20 ms·

Divorce rate cut in half for couples who discussed relationship movies (2014)

172 points by mleonhard 6y ago

realitysballs 6y ago
Having a hard time finding causation here
- hntrader 6y ago
  It's an intervention.
- rriepe 6y ago
  Relationship movies are marriage propaganda.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  Just a few really strong movies and guided discussion after that can definitely completely change ones perspective towards how to approach their partner; this study seems to affirm the same.
- HighlandSpring 6y ago
  You shouldn't, interventional studies yield causal evidence, by definition
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  The causation is the same as for common pre-marital counseling methods, having an improved shared understanding of relationship expectations (including improved understanding of partner expectations where they differ from yours) before running into clashes of expectations in marriage. This is done early marriage, and a slightly novel specific format, but it's not really all that different from pre-marital counseling methods which have been known to provide good results for decades, which have often included, which have often included pretty similar time allotment to the mechanism here, and a pattern of spaced sessions with presentation consisting largely of scenarios (fictional and/or from other couples) followed by time for the couple to discuss. So I'm not at all surprised that this is both effective and as effective as intense but narrow focus on one or anothee tool for coping with stressful situations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
runawaybottle 6y ago
Drops divorce rates on what timeline? Reminds of Intervention, where all addicts relapse within 6 months. I’ll never understand how divorce happens when two people have kids. Anything before that is just a dressed up break up.
- btilly 6y ago
  The article starts off with, Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half... So it reduces divorce rates in half. I would be curious at how large the sample size was though.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > So it reduces divorce rates in half. Over three years, not over the life of the marriage, but, while the average life of a first marriage that ends in divorce is around 8 years, there's a lot ending in the first couple, so having the three-year divorce rate is a big deal.
    - btilly 6y ago
      That and to do a study, you have to define your success criteria. There is a big difference between taking 3 years to get a result and taking 8. Even though 8 would be more meaningful, I completely support looking at 3 instead and hoping that it is meaningful.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        For the people in the relationship, taking 3 years to get to a [relationship] result may be better than 8 as well. If I’m going to end up divorced in all cases, I’d much prefer it only take 3 years (though others might prefer 8). So, if this counseling activity moves divorces out, it could be viewed as worse by some.
btilly 6y ago
This makes sense. There is other research indicating that intellectual knowledge does not translate into behavior. But direct or imagined experience does. So for example someone who can give all the right answers on a psychology test still acts the same under pressure. But people who have had to go through and reflect on simulated experiences will have that change actual behavior. Therefore watching and discussing relationship movies is in line with what is known to actually change behavior. The two books that made this point most effectively to me were Enlightenment Now and Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. The first in the context of how much the rise of fiction changed the amount of empathy that people in general had. And the second explains it in terms of how intellectual knowledge only helps with the "thinking slow" parts of our brains, but you have to affect the "thinking fast" parts to change actual behavior.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  Or... Fiction drives home unrealistic standards or extremes. I found the data to be dubious ofcourse. Just like we can extrapolate all sorts of nonsense from data - movies aabout relationships might not mean anything at all. Considering that life is 90% boring routine and fiction does not show or truly represent that boringness in order to sell the story. They need drama. Thats why writers wont write about a perfectly normal day with a couple talking about tiles for an hour dialog near the kitchen sink.
  - _Microft 6y ago
    The movies served as means to make couples talk about their own relationsship. Check the questions from the PDF that I linked elsewhere here to get a better idea.
    - vagrantJin 6y ago
      > The movies served as means to make couples talk about their own relationship. Sure. The next one should be titled Taylor Swift lyrics decrease divorce rate by 45% but Nicki Minaj lyrics don't. I'm sure the methodology will hold up equally well. Marriage ad the strongest legally recognised relationship outside blood relations - needs interventions so that couples can talk. Is this an approximation of the problem statement? If it is, either no one really knows the problem or it is known but won't be touched with a 100ft pole since doing so will lead down the rabbit hole of disillusionment.
philosopher1234 6y ago
For all the confused commenters, heres a hypothesis: Talking about relationship movies gives a couple a platform to discuss issues that affect their current relationship, with much lower stakes than in the middle of a conflict. This doesn't have to effect change so much as it enables the partners to understand each other better, and accept the other more fully when conflicts arise. This can also enable the pair to adapt to each other better. My girlfriend and I do this all the time, coincidentally, and i find it to be a great way to learn about her and to discuss how we might react in situations that would be difficult to resolve otherwise (like all the ones on the tele). TLDR: It cuts the tension.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Most hollywood movies also present relationships in a positive light, and people are memetic creatures.
_Microft 6y ago
I have not managed to get access to the paper yet but I wonder if they have considered "treating" only one of the partners to see how much that helps. Is the "treated" partner able to provide almost all of the advantage on their own? Or is the other partner the "blocker" then, making the effort completely futile? Does it work to go through the process without being in a partnership at that time or does it require immediate practice to have a lasting effect on the behaviour? There are so many interesting follow-up questions... Edit: after reading the questions about the movies that the couple were asked to answer, I doubt that my questions actually make that much sense.
