You're So Vain, You'll Probably Choose a Mate That's Just Like You

Humans choose their mates based on many different variables. One of those variables is likeness. To be more specific I am referring to physical likeness. After reading an article by Liliana Alvarez, about an experiment done to test the theory that we are attracted to others like ourselves, I found a lot of insightful information. The article is titled "Narcissism guides mate selection: Humans mate assortatively, as revealed by facial resemblance, following an algorithm of 'self seeking like'."

My first thought was why would we want to find a mate that looks similar to ourselves? I thought that the theory might not have been very stable, because if we looked for others physically similar to ourselves than inbreeding would probably occur since close and even distant families members would theoretically resemble each other the most. Through reading this article I discovered that our instincts lead us away from both out-breeding and in-breeding since both can have deleterious effects. Too much out-breeding and in-breeding can both lead to too much homogenization which will lead to a decrease in variability. This is probably why we choose mates who look similar but have no linkable relation to ourselves.

In the experiment documented by Alvarez 36 randomly chosen couples were compared and the similarities between the six couples pictured is quite surprising. This picture can be found in the article at this link on page 6.

Different individuals were then asked to identify different things such as which male and female look most closely related, and which male and female look like they are a couple. The results of the experiment show that people matched the couples that looked the most similar to each other in both situations.

Another reason, that was stated in the article, as to why we choose to mate with people who look similar to ourselves, is the fear of rejection. People who think that they are less attractive than another individual have less of a chance of asking that individual on a date because they fear the idea of being rejected by a person that they believe to be very attractive.

People were also asked to rate the individuals pictures on how attractive they were. Another result was that people usually ended up pairing the people they considered most attractive with each other, and so on down the line to the people that they considered the least attractive to themselves. These pairings of individuals on this basis also have relatively accurate results.

So where does this like of physical similarity stem from? According to Alvarez it stems from our parents. A process called imprinting is occurring when we are small children, and it is the process of formulating what we consider to be attractive qualities in our minds. As it states in this article there is no way to define what is attractive and what is beautiful. That is decided by the individual, but as we have discussed that idea of beauty comes from what we imprint as children, which just happens to be our parents who are very physically similar to ourselves.

All of this boils down to one of the assumptions of Evolution, non-random mating. Because if mating were random than people would just mate with anyone without any criteria necessary. Non-random mating is inherently assortative. We all have specific things that we like and that we don't like and we sort through people based on these criteria, as to who we would like to mate with.

Physical likeness is just one piece of a larger picture of why we choose the people that we choose as our partners, but it is also a very important one when it comes down to the instinctual pressure to avoid excessive out-breeding and in-breeding. There is a saying that came to mind while I was reading this article, "you must first learn to love yourself before you love another", and after reading the article I concluded that once you love yourself you'll want to love someone just like you.