Are you itching to know when your friends’ relationships crash and burn? Rather than waiting for them to tell you about it, a new Facebook app will notify you when they’ve become single. It’s just what all you stalkers were waiting for.
Of course, you probably could have guessed that these relationships were doomed. There’s research showing that friends are actually more accurate in predicting breakup than are the members of the relationship itself.1 That’s right — friends seem to know best; even better than the couple. In addition, friends’ approval for a relationship is as good of a predictor of breakup as is the satisfaction level of the people in the relationship.2 So if you want to know if a relationship will break up, it’s just as useful to know what the friends think about the relationship as it is to ask the couple members if they are happy in their relationship.
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1Agnew, C. R., Loving, T. J., & Drigotas, S. M. (2001). Substituting the forest for the trees: Social networks and the prediction of romantic relationship state and fate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1042-1057.
2Le, B., Smoak, N. D., Agnew, C. R., Korn, M. S., & Mutso, A. A. (2010). Predicting non-marital romantic relationship dissolution: A meta-analytic synthesis. Personal Relationships, 17, 377-390.
Dr. Benjamin Le – Science of Relationships articles | Website/CV
Dr. Le’s research focuses on commitment, including the factors associated with commitment and its role in promoting maintenance. He has published on the topics of breakup, geographic separation, infidelity, social networks, cognition, and need fulfillment and emotions in relationships.