fdiskl 6y ago
Deep Blue Something was onto something.
- namenotrequired 6y ago
  Unfortunately, in their case, it seems to have been too little, too late.
_Microft 6y ago
The link to the list of movies and questions is broken in the article but it can be found here instead: https://www.rochester.edu/news/divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-couples-who-discussed-relationship-movies/movie-list-and-questions.pdf https://www.rochester.edu/news/divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-... Edit: it's also in the right sidebar but I did not notice it until I had seen the PDF already (the graphics is the same as the frontpage of the PDF). Funny how being on the interwebz long enough trains one to ignore everything but the main content.
ramraj07 6y ago
Can’t access the paper but deducing the following numbers from the abstract : Participants per group - 43 Number divorced in control - 11 Number divorced in all three treatments - 5. It sounds iffy but when I think about it, it probably will pass most statistical tests of significance. So this is surprising for sure.
tus89 6y ago
I find divorce statistics hard to fathom. A rate that compares numbers of marriages and divorces in a single year does not really seem to speak for long term prospects, especially due to population changes over that time. For example, are there any reliable statistics on the percent of people who married in 1970, who did not divorce to the present day? And for 1980, 1990, 2000 etc.
- eric4smith 6y ago
  There’s a statistic that the average length of the American marriage is 8 years. Yes you’re right, the overlap numbers are incredibly confusing. But the 8 year number is a pretty good indicator that people don’t remain married for long anyway. https://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf
  - tus89 6y ago
    Under a standard bell curve, what percentile would a 20 year marriage be then?
    - exporectomy 6y ago
      If it was normally distributed, it would be 100% - the percentile of a -12 year marriage. So it's surely very much not a normal distribution.
      - dahart 6y ago
        Normal distributions are used all the time to model strictly positive phenomena. https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1335872 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1335872
        exporectomy 6y ago
        That's alright when the negative values are way off the end of the tail, but a 20 year marriage is way more common than a 3.4 meter tall woman (same distance from the mean as a 0 meter tall woman).
chovybizzass 6y ago
dafuq cares.
yarcob 6y ago
Please make sure to read the full paper before jumping to conclusions! This was not a fully randomized study! The main outcome of the study was that couples that participated in ANY treatment had similar outcomes. The benefit was compared to a "No treatment" group. But the article fails to mention that this "no treatment" group was not randomly selected!! The "no treatment" group was made up of couples that refused treatment, or failed to participate in treatments because of scheduling constraints. So a less misleading headline might be: Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise noone.
- haffi112 6y ago
  It's getting really tired how unreliably scientific results are reported in the mainstream media. Is anyone building a (crowdsourced) fact checker to validate these kinds of claims that I could install as a browser extension?
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    The worst part is this isn't even a mainstream media source. This is coming from a university!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ErikAugust 6y ago
      They may have even stronger incentive to juice up a press release.
  - d0mine 6y ago
    It is soft science. Almost all results are unreproducable BS
- morekozhambu 6y ago
  Right, I would like a study on how discussing relationship movies increases the marriage rate for couples.
hirenj 6y ago
This makes me wonder about the role of film as a “machine for empathy” as described by Ebert. If movies could prime people for relationship chats by seeding empathetic ideas. This led me to wonder if there’s any relationship between the media and ability to elicit empathy - if couples discussed relationship books would they also see a lower rate of divorce? So far, I can only find one paper on this (https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19003.tur https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19003.tur) but I wonder how it fits into the wider literature? What is known about the ability of different media to generate empathy? The paper above suggests books are better than films. What about immersive games?
fiftyacorn 6y ago
I think the fact that they are both willing to watch some of those films must improve chances of staying together
shoyer 6y ago
Here’s the paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130ec66952772ce922.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130e... Unfortunately on closer examination the results look pretty meaningless to me. The study involves rather small numbers (e.g., 4/33 vs 10/44 divorces), but an even bigger issue is that the “control” arm in this study wasn’t selected randomly, but rather consisted of couples “declining active treatment” or who “could not be scheduled for active treatment.” So a better summary might be “Divorce rate cut in half for coupling willing and able to take part in a relationship building program, of any sort.” If these psychologists had only been a bit less greedy about wanting to compare three different treatment arms rather than a real control arm, they could have set up a study that could actually have taught us something...
bickeringyokel 6y ago
174 is a pretty small sample size. This was several years ago, anyone know if there was any follow up?
Eliezer 6y ago
I can rarely remember seeing a title that made me so quickly and confidently say "Will Not Replicate". I mean, I say that often, but this made me say it louder.
jmsmistral 6y ago
Tip: don't marry in the first place.
dagorenouf 6y ago
Here I was complaining about "big sugar" or "big tobacco" influencing scientific studies, when "big romantic comedy" was behind the wheel this whole time.
freebuju 6y ago
This reminds me of an episode on Ozark where the main character secretly pays the psychiatrist whom he regularly visits together with the wife to be on his side. Didn't take long for the equally cunning wife to successfully attempt to bribe the morally bankrupt psychiatrist.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mrfusion 6y ago
I’m pretty skeptical of feel-good-10-o’clock-news-ready studies like this. Don’t get me wrong, it could certainly be true but I come in from a place of skepticism.
analog31 6y ago
Maybe a person who has the resilience to tolerate discussing a relationship movie, is also likely to tolerate a bad marriage.

