People tend to overestimate their partners’ attachment insecurity

A 3-year study of newlywed couples found that people are generally accurate in perceiving their partners’ attachment patterns, but tend to overestimate their partners’ attachment anxiety and avoidance. They also often projected their own attachment orientations onto their partners. These perceptions persisted over time and depended on how the relationship was going. The paper was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Attachment orientations are relatively stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving in close relationships. They are typically described along two dimensions: attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety refers to the tendency to worry about rejection, abandonment, or not being loved enough. People high in attachment anxiety may seek frequent reassurance and become especially sensitive to signs that a partner is becoming distant.

Attachment avoidance refers to discomfort with emotional closeness, dependence, or relying on other people. People high in attachment avoidance may prefer emotional distance and may find it difficult to express vulnerability or ask for support.

These two attachment traits are thought to be independent. This means that a person can score high or low on one of them regardless of the level of the other trait. When a person is low on both anxiety and avoidance, this is called secure attachment. High anxiety, high avoidance, or both are commonly referred to as insecure attachment orientations. Attachment orientations can influence romantic and family relationships, friendships, as well as many other aspects of life.

Study author Jeewon Oh and her colleagues examined the extent to which people show accuracy and bias in perceiving their partners’ attachment orientations. They also explored how this accuracy and bias change over time and vary depending on the quality of the relationship. To do this, they compared the assessments made by their participants with the participants’ partners’ own self-assessments and with the participants’ own characteristics. This analytical method is referred to as the Truth and Bias approach.

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They analyzed data from the Growth in Early Marriage Project. This is a three-wave study of newly married mixed-sex couples that collected data across 3–4 years. Couples were recruited mainly from marriage license records in Western Massachusetts (e.g., Amherst, Hadley, Northampton, Belchertown, South Hadley, Springfield, Pittsfield).

Data came from 226 couples (i.e., 452 participants). On average, husbands were 29 years old and wives were 27-28 years old at the start of the study. They had been, on average, in the relationship for 5 years and cohabited for somewhat over 2 years. Eighty-nine percent of husbands and 91% of wives had a paid job.

Study participants completed assessments of attachment (the Experiences in Close Relationships questionnaire) and marital relationship quality (the Dyadic Adjustment Scale). Participants answered the same attachment assessment questions for themselves and referring to their partner.

Results showed that participants tended to overestimate their partners’ attachment anxiety and avoidance compared to how the partners saw themselves. However, the participants’ assessments of their partners’ attachment anxiety and avoidance were still positively associated with how their partners rated themselves, meaning that these ratings were relatively accurate in tracking the partners’ own self-perceptions. For example, when people rated themselves as higher in anxious attachment, their partners also rated them as higher in anxious attachment. The same was the case with avoidance.

Further analysis revealed that the attachment ratings participants gave their partners were also strongly associated with the participants’ own attachment ratings. This indicates that “assumed similarity bias” plays a role in the judgment of a partner. For example, when people rated themselves as higher in attachment anxiety, they also assumed that their partners were higher in attachment anxiety (i.e., they assumed that their partner was more similar to them than he/she really was).

Interestingly, participants who reported higher satisfaction with their marriage tended to overestimate their partners’ anxiety and avoidance to a lesser extent. However, for avoidance, this effect was present only in the first two years of marriage. People reporting better relationship quality also tended to show a higher similarity bias for anxiety. There was a very weak tendency for people who viewed their relationships as better quality to rate their partners as more anxious over time, though they still rated their partners as less anxious overall than participants who reported lower relationship quality did.

Importantly, the researchers also found that people in lower-quality relationships were consistently *more accurate* in perceiving their partners’ true levels of attachment insecurity over time than those in happier marriages.

“People were generally accurate in perceiving their partners’ attachment, but overestimated their partners’ attachment anxiety and avoidance and often projected their own attachment orientation. These perceptions persisted over time and depended on how the relationship was going,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific knowledge about social perception in romantic relationships. However, the study authors note that newlyweds might be highly motivated to be accurate about their partners, as people contemplating important relationship milestones tend to be accurate. Results on couples diverse in marital statuses and length of relationships might differ.

Additionally, because the study relied on self-reports and did not account for behaviors observed by third parties, it is difficult to determine if the partners were truly overestimating insecurity, or if their spouses were simply under-reporting their own insecurity due to a lack of self-awareness.

The paper, “Truth and Bias in Partner Perceptions of Attachment Orientation Over Time: The Moderating Role of Relationship Quality,” was authored by Jeewon Oh, Mariah F. Purol, William J. Chopik, Fiona Ge, Sally I. Powers, and Paula R. Pietromonaco.