Conflict with friends, relationship blindness, and the pathwayto adult disagreeableness

The ability to form and maintain relationships with friends and romantic partners is a major develop-mental task for adolescents. Disagreeable youth are likely to struggle with this task, yet little is knownabout how they maintain their oppositional style from adolescence to adulthood. The current studyexamines the long-term implications of disagreeableness in a diverse sample of 164 adolescents assessedrepeatedly across a 10-year period along with their friends and romantic partners. Disagreeableness atage 14 and 15 was assessed in observation with friends. Disagreeableness was then examined as a pre-dictor of both future relationship quality with friends at age 16 and romantic relationships at age 21. Theresults indicate that although disagreeable youth do not report any relationship struggles, both theirfriends and romantic partners see their relationships as being low in quality. Findings suggest a develop-mental process by which disagreeable adolescents maintain their oppositional style through a mecha-nism of relationship blindness, as they simply are unable to see the relationship issues that theirfriends and partners clearly perceive.