types of false beliefs, I think being promoted. True.
Karla:All right, Emily, let's finish this up. What are the key takeaways?
Emily:Okay, so first of all, people are complex. We are never exactly the same as another person, of course. So even though we may be more likely to notice differences when we think about our relationship partners, it doesn't mean that more differences equal more attraction or more success in a relationship. It is true, similarity attracts. And also similarity seems to be more key to a successful longer term relationship as well.
Emily:But we know, I mean, relationships with other people are complicated. There's certainly never one simple key that can just explain, Oh, here's how to be successful in a relationship. Unfortunately, it is not that easy. But overall, we know opposites attract, that's just a myth. And that similarity is what really attracts.
Emily:You heard that here on Brains versus Beliefs. You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes and follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.