Only You Can Improve Your Relationships

We all have relationship problems. I've talked about a lack of dedication, giving too much (or too little),  focusing too much on the short-run, sharing too much (or too little), or fostering anger instead of resolving conflict. The pattern in all of those previous posts is what I can do, not what the other person can do. Here's why:

This research examined the consequences of targeting the self versus the partner when trying to improve intimate relationships. As predicted, when participants (N = 160) focused their relationship improvement attempts on changing the partner, individuals reported more negative improvement strategies, lower improvement success, and, in turn, more negative relationship evaluations. Self-focused improvement attempts and participants’ own self-regulation efforts, however, were not associated with more positive relationship evaluations or improvement. Instead, individuals reported more improvement and greater relationship quality when partners were perceived to be engaging in successful self-regulation efforts. The results suggest that targeting the partner may do more harm than good despite that relationship evaluations pivot on whether the partner produces change.

To clarify, trying to change your partner only makes it worse. Trying to change yourself doesn't improve it for you, but it does for your partner. So we should always focus on self improvement and find others who do the same. If you can understand each other, you can love each other.

Pick Your Bias(es)

Great list from the Spousonomics blog:

1. Confirmation bias. Everything you see only confirms what you already believe to be true–whether or not it really is. Jenny recently decided that her family was perfect because a new study confirmed that families with two girls are happiest–and she has two girls!

2. Optimism bias. You view and interpret facts in a self-serving way. Like believing you do more than 50% of the housework, while your spouse believes same about herself.

3. Hindsight bias. Also known as the I-knew-it-all-along effect. Things that happened in the past were so predictable. You KNEW you shouldn’t have hung up on your mother-in-law, but now it’s too late and she’s not speaking to you.

4. Correspondence bias. The tendency to make trait inferences about someone based on their behavior. Your wife steals the sheets. She must not care if you’re cold.

5. Actor-Observer bias: Similar to above. You believe others do things because of their personality, but you do things because of the situation, i.e. your husband didn’t pick up the milk because he only thinks of himself, but you didn’t pick up the milk because you’re busy doing a million things.

6. Self-serving bias. You choose the explanation that makes you look best. If your kid gets a bad grade on his English test, it’s because the teacher is bad. If he gets an A, it’s because he’s a genius (thanks to your good genes).

7. Ingroup bias. Other couples suck compared to you guys.

Thinking About Relationships Long Term

I've boasted regularly about the new blog and book, Spousonomics. Whether it's date night, conflict, or marriage in general, economics has a lot to say about marriage. The authors recently requested questions on the Freakonomics blog, and mine got accepted. Here the question and answer:

Q. How do you avoid the counting-favors game? -Harrison Brookie

A. Or put another way, how to stop score-keeping? An excellent question and one that applies to virtually every couple, partnership and business relationship on planet earth. Research on incentives shows that counting favors is a double-edged sword. Say you’re trying to construct an agreement for how to pay an employee (or spouse). You could count every little thing he or she does or doesn't do, and pay for or punish each one. But this signals a lack of trust: Why else would you have to keep such close score? Evidence has shown that when a partner feels a lack of trust, he or she is more likely to cheat the system and less likely to volunteer to do something on his or her own. This is called “crowding out” of intrinsic motivation.

There are clear benefits to counting favors, you get the other to do more. But I'd never considered the costs. Like Dan Ariely stated in his book, there two different kinds of exchanges, market and social. When you treat a relationship like a system of platonic exchanges, the intrinsic desire to help disappears. If you plan on being in a relationship long term, which I certainly do, it's probably better for you to stop keeping count.

Conditioned For Marriage

There's been a lot of chatter on the web recently about "the end of marriage". Unsurprisingly, I'm skeptical. Here's some evidence that humanity is trained for committed relationships:

Single, male subjects rated a woman the most attractive at the peak of her ovulation, scientists found, which is to be expected since that's when she's the most fertile. On the other hand, male subjects in a committed relationship behaved the opposite by giving the woman lower attractive marks during her fertility peak.

Here's why:

The authors hypothesize that people in relationships are more likely to subconsciously reduce thoughts of temptation. Researchers call these tendencies "relationship maintenance strategies," where we downplay the attractiveness of others we might be tempted by.

