REALITYWIPE

RESEARCHERS

The Science of In-Law Conflict: Why It's Rarely About Who's the Bigger Jerk

4 the researchers behind it — "My mother-in-law hates me" and "his family thinks I'm not good enough" feel like verdicts about character. Family science tells a less dramatic, more

Oakland University / Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Terri L. Orbuch

Known for:The Early Years of Marriage project — a multi-decade longitudinal study of marital stability, including how in-law perceptions predict divorce

Key findings

  1. 2021

    Across 355 Black and White couples followed for 16 years, discordance between spouses' perceptions of in-law closeness and support — not the objective level of closeness itself — predicted increased risk of divorce. ↗

  2. 2002

    In a programmatic review of the Early Years of Marriage data, Orbuch and Veroff describe how patterns of family support-seeking established in the first year of marriage carry forward to shape long-term marital quality. ↗

West Virginia University

Christine E. Rittenour

Known for:Communication research on the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship, including shared family identity and attribution patterns

Key findings

  1. 2009

    With Jordan Soliz, Rittenour found that supportive communication and self-disclosure between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law predicted a stronger shared family identity and better relational outcomes, while dismissing the other's communication style predicted worse ones. ↗

  2. 2015

    With Jody Koenig Kellas, Rittenour found that daughters-in-law's attributions for a mother-in-law's hurtful message — blaming her fixed character versus the circumstances — predicted relationship satisfaction more strongly than the objective severity of the message. ↗

McMaster University

Martin Daly

Known for:Evolutionary psychology of family relationships, including a review (with Gretchen Perry) of in-law conflict across species and cultures

Key findings

  1. 2021

    With Gretchen Perry, Daly reviewed evidence that affinal kin (in-laws) share zero genetic relatedness with each other yet both have a stake in the same descendants — a structural asymmetry that makes conflicts of interest more likely than among blood relatives. ↗

  2. 2021

    The review flags the mother-in-law/daughter-in-law dyad as carrying the highest structural conflict potential of any in-law pair across the cultures surveyed — a cross-cultural pattern the authors attribute to competing investment interests, not individual character. ↗

Oklahoma State University

Jaimie Arona Krems

Known for:Experimental work showing friendship jealousy is a functional tool for keeping valued friendships

Key findings

  1. 2021

    Across 11 studies (N = 2,918), friendship jealousy was uniquely evoked by third-party threats, scaled with friendship value, tracked replacement cues over time-lost cues, and motivated 'friend guarding'. ↗

  2. 2021

    Men's and women's friendship jealousy is broadly similar, with one notable difference: women reported greater jealousy than men at the prospect of losing same-sex best friends to interlopers posing high replacement threats. ↗

View full research file ↗All researchers