Romantic Relationships Conceptualized as a Judgment and Decision-Making Domain

Abstract

We review the emerging evidence suggesting that the largely separate research areas of romantic relationships and judgment and decision making (JDM) can usefully inform each other. First, we present evidence that decisions in more traditional JDM domains (e.g., consumerism, economics) share important features with romantic-relationship decisions, including the use of formal decision strategies (e.g., the investment model), intuitive shortcuts (e.g., the availability heuristic), and anticipated emotions (e.g., affective forecasting). In turn, we present evidence suggesting that incorporating key concepts from the field of relationships (e.g., need to belong, attachment style) can enrich traditional JDM domains. These largely unrecognized overlaps between relationship decisions and decisions made in more traditional decision-making domains suggest that the fields of relationship science and JDM—each of which contains a wealth of existing theory, findings, and research tools—could be used to illuminate one another for mutual benefit.