172 points by mleonhard 6y ago

realitysballs 6y ago

Having a hard time finding causation here

hntrader 6y ago
It's an intervention.
rriepe 6y ago
Relationship movies are marriage propaganda.
ramraj07 6y ago
Just a few really strong movies and guided discussion after that can definitely completely change ones perspective towards how to approach their partner; this study seems to affirm the same.
HighlandSpring 6y ago
You shouldn't, interventional studies yield causal evidence, by definition
dragonwriter 6y ago
The causation is the same as for common pre-marital counseling methods, having an improved shared understanding of relationship expectations (including improved understanding of partner expectations where they differ from yours) before running into clashes of expectations in marriage. This is done early marriage, and a slightly novel specific format, but it's not really all that different from pre-marital counseling methods which have been known to provide good results for decades, which have often included, which have often included pretty similar time allotment to the mechanism here, and a pattern of spaced sessions with presentation consisting largely of scenarios (fictional and/or from other couples) followed by time for the couple to discuss. So I'm not at all surprised that this is both effective and as effective as intense but narrow focus on one or anothee tool for coping with stressful situations.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

runawaybottle 6y ago

Drops divorce rates on what timeline? Reminds of Intervention, where all addicts relapse within 6 months. I’ll never understand how divorce happens when two people have kids. Anything before that is just a dressed up break up.

btilly 6y ago
The article starts off with, Discussing five movies about relationships over a month could cut the three-year divorce rate for newlyweds in half... So it reduces divorce rates in half. I would be curious at how large the sample size was though.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > So it reduces divorce rates in half. Over three years, not over the life of the marriage, but, while the average life of a first marriage that ends in divorce is around 8 years, there's a lot ending in the first couple, so having the three-year divorce rate is a big deal.
  - btilly 6y ago
    That and to do a study, you have to define your success criteria. There is a big difference between taking 3 years to get a result and taking 8. Even though 8 would be more meaningful, I completely support looking at 3 instead and hoping that it is meaningful.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      For the people in the relationship, taking 3 years to get to a [relationship] result may be better than 8 as well. If I’m going to end up divorced in all cases, I’d much prefer it only take 3 years (though others might prefer 8). So, if this counseling activity moves divorces out, it could be viewed as worse by some.

