Even someone who has many positive qualities can strike out because of one or two negative qualities.
When people are thinking about a potential partner they consider negative qualities more than positive ones.
Even someone who has many positive qualities can strike out because of one or two negative qualities.
Dr Gregory Webster, study co-author, explained:
“We have a general tendency to attend more closely to negative information than we do to positive information.”
Here are the 7 most important deal breakers, in no particular order:
- Undesirable personality traits (e.g. anger issues, abusive, untrustworthy).
- Differing relationship goals (e.g. is uncaring or inattentive).
- Unhealthy lifestyle (e.g. smells or has poor hygiene).
- Differing religious beliefs.
- Limited social status.
- Differing mating strategies (e.g. is seeing someone else).
- Unattractiveness.
The study found that the deal breakers were more important for women and those in committed relationships.
However, different people had different deal breakers — not everyone found the same negative traits off-putting.
For example, some people enjoy impulsive personality traits in others, while others prefer someone predictable.
The results come from six different studies that surveyed over 6,500 people.
Unconsciously or not, people focussed a lot on undesirable traits in order to weed out those they considered undesirable.
Dr Webster said:
“A lot of times, just by avoiding negative traits, people will probably be fairly well off — maybe even more well off — than if they were trying to optimize the best potential partner.”
People who were more desirable to others were also more picky; in other words they had more deal breakers.
Those less fortunate had fewer deal breakers.
Focusing on negative traits is adaptive behaviour since it helps us survive, Dr Webster said:
“Things that can harm are generally more important [to pay attention to] than things that can help you.”
The study also looked at deal breakers in the context of non-romantic friendship.
Deal breakers were not as strongly adhered to for choosing friends, although some qualities, like dishonesty, were always avoided.
The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Jonason et al., 2015).
