Valentine's Day: How You Treat Others Depends on If You're Single or Not

Are you single or do you have a significant other? With Valentine's Day just around the corner, you may want to find a partner; but new research shows that how you treat others may depend on whether or not you're single.

The new study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that people who feel "stuck" within a particular social system (such as being single or coupled) leads people to justify and rationalize that system. Essentially, people believe that their way of life is the best for everyone, which will affect how they treat others.

Researchers, including Kristin Laurin of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and David Kille and Richard Eibach of the University of Waterloo, conducted four studies total. With the first, they found that the more stable participants considered their relationship status to be, the more they idealized that status at the norm for others to follow.

For their second study, though, the researchers decided to take advantage of Valentine's Day. They recruited participants on the holiday and asked them to imagine a Valentine's Day evening for a hypothetical person of the same gender--either Nicole or Nick.

The results showed what the researchers expected. The participants imagined that Nicole or Nick would have a happier and more fulfilling Valentine's Day if they had the same status as them. For example, if the participant was single, he believed that Nick would be happier if he were also single.

That wasn't the end of the researchers' studies, though. They conducted two more to investigate whether or not this bias might influence how people behaved toward others. The results were that participants who had a stable relationship judged same-status job candidates more positively, and that participants were also more likely to vote for a same-status political candidate.

All combined, the four studies shows that a relationship status does have the ability to affect how people perceive others. It is the first of its kind to show relationship-specific patterns of prejudice where both single and coupled people favor others who share the same.

The researchers plan to next explore whether people idealize other aspects of their lives, such as decisions they've made and the type of community they live in.