A new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality sheds light on how power dynamics and personality traits intersect to shape romantic relationship satisfaction—and how these patterns can vary dramatically across different social identities. The researchers found that how people perceive their partner’s power in the relationship is more closely related to how satisfied they are than how much power they believe they themselves have. The study also showed that the influence of personality on satisfaction depends not just on power dynamics, but on factors such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and relationship type.
The researchers wanted to revisit long-standing questions about power in romantic relationships, but with a broader lens. Much of the previous work in this area has focused on heterosexual, mixed-gender couples, which limits understanding of how power functions in diverse partnerships. The goal was to explore how personality traits—especially the Big Five and gender expression—interact with perceived power in relationships, and whether those dynamics vary across different social groups.
“This paper was inspired by two main ideas. First, we wanted to explore different variables that theories of power argue are sources of power. Second, we aimed to include sexual and gender diverse people in different relationship configurations, which past research often ignored,” explained study author Eleanor Junkins, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“Theories about power in romantic relationships focused on resources like higher income, social advantages like being a man, individual characteristics including personality, and socioemotional variables like dependency (how dependent on the relationship you are). These theories arose from a focus on traditional marriages between one man and one woman, which was reflective of the times. The role of individual differences was less emphasized.”
“Our goal was to empirically examine for whom and how personality and relationship power interacted with one another,” Junkins said. “For example, does the association between personality and relationship satisfaction depend on one’s level of power. Would you be happier in your relationship with more or less power if you are an agreeable person?”
“We also examined whether these associations changed based on people’s resources (higher socioeconomic status, older, more educated) or their identities (gender, marginalized group, and same-gender or different-gender relationship).”
“The goal of these two sets of analyses in the paper was to bring in those theoretical ideas of sources of power and determine whether for these features (resources and identities), the interaction between personality and power was stronger or weaker for different groups,” Junkins continued. “The main effects of the identities and resources will be presented in a future paper.”
“In other words, we will later discuss if someone’s gender is nonbinary versus a man does higher or lower power relate to greater satisfaction? And does the association between one’s socioeconomic status and relationship satisfaction depend on one’s levels of power? Both of these research papers are meant to update theories on what leads to power and update who is included in the conversation.”
For their study, the researchers conducted a secondary analysis using data from the POWER study, a large online survey of 1,750 adults. The sample was designed to be diverse in terms of gender identity, sexual orientation, and relationship structure, including both monogamous and non-monogamous partnerships. Participants completed several well-established questionnaires assessing personality, gender expression, relationship power, and satisfaction.
Personality traits were measured using the Big Five Inventory, which captures levels of traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Gender expression was assessed through self-ratings of masculinity and femininity as independent dimensions. To measure power in relationships, participants completed a scale that separately assessed how much influence they felt they had, and how much power they believed their partner had. Relationship satisfaction was measured using two different scales.
The researchers used advanced statistical modeling to estimate how personality traits and gender expression related to relationship satisfaction at different levels of perceived power. They also examined whether these patterns differed across groups defined by social identity factors like gender and sexual orientation, as well as resource factors like age, education, and income.
One key finding was that people’s perceptions of their partner’s power in the relationship had a stronger link to their own satisfaction than their perceptions of their own power. The more powerful someone thought their partner was, the less satisfied they tended to be. In contrast, feeling powerful oneself had a weaker connection to satisfaction.
“How someone perceives their own relationship power doesn’t strongly relate to how they perceive their partner’s relationship power,” Junkins told PsyPost. “This is shown by a weak correlation between self-report relationship power and perceived partner relationship power. Perceptions of one’s partner’s power was more strongly correlated with relationship satisfaction than perception of one’s own power.
When looking at correlations between personality and relationship power, the results were relatively modest. For example, self-reported power was positively associated with extraversion and conscientiousness, and negatively associated with neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness. Interestingly, agreeableness—often assumed to be a positive trait in relationships—was actually negatively associated with one’s sense of power. This could reflect that agreeable individuals may be more accommodating, leading them to perceive themselves as having less influence in decision-making.
