Mate 'poaching'

According to one estimate, 63 per cent of men and 54 per cent of women are in their current long-term relationships because their current partner "poached" them from a previous partner. Now researchers in the US and Australia have conducted the first investigation into the fate of relationships formed this way, as compared with relationships formed by two unattached individuals.

An initial study involved surveying 138 heterosexual participants (average age 20; 71 per cent were women) four times over nine weeks. All were in current romantic relationships that had lasted so far from 0 to 36 months. Men and women who said they'd been poached by their current partner tended to start out the study by reporting less commitment to their existing relationship, feeling less satisfied in it, committing more acts of infidelity and looking out for more alternatives.What's more, over the course of the study, these participants reported progressively lower levels of commitment and satisfaction in their relationships. They also showed continued interest in other potential romantic partners and persistent levels of infidelity. This is in contrast to participants who hadn't been poached by their partners - they showed less interest in romantic alternatives over time.

The researchers led by Joshua Foster attempted to replicate these results with a second sample of 140 heterosexual participants who were surveyed six times over ten weeks. Again the participants who said they'd been poached by their partners tended to report less commitment and satisfaction in their current relationships, and more interest in romantic alternatives. However, unlike the first sample, this group did not show deterioration in their relationship over the course of the study. The researchers speculated this may be because the study was too short-lived or because deterioration in these relationships had already bottomed out.

It makes intuitive sense that people who were poached by their partners showed less commitment and satisfaction in their existing relationship. After all, if they were willing to abandon a partner in the past, why should they not be willing or even keen to do so again? This logic was borne out by a final study of 219 more heterosexual participants who answered questions not just about the way their current relationship had been formed, but also about their personalities and attitudes.

Foster and his team summarised the findings: "individuals who were successfully mate poached by their current partners tend[ed] to be socially passive, not particularly nice to others, careless and irresponsible, and narcissistic. They also tend[ed] to desire and engage in sexual behaviour outside of the confines of committed relationships." The last factor in particular (measured formally with the "Socio-sexual Orientation Inventory-revised") appeared to explain a large part of the link between having been poached by one's partner and having weak commitment to the new relationship.

Across the three studies, between 10 and 30 per cent of participants said they'd been poached by their current partners. This shows again that a significant proportion of relationships are formed this way, the researchers said, and that more research is needed to better understand how these relationships function. "We present the first known evidence [showing] specific long-term disadvantages for individuals involved in relations that formed via mate poaching," they concluded.

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Foster, J., Jonason, P., Shrira, I., Keith Campbell, W., Shiverdecker, L., & Varner, S. (2014). What do you get when you make somebody else’s partner your own? An analysis of relationships formed via mate poaching Journal of Research in Personality, 52, 78-90 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2014.07.008

New research: The most intelligent candidates don't always make the best employees.

Workplace research through the 20th Century suggested that selecting for intelligence is the best way to identify good performers. General mental ability (GMA), a popular recruitment measure that maps closely to the colloquial meaning of "intelligence", is strongly correlated with on-the job performance, well ahead of any other single measure.

This consistent finding came from studies that mostly defined job performance as carrying out the duties expected in that role. Although intuitive, this neglects two types of "extra-role" behaviours identified and studied in more recent years: citizenship behaviours, such as volunteering time or treating colleagues with courtesy; and counter-productive work behaviours, such as spreading rumours, shirking, or theft. Now a new meta-analysis suggests that GMA isn't the best predictor of these crucial aspects of performance. In fact, intelligence may be of little use in predicting who will behave badly at work - although it may predict who can get away with it.

The meta-analysis winnowed the available literature down to 35 relevant studies that looked at citizenship and counterproductive behaviours in real organisations. Intelligence (GMA) was correlated with engaging in more citizenship behaviours, but the association was far weaker than between intelligence and traditional task-based measures of performance. The researchers led by Erik Gonzalez-Mulé then cross-compared their results with previous meta-analyses focused on personality, and concluded that personality and GMA each account for about half the variance in citizenship behaviours. Put another way, you're just as likely to do good because you're inclined that way, as you are because you're smart.