btilly 6y ago

This makes sense. There is other research indicating that intellectual knowledge does not translate into behavior. But direct or imagined experience does. So for example someone who can give all the right answers on a psychology test still acts the same under pressure. But people who have had to go through and reflect on simulated experiences will have that change actual behavior. Therefore watching and discussing relationship movies is in line with what is known to actually change behavior. The two books that made this point most effectively to me were Enlightenment Now and Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. The first in the context of how much the rise of fiction changed the amount of empathy that people in general had. And the second explains it in terms of how intellectual knowledge only helps with the "thinking slow" parts of our brains, but you have to affect the "thinking fast" parts to change actual behavior.

vagrantJin 6y ago
Or... Fiction drives home unrealistic standards or extremes. I found the data to be dubious ofcourse. Just like we can extrapolate all sorts of nonsense from data - movies aabout relationships might not mean anything at all. Considering that life is 90% boring routine and fiction does not show or truly represent that boringness in order to sell the story. They need drama. Thats why writers wont write about a perfectly normal day with a couple talking about tiles for an hour dialog near the kitchen sink.
- _Microft 6y ago
  The movies served as means to make couples talk about their own relationsship. Check the questions from the PDF that I linked elsewhere here to get a better idea.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    > The movies served as means to make couples talk about their own relationship. Sure. The next one should be titled Taylor Swift lyrics decrease divorce rate by 45% but Nicki Minaj lyrics don't. I'm sure the methodology will hold up equally well. Marriage ad the strongest legally recognised relationship outside blood relations - needs interventions so that couples can talk. Is this an approximation of the problem statement? If it is, either no one really knows the problem or it is known but won't be touched with a 100ft pole since doing so will lead down the rabbit hole of disillusionment.

philosopher1234 6y ago

For all the confused commenters, heres a hypothesis: Talking about relationship movies gives a couple a platform to discuss issues that affect their current relationship, with much lower stakes than in the middle of a conflict. This doesn't have to effect change so much as it enables the partners to understand each other better, and accept the other more fully when conflicts arise. This can also enable the pair to adapt to each other better. My girlfriend and I do this all the time, coincidentally, and i find it to be a great way to learn about her and to discuss how we might react in situations that would be difficult to resolve otherwise (like all the ones on the tele). TLDR: It cuts the tension.

cblconfederate 6y ago
Most hollywood movies also present relationships in a positive light, and people are memetic creatures.

_Microft 6y ago

I have not managed to get access to the paper yet but I wonder if they have considered "treating" only one of the partners to see how much that helps. Is the "treated" partner able to provide almost all of the advantage on their own? Or is the other partner the "blocker" then, making the effort completely futile? Does it work to go through the process without being in a partnership at that time or does it require immediate practice to have a lasting effect on the behaviour? There are so many interesting follow-up questions... Edit: after reading the questions about the movies that the couple were asked to answer, I doubt that my questions actually make that much sense.

fdiskl 6y ago

Deep Blue Something was onto something.

namenotrequired 6y ago
Unfortunately, in their case, it seems to have been too little, too late.

_Microft 6y ago

The link to the list of movies and questions is broken in the article but it can be found here instead: https://www.rochester.edu/news/divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-couples-who-discussed-relationship-movies/movie-list-and-questions.pdf https://www.rochester.edu/news/divorce-rate-cut-in-half-for-... Edit: it's also in the right sidebar but I did not notice it until I had seen the PDF already (the graphics is the same as the frontpage of the PDF). Funny how being on the interwebz long enough trains one to ignore everything but the main content.

ramraj07 6y ago

Can’t access the paper but deducing the following numbers from the abstract : Participants per group - 43 Number divorced in control - 11 Number divorced in all three treatments - 5. It sounds iffy but when I think about it, it probably will pass most statistical tests of significance. So this is surprising for sure.

tus89 6y ago

I find divorce statistics hard to fathom. A rate that compares numbers of marriages and divorces in a single year does not really seem to speak for long term prospects, especially due to population changes over that time. For example, are there any reliable statistics on the percent of people who married in 1970, who did not divorce to the present day? And for 1980, 1990, 2000 etc.

