Cindy Hazan
Cindy Hazan is a developmental psychologist at Cornell University and, with Phillip Shaver, the author of the 1987 paper that took attachment ideas from the nursery into adult romantic life. Everything you have read about anxious and avoidant partners descends from it. So does the measurement problem underneath the whole genre.
Who they are
The question was reasonable and the design was of its time. Hazan and Shaver wrote three short paragraphs, one describing comfort with closeness, one a fear of abandonment, one discomfort with intimacy, and asked readers to pick the one that sounded most like them. It was printed as a "love quiz" in the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. Six hundred and twenty people, aged fourteen to eighty-two, posted their answers back.
The proportions came out at a little over half secure, a quarter avoidant, a fifth anxious, which is close enough to Ainsworth's infant distribution to have looked like confirmation. That resemblance is the reason an online quiz today returns a result using the same three words as a laboratory classification for one-year-olds.
Two things should be said plainly and in this order.
The instrument was a self-selected mail-in questionnaire with a single forced-choice item, which is not a strong foundation for a literature.
And the literature built on it improved enormously. Modern adult attachment questionnaires are multi-item, dimensional rather than categorical, and they do predict real things about how people behave in relationships. The problem is not that they measure nothing. It is that what they measure was shown in 2007 to have almost no overlap with the interview-based tradition that supplies the theory's authority.
Key papers
Key papers
Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. R. (1987). The paper that applied attachment ideas to adult romantic love, and the origin of the adult attachment literature. Hazan is first author. The original instrument was a three-paragraph forced-choice quiz printed in a Denver newspaper and answered by 620 self-selected readers. The resemblance between the proportions it produced and Mary Ainsworth's launched the field, and whether the two instruments measure the same thing went unchecked for twenty years.
No further citation is recorded in the vault for her, and none is invented here.
Key ideas
Adult romantic bonds as attachment bonds, the move that opened a field.
The resemblance was taken for identity. Matching proportions are not evidence that two measures capture the same thing.
The instrument improved and the join was never made. Better questionnaires did not close the gap with the interview tradition.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). JPSP, 52(3), 511-524.
- Roisman, G. I., Holland, A., Fortuna, K., Fraley, R. C., Clausell, E., & Clarke, A. (2007). JPSP, 92(4), 678-697.