Marriage Advice on Conflict

Conflict is important for any relationship and like most things, it has a learning curve. Here's a good question from the Spousonomics blog:

Have you figured out a way to argue more efficiently? Like, to reach resolution and smiles more quickly?

and here's the fabulous answer:

Never ever call names. Never ever threaten to leave. Don’t apologize for things you aren’t sorry for, that’s just mean, and for the love of all things Holy don’t fight about things that don’t matter. If you sit down and look at your part in things it’s unlikely that what you’re angry about matters one bit.

Economics of Marriage, Part II

Last month I mentioned a new blog I was following, Spousonomics. Not only do the authors have regular interesting insights, they've begun a very popular series of Economists in Love. In it they interview married economists about how those two parts of their lives interact. Previous entries include Jeff Ely, Shelly Lundberg and Dick Startz, Daniel Hamermesh, Seth Gitter. Their most recent entry is a behavioral economist I've had the pleasure of meeting, Dan Ariely. He offers his marital wisdom in video form:

Emptying the Bottle: Early-January '11 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• RegretTheError.com posts corrections, retractions, and apologies in the press.
• Julian Assange is upset about the information leaked about his charges (earlier).
• In rich and fat countries, do overweight politicians have an advantage?
• With a lack of safe disposal, smoking bans actually increase fires.
• Popularity of internet activities in each generation [chart].
• Talking hands free in the car makes your forget to compensate for talking.
• Cigarette taxes cover spillover costs, but alcohol taxes do not.
• Interactive map of American English dialects.
• Sex after marriage rates higher in stability, satisfaction, and "sexual quality".
• Socially insecure men have a higher aggression towards immigrants (earlier).
• Employer provided health care may decrease unemployment (earlier).
• Prisoners' release dependent on future kidney donation (earlier).
• How the world has changed from 2000 to 2010 [graphic].

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Resolving Conflict with Customers (and Spouses)

Here's are the highlights of an article from Slate Magazine about dealing with rude customers. It applies to relational conflict as well:

Aikido. This concept is borrowed from Japanese martial arts. "Masters of aikido do not resist the physical force of their opponents,"

Here's an example:

Don't interrupt the volcano while it's spewing lava! Take notes instead. Once the eruption is over, acknowledge your customer's anger by saying something like, "I know you're angry. I would be, too." If that doesn't calm your volcano down, remove him from the crowd so he can subside without losing face in front of the other customers.

Here it gets real good:

"All of us have a strong tendency to like people who are most similar to us," Barlow and Moller write. You must therefore find something in yourself that resembles the customer and display it. Obviously this is going to be tricky when the customer is in a really bad mood. If he's shouting, you don't want to start shouting, too. But neither do you want to be smiling. Instead, put on a sober face and make eye contact to acknowledge that this is a serious problem (even if it isn't).

Here's the marriage application:

The aikido method reminds me of some advice a mentor gave me when I got married 20 years ago. When fighting with your wife, he said, never apologize too early. Angry people need time to vent, he explained; apologize too quickly and your wife won't get what's made her mad off her chest.

Emptying the Bottle: Late-December '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• Interactive graphic of slavery in America (hat-tip to Justin W).
• Then and now photography with repeat pictures of changing landscapes [photos] (earlier).
• Coming soon to 2011, an internet-browser-only computer.
• Essays with more legible handwriting were evaluated more positively.
• Forget the gold standard, how about the classic giant stone disc standard [audio] (earlier).
• Divorce can make you sick and remarriage is the solution (earlier).
• Economists work harder at the beginning of their career when the benefits are larger.
• Penelope Trunk hate David Dellifield. The one from Ada, Ohio [read the comments too].
• Send your parents a personalized tech support care package.
• How about just public catastrophic health insurance? I'm on board. (earlier).
• iPhone adds to our trade deficit with China and it doesn't matter (earlier).
• Hans Rosling's economics of the last 200 years chart is misleading (earlier).

As always, feel free to email me anything interesting you come across.

Spousonomics' Suggestion for Date Night

I recently came across a blog called Spousonomics all about "using economics to master love, marriage and dirty dishes". It's based on a book of the same name. In one of their posts the authors suggest not only regular date nights, but unique ones. These new experiences flood the brain with same chemicals that bring us back to the same feelings we had when we first fell in love. Encouraging these kinds of "active choices", ensure that our routine isn't irrationally impacting our actions. This is idea is what convinced my lovely wife and I to go to downtown Raleigh to the only outdoor skating rink in North Carolina last week. Just look how romantic this advertisement makes it look!

It was cold. It was inelegant. It was memorable. So get out and there and follow your heart (and your utility curve). My wife and I are heading out again tonight for a improv company Christmas party!

