Can You Tell That I’m in a Relationship? Attachment and Relationship Visibility on Facebook

Abstract

People often attempt to shape others’ perceptions of them, but the role of romantic relationships in this process is unknown. The present set of studies investigates relationship visibility, the centrality of relationships in the self-images that people convey to others. We propose that attachment underlies relationship visibility and test this hypothesis across three studies in the context of Facebook. Avoidant individuals showed low desire for relationship visibility, whereas anxious individuals reported high desired visibility (Studies 1 and 2); however, similar motives drove both groups’ actual relationship visibility (Study 1). Moreover, both avoidant individuals and their partners were less likely to make their relationships visible (Studies 1 and 3). On a daily basis, when people felt more insecure about their partner’s feelings, they tended to make their relationships visible (Study 3). These studies highlight the role of relationships in how people portray themselves to others.

Keywords

attachment close relationships impression management Facebook

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Aron

E. N.

Tudor

Nelson

(1991). Close relationships as including other in the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 241-253.

Back

M. D.

Stopfer

J. M.

Vazire

Gaddis

Schmukle

S. C.

Egloff

Gosling

S. D.

(2010). Facebook profiles reflect actual personality, not self-idealization. Psychological Science, 21, 372-374.

Bartholomew

Horowitz

L. M.

(1991). Attachment styles among young adults: A test of a four-category model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 226-244.

Bartz

J. A.

Lydon

J. E.

(2004). Close relationships and the working self-concept: Implicit and explicit effects of priming attachment on agency and communion. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1389-1401.

Baumeister

R. F.

Jones

E. E.

(1978). When self-presentation is constrained by the target’s knowledge: Consistency and compensation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 608-618.

Baxter

L. A.

Widenmann

(1993). Revealing and not revealing the status of romantic relationships to social networks. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 10, 321-337.

Bogaert

A. F.

Hafer

C. L.

(2009). Predicting the timing of coming out in gay and bisexual men from world beliefs, physical attractiveness, and childhood gender identity/role. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 39, 1991-2019.

Buhrmester

Kwang

Gosling

S. D.

(2011). Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 3-5.

Butzer

Campbell

(2008). Adult attachment, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction: A study of married couples. Personal Relationships, 15, 141-154.

10.

Campbell

J. D.

Trapnell

P. D.

Heine

S. J.

Katz

I. M.

Lavallee

L. F.

Lehman

D. R.

(1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141-156.

11.

Campbell

Simpson

J. A.

(2013). The blossoming of relationship science. In Simpson

J. A.

Campbell

(Eds.), The Oxford handbook of close relationships (pp. 3-12). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

12.

Campbell

Simpson

J. A.

Kashy

D. A.

Rholes

W. S.

(2001). Attachment orientations, dependence, and behavior in a stressful situation: An application of the Actor–Partner Interdependence Model. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 18, 821-843.

13.

Carpenter

C. J.

Spottswood

E. L.

(2013). Exploring romantic relationships on social networking sites using the self-expansion model. Computers in Human Behavior, 29, 1531-1537.

14.

Collins

N. L.

Allard

L. M.

(2001). Cognitive representations of attachment: The content and function of working models. In Fletcher

G. O.

Clark

M. S.

(Eds.), Blackwell handbook of social psychology: Interpersonal processes (pp. 60-85). Malden, MA: Blackwell.

15.

Collins

N. L.

Read

S. J.

(1990). Adult attachment, working models, and relationship quality in dating couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 644-663.

16.

Emery

L. F.

Muise

Alpert

(in press). Do we look happy? Perceptions of romantic relationship quality on Facebook. Personal Relationships.

17.

Etcheverry

P. E.

T.-S.

Wei

(2013). Attachment and the investment model: Predictors of relationship commitment, maintenance, and persistence. Personal Relationships, 20, 546-567.

18.

Facebook Newsroom. (2014). Company info. Retrieved from http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info

19.

Foster

C. A.

Campbell

W. K.

(2005). The adversity of secret relationships. Personal Relationships, 12, 125-143.

20.

Fraley

R. C.

Shaver

P. R.

(1998). Airport separations: A naturalistic study of adult attachment dynamics in separating couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1198-1212.

21.

Goodman

J. K.

Cryder

C. E.

Cheema

(2013). Data collection in a flat world: The strengths and weaknesses of Mechanical Turk samples. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 26, 213-224.

22.

