Birds of a Feather Doflock Together: Behavior-Based Personality-Assessment Method Reveals Personality Similarity Among Couples and Friends.

Friends and spouses tend to be similar in a broad range of characteristics, such as age, educational level, race, religion, attitudes, and general intelligence. Surprisingly, little evidence has been found for similarity in personality--one of the most fundamental psychological constructs. We argue that the lack of evidence for personality similarity stems from the tendency of individuals to make personality judgments relative to a salient comparison group, rather than in absolute terms (i.e., the reference-group effect), when responding to the self-report and peer-report questionnaires commonly used in personality research. We employed two behavior-based personality measures to circumvent the referencegroup effect. The results based on large samples provide evidence for personality similarity between romantic partners in = 1,101; rs = .20-.47) and between friends in = 46,483; rs = .12--.31). We discuss the practical and methodological implications of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]