Dr. Susan Sprecher sits at a wobbly table in her Schroeder Hall office discussing research she began long before most of her current students were born. Every few minutes, she stands to retrieve a book or journal from the overflowing shelves lining the office. The volumes pile up, and the weight of her work stabilizes the unsteady surface.
Sprecher, a social psychologist, researches human relationships, from the most intimate relationships between lovers to the casual bonds formed by strangers. Her research has been published in scores of journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedias. She’s earned grants totaling nearly a quarter-million dollars, the latest an award of $93,289 last year from the John Templeton Foundation to study relationship initiation.
“I love to teach, and I love service, but I really love research,” Sprecher said. “It’s my first love.”
Appears InA Distinguished Professor in Illinois State University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology, Sprecher owns a Google Scholar profile that’d be the envy of most researchers. It was cited by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Professor John Caughlin in his nomination of Sprecher for the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) Distinguished Career Award, which Sprecher accepted at the organization’s annual conference last summer in Boston.
“She has done an extraordinary amount of pathbreaking work on fundamental relationship concepts and questions,” Dr. Caughlin wrote in his nomination. “She has continued to make high-quality contributions over the course of her entire career, including recent work where she examines the effects of new modes of communicating on core relationship processes.
“Sue is both an enduring leader in the study of relationships and a scholar whose work continues to be timely and influential.”
How it started
Sprecher’s research began at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied under pioneering social psychologist Dr. Elaine Hatfield. One of Sprecher’s first tasks was typing Hatfield’s groundbreaking manuscript on the social psychology of interpersonal attraction.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to do this,” Sprecher recalled. “I wanted to do exactly what she was doing.”
Sprecher earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, all while researching alongside Hatfield. Sprecher published her first journal article with Hatfield in 1978, and the two have collaborated frequently since.
Sprecher landed at Illinois State in 1985 as an assistant professor. With a research interest in romantic relationships between young people, she had ample subjects for her studies seated in her classrooms. She began a longitudinal study of dating couples with an initial survey; follow-up surveys were sent six months, a year, and two years later. The research yielded a dataset showing how relationships changed over time. It found predictors of why and how relationships succeeded or failed. The research led to many publications.
“I just got an email a few weeks ago from a couple who had been in the study,” Sprecher said. “They are married now and wanted to know what happened with the study.”
More research delved into attraction, compassionate love, and sexual attitudes and activity. Sprecher’s arrival at Illinois State coincided with growing public awareness of HIV and AIDS, and some of her early work investigated the impact. “You can see a drop off in sexual activity around that time in the data,” Sprecher said. “People were less active for a while.”
Each topic Sprecher explored led to published findings. The results were fascinating, but Sprecher was—and still is—more motivated by something else.
“I am less driven by answering a question like ‘What is love?’ or ‘What makes a relationship?’ It’s more the scientific process itself,” she said. “I like all steps of engaging in research, from identifying a research topic to collecting and analyzing data, and then writing up the research and going through the peer review process.”
How it’s going
A new chapter in Sprecher’s research career began in 2010 when Dr. Fred Smith, then-chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, deemed that sociology faculty should have access to lab space for their research.
The space allowed Sprecher to take her research in a new direction. Rather than investigating close relationships, Sprecher shifted her focus to the getting-acquainted process, studying how people react when they’re first getting to know each other.
“Weak ties can also be loving ties, and they can help improve our lives.”
Dr. Susan Sprecher
Using the “Fast Friends” procedure developed by social psychologist Dr. Arthur Aron, in which two strangers ask each other three sets of increasingly personal questions, Sprecher has sought data on the beginnings of platonic relationships. “Weak ties can also be loving ties, and they can help improve our lives,” Sprecher said. “And this line of research shows us factors that lead to smooth getting-acquainted processes versus less smooth getting-acquainted processes.”
Illinois State students have served as both participants and experimenters in Sprecher’s research. The unacquainted students are surveyed before and after the interaction, and they usually never meet again. Their controlled exchange mimics real-world interactions such as making small talk with a barista at a coffee shop or passing time conversing with a ride-share driver.
“People have barriers to interactions with strangers. They might be worried they won’t like the person, or the person won’t like them. They think they might not enjoy the interaction,” Sprecher explained. “I’m looking at the barriers people have before these interactions and then comparing them with how they feel after the interactions.”
Sprecher has been conducting such experiments in her lab for more than a decade. One of the most prescient manipulations was conducting the same experiment both in person and over video communication.
“It’s interesting because the general public only recently has become familiar with video communication—certainly since COVID,” said Sprecher. “So, how do first interactions develop depending on whether pairs are in video communications or in person? Some of my research is addressing that question.”
Technological influence on relationships has increasingly become part of Sprecher’s research. She’s also investigated differences between relationships that progressed from text messages to in-person interactions versus bonds formed solely in person. She published research on online dating long before it was commonplace.
Over the decades, Sprecher’s research has evolved from printed questionnaires to Qualtrics surveys, electric typewriters to laptop computers, love letters sent with a postage stamp to text messages punctuated with emojis.
Sprecher admits she’s “nearing the end” of her career but says she “missed the memo” about retirement and could teach for another decade or more. Her passion for research is reignited when students eagerly participate in experiments or analyze the data that’s gathered.
“I love research, and the students I work with seem to love it, too,” she said. “Conducting research and mentoring students are part of my identity.”
