Implicit predictions of marriage satisfaction based on perception of expressive features

The paper deals with the problem of determining the zones of predictive accuracy of everyday perception. We studied implicit representations of women about the satisfaction with marriage among males with contrasting personality traits. The research involved 100 females aged from 17 to 48 (M = 22.11, SD = 4.23). At the first stage, the respondents filled out the Big Five-2 questionnaire. After that, they studied the responses to the same questionnaire supposedly given by a man with one of the four traits vividly expressed: extraversion, introversion, benevolence, or hostility. The participants were then asked to fill out the Marriage Satisfaction Questionnaire in the way they thought this man would do it. The data were analyzed using ANOVA. It was found that women attribute the same level of satisfaction with marriage to extroverted and introverted men. These judgments appear to be based on a projection mechanism, which is manifested in the fact that subjects with high extraversion predict a more successful marriage for an extrovert, and introverted subjects attribute an equally successful marriage to both an introvert and an extrovert. Thus, taking the projective intervention into account, it can be concluded that the implicit theory of the extraverted personality is consistent with research data on links between extraversion and subjective well-being. Women also ascribed significantly higher marital satisfaction to the benevolent men than to the hostile ones. This indicates that the implicit theory of benevolent personality does not reproduce the objective variability of interpersonal interaction scenarios of such a personality. The results obtained expand the understanding of the implicit theories limitations and can be helpful in preventing cognitive distortions in the field of social perception.