Executive control of married and cohabiting couples

•We compared married and cohabiting couples on their levels on executive control.•Married couples have better executive control than cohabiting couples.•Cohabiting couples and married couples who cohabited differ on executive control.•Social selection and social causation are invoked to explain results.•Results further illustrate the ubiquity of executive control in psychology.

Attention mechanisms of 125 couples were assessed to determine whether married and cohabiting couples differ in their levels of executive control. Executive control is the attention network that is responsible for resolving cognitive conflicts among competing responses. Of the 125 couples, 85 were married (48 after premarital cohabitation) and 40 were in cohabiting unions. Executive control was assessed with a cognitive task, the Attentional Network Task. The participants’ task was to identify the direction of a central arrow that was surrounded by flanker arrows. As predicted, cohabiting couples exhibited stronger deficits in executive control than married ones, after controlling for demographic confounders. Moreover, similar differences in executive control were observed between the subsample of married couples who cohabited with their spouses prior to marriage and currently cohabiting couples. Taken together, our results reveal that cohabiting couples have more trouble responding to some stimuli while ignoring extraneous stimuli.