Abstract
Dominance is often studied and seems conceptually clear. However, there often are discrepancies in definitions of the dominance construct in human ethology research.
Dominance is variably defined as a stable trait (e.g. psychological or morphological), as the result of hormonal influences, as the outcome of a specific interaction, or it is conflated with power and status. When partners are asked to characterize the dominance within their own relationships, we noticed that partners do not agree on the definition of dominance either.
In order to investigate this further, we re-analyzed video recordings of interviews with 58 Czech couples dating for three years (mean age = 24.87; SD = 4.78) in order to see whether they agree on who was the dominant one in a reenactment of their stereotypical conflict. Surprisingly, even when partners were interviewed together, only 56% of couples agreed with one another.
Full responses to the question "Why did you ascribe dominance to your partner/yourself?" were transcribed, open-coded for verbal content and qualitatively categorized. Five larger categories emerged: 33% of responses were referring to a higher level of activity (talking and moving more, being more expressive). 31% referred to win/loss (one's request was fulfilled, or a partner resisted the other partner's request).
Expressed aggression (appearing angry, yelling) was the reason to ascribe dominance in 18% of the cases. A category pointing to one's right or truth (one was being correct, had a right, partner made a mistake) occurred in 11% of the responses, and 7% consisted of the simple ignorance of partner's request.
It seems that the theoretical discrepancies, and maybe even research results lie mostly in the roughs of approaches. We found three larger perspectives in what lay people are referring to when talking about dominance: (1) the outcome (win or lose), (2) the level of expressiveness (higher activity, ignoring and aggression), and (3) being (in) right.