Know Thy Spouse

In yesterday's post about how men and women view fighting differently, my wife was nice enough to give her thoughts. This was the GoogleChat conversation we had during it:

me: [link to my comment]
Traci: ew, i dont like the sweetie thing
me: haha, i was trying to think of a nice name what wasn't sexual
me:[link to my second comment]
Traci: im not responding
me: haha, i love you
Traci: your definition of fight is different than mine
me: say that then and explain it, because i disagree
Traci: nah
me: haha, then we will never improve!
Traci: you just want me to comment, you dont really want to improve
me: haha, i might post this chat on my blog
Traci: i was just typing that you weren't allowed to but then i erased it
me: now i have to

Views of conflict aside, nothing better for a marriage than knowing and accepting each other.

Applying Preference for Change in Marriage

In a recent post considering what core belief makes conservatives and liberals different, I argued that change is the best measure. Liberals embrace change and conservatives are weary of it. It resulted in a great discussion that ended with the question of whether this idea is practically helpful. Taking that as a challenge, I found a clear example of where the conservative/liberal views of change are both true and helpful, in marriage.

It is a fairly common understanding that women are more liberal than men, by a margin as wide as 12%. If we then apply the preferences for change, it helps explain common marital disagreements. Pop culture and my own marital experience confirm the idea that women are more satisfied in marriage when things are improving. For example, for my wife, our marriage is doing well if we are regularly dealing with our problems. If we aren't fighting, we probably aren't growing. For me, I feel like our marriage is doing well if we don't fight at all (my wife has taught me the folly of this idea, hence this earlier post).

Women, who are on average more liberal, are optimistic about the change the next fight will bring. Men, who are on average more conservative, are worried about the change the next fight might bring. I think both perspectives can be true. For many couples fighting leads to future baggage and more fights. For others fighting leads to dealing with past baggage and less (or at least healthier) fights. I'm curious, have other couples seen this to be true?

Emptying the Bottle: Early-July '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• Marriage doesn't always make you happier.
• Low self esteem is more likely associated with interest in celebrities (earlier).
• Victory for user created content sharing online.
• North Korea's World Cup fans were really volunteers from China.
• Israel bans subtly airbrushing models.
• Overworking, terrible for your health (earlier).
• Invest, not donate, to the already growing Africa.
• A psychological case for lighter textbooks and more comfortable desks.
• The economic data on prostitution.
• The real problem with Wal-mart is it's selling food too cheap (earlier).
• Fed blames layman economics bloggers. Tyler comes to the rescue.
• Worried immigrants might take taxpayer safety nets, charge them (earlier).

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Importance of Secular Counseling

Pastor Ted Haggard is well known for his scandal with a male prostitute. He is less well known for his humble and honest personal response to situation. Even going as far to publicly call himself a "a deceiver and a liar". He says he struggled for years, with small bouts of "freedom" every so often, but no real relief. In an interview he wisely describes one of his biggest mistakes:

Spiritual problems can be solved spiritually and physical problems need to be solved physically. Spirituality gives us power to address different issues but if you need an appendectomy you need to go to the hospital. If you need counseling, you need to go to a counselor... I needed counseling and I tried to pray about it and it didn't work. Counseling helped me accept me for who I am so I could get my life in order.

His counselors were professionals who happened to be Christians, not the other way around. There is a negative connotation to the going to therapy that even I have had. My wife and I had premarital counseling and I'm sure we will go to counseling in the future. Not because we have marriage-threatening problems, but because we don't want them.

Related: Ted Haggard is starting a new church, with a tithing lottery.

Costs of Economic Productivity

One is less help for strangers:

Independent field experiments in 23 large cities around the world measured three types of spontaneous, nonemergency helping: alerting a pedestrian who dropped a pen, offering help to a pedestrian with a hurt leg trying to reach a pile of dropped magazines, and assisting a blind person cross the street. The results indicated that a city’s helping rate was relatively stable across the three measures, suggesting that helping of strangers is a cross-culturally meaningful characteristic of a place; large cross-cultural variation in helping emerged, ranging from an overall rate of 93% in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to 40% in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. Overall helping across cultures was inversely related to a country’s economic productivity

This could be a result of the increased opportunity cost of time that comes with economic growth. It could also be the increased autonomy. Individual independence not only leads to to less empathy for strangers, but also the break down of the traditional family:

It means it's more technically feasible for men and women to live alone. That alone has reduced the marriage rate and increased the divorce rate. It also means wives have had the time to enter the workforce. That's led to more affairs - as men and women meet more often away from their spouses eyes at the workplace. And in giving women an income outside marriage, it's increased their ability to divorce their hubbies.

