Secure Attachment: The Norm in Interethnic Relationships

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967), which nullified all remaining state anti-“miscegenation” laws (which, at that time, covered all of the states of the former Confederacy). The rise in interethnic marriages within the United States in the wake of Loving v. Virginia is well-documented, with 15 percent of all new U.S. marriages involving spouses from different ethnic groups. However, to some extent, stereotypes persist in American society regarding the psychological characteristics of individuals who marry across ethnic lines as dysfunctional (neurotic, filled with self-hate; see routledge/Identity-and-Interethnic-Marriage).

During the 1990s, I and my colleagues (Gaines, Granrose, Rios, Garcia, Page, Farris, & Bledsoe, 1999) conducted a study of women and men in interethnic, and primarily marital, relationships. We reasoned that, if the aforementioned stereotypes contained a grain of truth, then the majority of women and men in interethnic relationships should score as insecurely attached (using the terminology of attachment theory; see routledge/A-Secure-Base/Bowlby). However, if the stereotypes were unfounded, then the majority of women and men in interethnic relationships should score as securely attached. Results indicated that a clear majority of the women and men were securely attached. Thus, we did not obtain any evidence for dysfunctionality among individuals within ongoing interethnic relationships.

Source: MBittner

Given the results that we have just reviewed concerning secure attachment as the norm within interethnic relationships, one might not be surprised that most women and men in intraethnic marital relationships likewise are securely attached (as reported by Gaines, Reis, Summers, Rusbult, Cox, Wexler, Marelich, & Kurland, 1997). However, perhaps it is surprising that, when the proportions of women and men who are securely versus insecurely attached are compared across interethnic and intraethnic relationships in the studies by us, individuals within interethnic relationships are significantly more likely to score as securely attached than are individuals within intraethnic relationships (see routledge/Identity-and-Interethnic-Marriage-in-the-United-States). In any event, from the standpoint of attachment theory, the personalities of individuals within interethnic relationships clearly do not tend to be maladaptive.

Of course, we have considered only one aspect of individuals’ personalities (attachment styles) that might be reflected in relationship dynamics among interethnic versus intraethnic relationships. We do not know whether the “Big Five” personality traits of openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism differ among individuals who do versus do not form long-term romantic relationships across ethnic lines—and, if so, whether the differences would favor individuals within interethnic relationships. Also, we do not know whether attitudes such as self-esteem and narcissism differ across individuals in the two types of relationships. Therefore, we shall refrain from over-interpreting the results of these studies concerning personalities and ethnic pairings in the U.S.

At the beginning of this blog entry, we alluded to the ground-breaking Loving v. Virginia decision, which provided a fitting conclusion to the “Civil Rights Decade” of the 1960s in America. The psychological implications of Loving v. Virginia have not been examined in nearly the same detail as have the implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine. Nevertheless, results of our studies indicate that interethnic relationships, which traditionally have received greater attention from sociologists than they have received from psychologists, deserve increasingly systematic consideration within psychology.

Copyright Stanley O. Gaines, Jr. 2016