How Do We Select Our Life Mates Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

How Do We Select Our Life Mates - Research Paper Example One of the theories that contemporary social science uses is called Five-factor personality traits model. This model uses five distinct characteristics to describe an individual’s personality. This assignment conducted a survey to determine self-portraits of 190 respondents through a set of questionnaires. Survey questionnaires were tailored to characterize respondents per Big-five model theory. The respondents then described the portrait of their expected life partners through the same questionnaires. This assignment conducts a literature review on mate selection process; uses the results of the survey to test several correlations between respondents’ self portraits and their mates' portraits. The assignment presents the results of the findings. How Do We Select Our Life mates? Introduction The man said, â€Å"This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.† – this is said in the 23rd verse of the Genesis 2:23. The next verse, Genesis 2:24 says,† That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is to his wife, and they become one flesh (â€Å"BibleGateway.com†, n.d.). This is how everything started and until this day we ponder with the question how to select our life mates (Kim,n.d.). Choosing a life partner is one of the crucial decisions that all of us face in the lives. Unfortunately, neither our schools nor our society provides us with the foresight and knowledge needed to make the best possible choice (Kim, n.d.). In the process of adolescent development, an individual creates an identity, which contains a set of self-defined commitments (Klimstra, et.al., 2012). Two unique personalities with two separate identities in future create the nucleus of a new family. It can truly be compared with the birth of a new star. That is why; both social science and society spend enormous time to find the answer which two personalities may be the best combination as  a couple. The science has been struggling to find a theory that may be attributed to the mate selection process. Could it be ideal mate personality concept, dark triad concept, or big-five model of personality? The scope of this research does not constitute the goal in focusing on merits and demerits of various concepts in mate selection process; it rather analyzes the correlations between mate selection and big-five model of personality traits. Mate selection from cross-cultural and historical perspective strongly varies from country to country and culture to culture (â€Å"Introduction to Sociology†, n.d.; Figueredo, et.al., 2006). This process even in the same culture with the passage of time makes evolutionary or revolutionary changes. For example; sixty years from now in the USA this selection process predominately was based on how one’s parents felt about him or her, how stable his or her economic resources appeared to be, how healthy the person appeared to be, how good/moral his or her character appeared to be (â€Å"Introduction to Sociology†, n.d.). However, today it is not a selection but a search. Nonetheless, both selection and search have criteria. To identify the search criteria, this search conducted a qualitative survey focusing on the attributes of big five personality traits. Personality can be considered as a metric that describes a person’s character through quality, which makes one individual different from another individual. From the viewpoint of psychology, personality represents a dynamic concept that describes the growth and development of an individual’s entire mental system (Bedi, 2011). Even though, from the psychological viewpoint, one person’