Read Receipts in Romantic Relationships

Personality, Attachment, and Trust

Abstract

Trust is essential for fostering human interactions and allows us to build and maintain meaningful relationships. Research shows that high levels of neuroticism and preoccupied-anxious attachment are significantly linked to lower levels of trust. With the emergence of texting, as well as social media sites and the instant messaging that they afford, relationships are subject to new and unique challenges. One such challenge is the read receipt, which enables users to see if, and in some cases when, their instant messages have been read by the intended recipient. Text messaging is currently the preformed form of communication due to its convenience, yet research looking specifically at read receipts is hard to come by, if at all. First, we propose a mediation model in which higher levels of neuroticism will result in paying more attention to read receipts in everyday text conversation with trust as a mediation variable. Second, we propose the same mediation model, only replacing neuroticism with preoccupied-anxious attachment. Using data collected from 352 undergraduate students, we show that the proposed model involving neuroticism is significant while the model involving preoccupied-anxious attachment is not.

Faculty Mentor: Sean Rogers

Department: Psychology (Honours)