eric4smith 6y ago
There’s a statistic that the average length of the American marriage is 8 years. Yes you’re right, the overlap numbers are incredibly confusing. But the 8 year number is a pretty good indicator that people don’t remain married for long anyway. https://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/p70-97.pdf
- tus89 6y ago
  Under a standard bell curve, what percentile would a 20 year marriage be then?
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    If it was normally distributed, it would be 100% - the percentile of a -12 year marriage. So it's surely very much not a normal distribution.
    - dahart 6y ago
      Normal distributions are used all the time to model strictly positive phenomena. https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1335872 https://math.stackexchange.com/a/1335872
      - exporectomy 6y ago
        That's alright when the negative values are way off the end of the tail, but a 20 year marriage is way more common than a 3.4 meter tall woman (same distance from the mean as a 0 meter tall woman).

chovybizzass 6y ago

dafuq cares.

yarcob 6y ago

Please make sure to read the full paper before jumping to conclusions! This was not a fully randomized study! The main outcome of the study was that couples that participated in ANY treatment had similar outcomes. The benefit was compared to a "No treatment" group. But the article fails to mention that this "no treatment" group was not randomly selected!! The "no treatment" group was made up of couples that refused treatment, or failed to participate in treatments because of scheduling constraints. So a less misleading headline might be: Couples that refuse relationship counselling have higher divorce rates. But that would surprise noone.

haffi112 6y ago
It's getting really tired how unreliably scientific results are reported in the mainstream media. Is anyone building a (crowdsourced) fact checker to validate these kinds of claims that I could install as a browser extension?
- gnicholas 6y ago
  The worst part is this isn't even a mainstream media source. This is coming from a university!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ErikAugust 6y ago
    They may have even stronger incentive to juice up a press release.
- d0mine 6y ago
  It is soft science. Almost all results are unreproducable BS
morekozhambu 6y ago
Right, I would like a study on how discussing relationship movies increases the marriage rate for couples.

hirenj 6y ago

This makes me wonder about the role of film as a “machine for empathy” as described by Ebert. If movies could prime people for relationship chats by seeding empathetic ideas. This led me to wonder if there’s any relationship between the media and ability to elicit empathy - if couples discussed relationship books would they also see a lower rate of divorce? So far, I can only find one paper on this (https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19003.tur https://doi.org/10.1075/ssol.19003.tur) but I wonder how it fits into the wider literature? What is known about the ability of different media to generate empathy? The paper above suggests books are better than films. What about immersive games?

fiftyacorn 6y ago

I think the fact that they are both willing to watch some of those films must improve chances of staying together

shoyer 6y ago

Here’s the paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130ec66952772ce922.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130e... Unfortunately on closer examination the results look pretty meaningless to me. The study involves rather small numbers (e.g., 4/33 vs 10/44 divorces), but an even bigger issue is that the “control” arm in this study wasn’t selected randomly, but rather consisted of couples “declining active treatment” or who “could not be scheduled for active treatment.” So a better summary might be “Divorce rate cut in half for coupling willing and able to take part in a relationship building program, of any sort.” If these psychologists had only been a bit less greedy about wanting to compare three different treatment arms rather than a real control arm, they could have set up a study that could actually have taught us something...

bickeringyokel 6y ago

174 is a pretty small sample size. This was several years ago, anyone know if there was any follow up?

Eliezer 6y ago

I can rarely remember seeing a title that made me so quickly and confidently say "Will Not Replicate". I mean, I say that often, but this made me say it louder.

jmsmistral 6y ago

Tip: don't marry in the first place.

dagorenouf 6y ago

Here I was complaining about "big sugar" or "big tobacco" influencing scientific studies, when "big romantic comedy" was behind the wheel this whole time.

freebuju 6y ago

This reminds me of an episode on Ozark where the main character secretly pays the psychiatrist whom he regularly visits together with the wife to be on his side. Didn't take long for the equally cunning wife to successfully attempt to bribe the morally bankrupt psychiatrist.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mrfusion 6y ago

I’m pretty skeptical of feel-good-10-o’clock-news-ready studies like this. Don’t get me wrong, it could certainly be true but I come in from a place of skepticism.

analog31 6y ago

Maybe a person who has the resilience to tolerate discussing a relationship movie, is also likely to tolerate a bad marriage.