Gosling

S. D.

Rentfrow

P. J.

Swann

W. B.

(2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality dimensions. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 504-528.

23.

Hazan

Shaver

(1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 511-524.

24.

House

W. C.

(1980). Effects of knowledge that attributions will be observed by others. Journal of Research in Personality, 14, 528-545.

25.

Karl

K. A.

Hall

L. M.

Peluchette

J. V.

(2013). City employee perceptions of the impact of dress and appearance: You are what you wear. Public Personnel Management, 42, 452-470.

26.

Kenny

D. A.

Kashy

D. A.

Cook

W. L.

(2006). Dyadic data analysis. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

27.

Kirkpatrick

L. A.

Davis

K. E.

(1994). Attachment style, gender, and relationship stability: A longitudinal analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 502-512.

28.

Leary

M. R.

Kowalski

R. M.

(1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 34-47.

29.

Lehmiller

J. J.

(2012). Perceived marginalization and its association with physical and psychological health. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29, 451-469.

30.

Lemay

E. P.

Dudley

K. L.

(2011). Caution: Fragile! Regulating the interpersonal security of chronically insecure partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 681-702.

31.

Leslie

L. A.

Huston

T. L.

Johnson

M. P.

(1986). Parental reactions to dating relationships: Do they make a difference? Journal of Marriage and Family, 48, 57-66.

32.

Loving

T. J.

Agnew

C. R.

(2001). Socially desirable responding in close relationships: A dual-component approach and measure. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 18, 551-574.

33.

Marshall

T. C.

Bejanyan

Di Castro

Lee

R. A.

(2013). Attachment styles as predictors of Facebook-related jealousy and surveillance in romantic relationships. Personal Relationships, 20, 1-22.

34.

Mashek

D. J.

Sherman

(2004). Desiring less closeness with intimate others. In Mashek

D. J.

Aron

(Eds.), Handbook of closeness and intimacy (pp. 343-356). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

35.

Mikulincer

(1995). Attachment style and the mental representation of the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 1203-1215.

36.

Muise

Christofides

Desmarais

(2014). “Creeping” or just information seeking? Gender differences in partner monitoring in response to jealousy on Facebook. Personal Relationships, 21, 35-50.

37.

Nadkarni

Hofmann

S. G.

(2012). Why do people use Facebook? Personality and Individual Differences, 52, 243-249.

38.

Oppenheimer

D. M.

Meyvis

Davidenko

(2009). Instructional manipulation checks: Detecting satisficing to increase statistical power. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 867-872.

39.

Papp

L. M.

Danielewicz

Cayemberg

(2012). “Are we Facebook official?” Implications of dating partners’ Facebook use and profiles for intimate relationship satisfaction. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15, 85-90.

40.

Preacher

K. J.

Hayes

A. F.

(2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 879-891.

41.

Raudenbush

S. W.

Bryk

A. S.

Cheong

Y. F.

Congdon

R. T.

(2004). HLM 6: Hierarchical linear and nonlinear modeling. Chicago, IL: Scientific Software International.

42.

Rosenberg

(1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

43.

Saslow

L. R.

Muise

Impett

E. A.

Dubin

(2013). Can you see how happy we are? Facebook images and relationship satisfaction. Social Psychological & Personality Science, 4, 411-418.

44.

Simpson

J. A.

(1990). Influence of attachment styles on romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 971-980.

45.

Simpson

J. A.

Rholes

W. S.

Nelligan

J. S.

(1992). Support seeking and support giving within couples in an anxiety-provoking situation: The role of attachment styles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 434-446.

46.

Slotter

E. B.

Gardner

W. L.

(2012). How needing you changes me: The influence of attachment anxiety on self-concept malleability in romantic relationships. Self and Identity, 11, 386-408.

47.

Snyder

Gangestad

(1986). On the nature of self-monitoring: Matters of assessment, matters of validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(1), 125-139.

48.

Wegner

D. M.

Lane

J. D.

Dimitri

(1994). The allure of secret relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 287-300.

49.

Wei

Russell

D. W.

Mallinckrodt

Vogel

D. L.

(2007). The Experiences in Close Relationship Scale (ECR)–Short Form: Reliability, validity, and factor structure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 88, 187-204.

50.

Wilson

R. E.

Gosling

S. D.

Graham

L. T.

(2012). A review of Facebook research in the social sciences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7, 203-220.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.21 MB