Commitment as a Moderator of “We” Pronoun and Romantic Satisfaction
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Cheng, Wei-Chuan
Abstract
People use language to construct their world. Some psychologist in intimate relationship research field argued that if individual use “we” instead of “My partner and I” describing his/her romantic relationship, which reflect some kind of “we-ness”, he/she is more satisfy with partner.
This idea have been discussed and challenged these years. Past studies had investigated into this issue, some studies support this idea, and some studies not. While facing this problem, those studies did little to find the reason of inconsistency, which warranting some moderator. This article trying to use meta analysis first find out what variable might be the moderator, and manipulate a experiment to test the hypothesis.
Study 1 found that relationship length might be the moderator, such that when couples just start their relationship, we-ness or perceived connected may play an important role; as the relationship goes longer, there are more problem need to be solve. Study 2 collect 40 subjects evolving in an intimate relationship rewrite an conflict essay, and found that people write more “we” pronoun in the text also use more positive strategy to solve conflict problem, while we failed to find moderation effect of relationship length. Study 3 use commitment level as a more sensitive moderator and satisfaction as a more suitable dependent variable. Result shown that when individual in high commitment level, no matter the subject have wrote “we” words or not, there was no satisfaction difference. However, when the commitment level is low, the more “we” words using might reflect higher relationship satisfaction.
These result work in concert with past studies and demonstrated that the “we” effect might generally weak but relatively stronger in some specific condition.
Subjects
commitment
close relationship
we-ness
pronoun using
conflict management strategy.
SDGs
Type
thesis
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