The researchers also looked beyond simple correlations to explore whether relationship power moderated the link between personality traits and satisfaction. That is, they wanted to know whether the impact of a personality trait on satisfaction changed depending on how much power a person or their partner was perceived to have. Using non-linear modeling techniques, they found some evidence for moderation—especially with the traits of agreeableness and neuroticism.
For instance, individuals high in agreeableness tended to be more satisfied at both low and high ends of the perceived partner power spectrum, with a dip in the middle. This suggests that agreeable people may adapt well to both dominant and submissive dynamics, but are less comfortable in more ambiguous power situations.
Neuroticism, a trait linked to emotional instability, was generally associated with lower satisfaction, especially when perceived partner power was high. This might indicate that highly neurotic individuals feel especially vulnerable or distressed when they believe their partner holds more control in the relationship.
“The way in which personality traits relate to higher or lower relationship satisfaction may relate to one’s levels of power,” Junkins said.
Instead of treating all participants as part of a single undifferentiated group, the researchers grouped people based on combinations of gender identity, sexual orientation, relationship type, and assigned sex at birth. They also included resource-based groupings like age, education, and income. They found that identity-based groupings explained much more variation in relationship satisfaction than resource-based ones. This means that who someone is—in terms of their social identity—matters more than what they have, at least when it comes to how power and personality interact in their romantic life.
Across these identity groups, the influence of personality traits like femininity, openness, and neuroticism on relationship satisfaction varied depending on how much power people perceived themselves or their partner to have. For example, in some groups, higher perceived partner power was associated with more satisfaction when paired with higher levels of femininity. But in other groups, different patterns emerged, with traits like openness becoming more relevant.
“The way personality and power relate to relationship satisfaction varied more by who you and your partner are (gender, sexual and/or gender minority, partnership type) than on the objective resources one has (education, socioeconomic status, age, leader role at work),” Junkins explained. “However, these findings are based on one sample of 1,700 people and by no means are these conclusive findings for what we may expect at a national and definitely not international level.”
The study’s strength lies in its methodological sophistication and diverse sample. By separately analyzing perceived power and self-reported power, and by considering a wide range of social identities and structural resources, the researchers were able to uncover patterns that would have been hidden in more traditional analyses. They used two statistical approaches: Local Structural Equation Modeling to identify non-linear patterns, and a multilevel approach to understand how effects varied across identity groups.
However, the study does have limitations. The data were cross-sectional, so no conclusions can be drawn about causality. It’s unclear whether personality influences perceived power or the other way around. Most participants were from the United States and were predominantly White, so the results may not generalize to all populations. Some subgroups, especially in the intersectional analyses, had small sample sizes, which increases uncertainty around those estimates.
“Past uses of the analysis (MAIHDA) used samples larger than 10,000 so our sample was considerably smaller at 1,700 people,” Junkins noted. “Relatedly, the model is meant to capture deviations, or departures, from the sample average. In a non-representative sample, like ours, the average does not represent the average person in the United States or any population in particular. Our sample was a convenience sample that over-represented queer people. The benefit of the analysis was that we obtained intersectional group specific estimates that could be compared to future research that uses the same variables to cluster their data.”
“My long-term goals are to better incorporate real people’s lived experience into personality and relationships research. I also want to continue in the vein of understanding the range of expected associations for people of different identities or intersections of identities rather than presenting one average that tends to represent no one.”
The results suggest that future research on romantic relationships should continue to explore how traits and dynamics operate differently across social groups—and that focusing only on the “typical” relationship risks leaving many people’s experiences out of the picture.
“These types of methods show lots of promise for addressing contextual influences on psychological associations,” Junkins said.
The study, “Registered Report Stage II: Does personality vary by relationship power? An investigation of satisfaction in diverse romantic partnerships,” was authored by Eleanor J. Junkins, D.A. Briley, Brian G. Ogolsky, and Jaime Derringer.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.