Turning to counterproductive workplace behaviours, the authors predicted a relationship here with intelligence/GMA based on evidence from criminology that’s shown helping people see the consequences of their actions has an inhibitory effect on aberrant behaviour. In fact, the new analysis found no association between intelligence and aberrant behaviour. It's possible that this discrepancy with the criminology findings is because of differences in samples: there may be low-intelligence individuals who are more disposed to malfeasance, but they are underrepresented in workplaces because of adolescent anti-social issues, such as truancy or criminal behaviour. Meanwhile, personality, particularly the trait of agreeableness (but also conscientiousness and openness to experience) was strongly associated with unhelpful behaviours at work.

An interesting footnote - when self-ratings of counterproductive behaviour were removed from the analysis (leaving only third-party ratings), the results showed a significant relationship between intelligence and (fewer) unhelpful workplace behaviours. This means that smarter people report engaging in just as much bad behaviour as the rest of us, but others, such as work supervisors, notice less of it.

In summary, while GMA is the undisputed king of predicting better task performance, it holds equal footing with personality in predicting helpful, altruistic work behaviour, and cedes the ground almost entirely to personality for bad behaviour. Looking at performance as a composite of these three areas, Mulé's team conclude that when it comes to workplace selection, GMA still has a prominent role, but a much diminished one.

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Gonzalez-Mulé E, Mount MK, & Oh IS (2014). A Meta-Analysis of the Relationship Between General Mental Ability and Nontask Performance. The Journal of applied psychology PMID: 25133304

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.

New research: Star performers suffer more than most from loss of status

Tiger Woods experienced a loss of status in 2009.
(He didn't win another major until 2012.)

Compared with lower-ranked people, those higher up the pecking order find it more difficult to stomach a drop in status, and their performance takes a bigger nosedive as a result. This is the verdict of a new article that presents experimental work, together with a more unusual source of evidence: major league baseball arbitration, in which players and clubs contest the players’ worth.

In many ways, individuals with high status are sitting pretty: more likely to receive praise, support, and positive influence from others; more likely to have positive life outcomes and perform better at work. You might expect them to be armed with the resources to cope with a threatening situation, such as being sidelined or demoted, and many psychologists would back you up.

But Jennifer Marr and Stefan Thau predicted that a status drop may have deeper repercussions for high-status individuals because their identity is likely to be more tied to their status, and identity threats suck up psychological resources and make focus harder.

Their first study examined 186 instances of baseball "final-offer arbitration" - a last-ditch contract renegotiation where the player and his club each make a proposal of his true worth for a third party to select between. In this adversarial situation, a club’s case often involves an indictment of the player’s health, team spirit, and temperament. A decision in favour of the club’s case therefore reflects a real status loss for the player. After controlling for player past performance and team results, Marr and Thau found that players ranked as high-status (based on awards and selection for All-Star Games) experienced a larger slump in their on-field performance following unfavourable arbitration.

Follow-up experimental work had participants recruited from a university pool interact in groups before completing a solo task (for example, some of them had to propose adjectives to describe the taste of a chocolate chip cookie). Between the group work and the solo challenge, some participants were told they’d sunk in the estimation of their teammates. This news led to poorer performance specifically for those participants who’d previously seen themselves as top dog, thanks to some rigged feedback they received earlier. When this status drop was followed by a positive self-affirmation exercise, those in the high status condition didn’t slump so badly on the final task, supporting the idea that the adverse effect is due to identity threat.

Taken together these findings suggest that when a high status person takes a tumble, a vicious cycle may result, with poor performance making further status drops possible. This is most likely for those who haven’t earned their status from superior ability and effort: once toppled, poseurs and Machiavellians may quickly slide into obsolescence. Legitimate high-status figures, with a track record of commitment and performance arguably deserve our attention and support. They should know that, perversely, a strong identification with their status could actually make it harder to hold onto it.
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Jennifer Carson Marr and Stefan Thau (2014). Falling from Great (and Not-So-Great) Heights: How Initial Status Position Influences Performance after Status Loss. Academy of Management Journal.

Post written by Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) for the BPS Research Digest.