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Prototype Matching in Close Relationships

Bergische Universität Wuppertal, hassebrauck{at}uni-wuppertal.de

Arthur Aron

State University of New York at Stony Brook

Four studies tested the prototype-matching model that people use the prototype of a good relationship to evaluate the quality of concrete relationships. In Study 1, distance from the consensual prototype of participants’ descriptions of the features of their relationship strongly predicted relationship quality, and this prediction was significantly stronger for distance from central (vs. peripheral) features. Study 2 replicated these results and also found no significant advantage for predicting relationship quality using a relationship’s distance from idiosyncratically weighted (vs. consensually weighted) centrality of prototype features. Study 3 experimentally manipulated a described relation-ship’s distance from the prototype and found that distance from central features affected relationship evaluations more than distance from peripheral or intermediate features. Study 4 experimentally manipulated the prototype of relationship quality itself and found that correlations of relationship quality with matches with the prototype were more strongly influenced by those features that were increased in their importance.

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