The Marriage Market

Personality Trait Theory in the Marriage Market

One of the popular uses of research in personality traits has been for the matrimonial industry, sometimes referred to as the “marriage market” or the “dating scene” where people are reduced to aggregated data meant to sort their personalities in categories and match them with others in similar categories. Friedman and Schustack (2016) aptly explained Carl Jung’s work on neo-analytic aspects of personality helped launch further research into introversion and extroversion for Hans Eysenks and further when Allport created the personality trait categorization system or lexicon and Cattel further enhanced this by grouping, rating and “factor analyzing” the thousands of trait adjectives.

 Dupuy and Galichon (2014) discuss how personality traits are aggregated and used in the marriage market. They posit that sorting is not unidimensional, individuals face important trade-offs and that level of education explains a greater level of attraction, but they also explain that different personality traits matter differently for men and for women.

References 

Dupuy, A., & Galichon, A. (2014). Personality traits and the marriage market. Journal of Political Economy, 122(6), 1271-1319.

Friedman, H. S. & Schustack, M. W. (2016). Personality: Classic theories and modern research (6th ed.). MA: Pearson