This, though, is not the only way in which divorce has risen, and marriage fallen, because women no longer need a meal ticket. One feature of economic growth is a decline in relative demand for physical strength and increased demand for intellectual or social skills. This too has led to increased numbers of women workers - and the more skilled among them are not marrying and having children.

A third mechanism is creative destruction. Economic growth is - in the long-run - often fastest where job destruction rates are high, as this frees up resources for more productive uses. But job loss leads to more divorce (pdf), not least because it signals to people that their spouse is no longer the meal ticket they thought.

Also, economic growth is associated (the causality goes both ways) with social and geographical mobility. This means people are less likely to meet like-minded others. That means less chance of marriage, and possibly more chance of bad marriages that don't last.

I don't believe these outweigh the huge benefits of economic growth (long life, better health, increased minority/women's rights, more leisure, etc), but helpful nonetheless.

Dedication Begets Dedication

Awhile back I warned against exerting too much passion, in fear of burning out. That may have been misleading. Despite popular belief to the contrary, divorce rates among parents of children with Down syndrome are lower than those with children without disabilities. I've discussed how all relationships are a certain portion give and take and a healthy balance is needed. Perhaps the more you give in one relationship, like a disable child, the more you give in other relationships, like your marriage. However, the lower divorce rate does not hold true for the first two years after a pregnancy. So if you can resolve the issues, your marriage is better off for it. This also seems to fit with my own predictions about how resolved conflict can actually increase intimacy.

Empowered by Inadequacy

I recently came across this very interesting article on marriage. The main point is in the first sentence:

A sure way to improve your marriage is to admit that you don't know what the hell you're doing when it comes to making an intimate relationship work.

This advice is not only Biblical, as the author describes, it's practical. The whole article is worth reading, especially the part on how men and women both have unique challenges in love relationships.

The Pill Turns 50

Probably the most important thing to happen to women in human history:

It was the first medicine ever designed to be taken regularly by people who were not sick. Its main inventor was a conservative Catholic who was looking for a treatment for infertility and instead found a guarantee of it. It was blamed for unleashing the sexual revolution among suddenly swinging singles, despite the fact that throughout the 1960s, women usually had to be married to get it. Its supporters hoped it would strengthen marriage by easing the strain of unwanted children; its critics still charge that the Pill gave rise to promiscuity, adultery and the breakdown of the family. In 1999 the Economist named it the most important scientific advance of the 20th century, but Gloria Steinem, one of the era's most influential feminists, calls its impact "overrated." One of the world's largest studies of the Pill — 46,000 women followed for nearly 40 years — was released this March. It found that women who take the Pill are less likely to die prematurely from any cause, including cancer and heart disease, yet many women still question whether the health risks outweigh the benefits.

I'm curious what the effect of a birth control pill for men will have.

Emptying the Bottle: Mid-April '10 Links

Here is a list of the worthwhile sites I've Bookmarked recently:

• The better your vocabulary, the better able you are communicate to others and to yourself.
• Economist Gary Becker's generally negative response to the health care bill (I mostly agree).
• Why cybersecurity is not a public good.
• Army unit whose mission was to impersonate other units in order to fool the enemy.
• www.buyajobreference.com, just what it sounds like.
• Even a small decrease change in the cost of getting married increases marriage rates.
• Shouldn't fear manufacturing loses for the same reason we shouldn't have feared farm loses.
• Importance of educating the poor, not just helping them short term.
• The almost states of America [map].
• Community college offers a money back guarantee on getting a job.
• Ten reasons why the economic recovery is real.
• Why happiness hasn't increased even though everyone is richer.
  

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Worthwhile Sentences on Suggestions

From Science Daily: "The idea that simply being more supportive is better for your marriage is a myth. Often husbands and wives think, 'If my partner really knows me and loves me, he or she will know I'm upset and will know how to help me.'"

From Tyler Cowen: "check the non-fiction Return carts, to see what other people have been reading."

From Clay Shirky: "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity"

From Steve Landsburg: "As any historian could tell you, no society has every pulled itself out of poverty without putting its children to work."

From Bryan Buckley (privately in response the previous article): "Just because you have good intentions doesn't mean you're doing something noble."

From Justin Wehr: "Treat your world view as nothing more than a default position -- a starting point from which to assimilate contradictory evidence."

From previous worthwhile sentences.