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Assortative Mating Model

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences
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Synonyms

Homogamy; Negative assortative mating; Positive assortative mating

Definition

Assortative mating is the idea that romantic partners often have correlated scores (either positive or negative) on a wide range of personality, demographic, and other characteristics.

Introduction

Assortative mating is the idea that romantic partners often have correlated scores (either positive or negative) on a wide range of personality, demographic, and other characteristics. Positive assortative mating is when individuals are similar to each other, while negative assortative mating – also referred to as disassortative mating – is when individuals share complementary traits, such as one person being dominant while the other person is submissive (Figueredo et al. 2005). A large body of research suggests that both humans and nonhuman animals show assortative mating on a wide variety of traits (Olderbak and Figueredo 2012; Jiang et al. 2013).

Assortative Mating and Personality Traits

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References

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  • Figueredo, A. J., Sefcek, J. A., Vasquez, G., Brumbach, B. H., King, J. E., & Jacobs, W. J. (2005). Evolutionary personality psychology. In D.M. Buss’ (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology, (pp. 851–877). Hoboken: Wiley.

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Correspondence to Alita Cousins .

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Cousins, A. (2018). Assortative Mating Model. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1602-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1602-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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