{"id":166853,"date":"2025-08-22T16:02:12","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T16:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/166853\/"},"modified":"2025-08-22T16:02:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T16:02:12","slug":"like-likes-like-partner-preferences-may-be-explained-by-genetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/166853\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Likes Like: Partner Preferences May be Explained by Genetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Newswise \u2014 It is no secret that people are often drawn to\u00a0romantic partners<\/a>\u00a0who seem similar to themselves. This tendency, called assortative mating, has been established in humans (Horwitz et al., 2023; Luo, 2017) as well as other species. Fish, for example, demonstrate the behavior frequently (Jiang et al., 2013).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Assortative mating has also recently been in focus on\u00a0social media<\/a>\u00a0with the viral Siblings or Dating game, where people guess whether two individuals who look alike are related or a couple.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea is well-founded in academic research. Humans have been observed to select partners with similar physical,\u00a0personality<\/a>, and demographic traits (Horwitz et al., 2023), which can impact the\u00a0genetics<\/a>\u00a0of populations\u2014creating subgroups that emphasize the presence of shared traits (Abdellaoui et al., 2015).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But selecting a partner like ourselves may not be solely determined by personal choice. A\u00a0new study soon to be published in\u00a0Psychological Science<\/a>\u00a0suggests that assortative mating can be explained relatively simply by looking at the inheritance of preferred traits and corresponding preferences for those traits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Coauthors Kaitlyn Harper and Brendan Zietsch from the University of Queensland describe this scenario simply: If you are tall, you may have inherited tallness from one parent (say, your mother) and the preference for tallness in a romantic partner from your other parent (in this case, your father). The combination of those inherited traits means that you exist in the world as a tall person and are attracted to tall people.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea that preference for a particular trait could lead to genetic correlations has been discussed in previous research but is a newer concept for\u00a0evolutionary psychology<\/a>, especially in the context of assortative mating.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pieces were there, but they hadn\u2019t been connected in this way before,\u201d Harper said. \u201cAgent-based modeling helped us connect the dots\u2014by simulating populations, we could see that assortative mating naturally emerged without the need for additional assumptions or processes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

She added that this research wouldn\u2019t have been possible without an\u00a0interdisciplinary<\/a>\u00a0mindset.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mechanism itself is familiar in evolutionary biology, but it wasn\u2019t thought of as an explanation for assortative mating,\u201d she said. \u201cMaking that connection only became possible when we looked across the two disciplines.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Listen to this related podcast:\u00a0Couples Who Laugh Together, Stay Together<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To test this theory, the authors ran an agent-based model where partners are chosen according to heritable traits and preferences over 100 generations. They included models with and without selection pressure on the number of offspring within each generation to assess how the theory stands up under more naturalistic conditions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

They found that even with up to 10 preferences for traits in a partner, clear genetic correlations formed between traits and preferences for those traits, which resulted in the agents choosing partners similar to themselves. Models with selection pressure generated less-stable correlations, which the authors attribute to reduced variance in traits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe power of this finding is in its parsimony\u2014it shows that a phenomenon which has puzzled researchers for decades can be understood through an explanation that was hiding in plain sight,\u201d Harper said. \u201cAnd because the mechanism is so general, it can also apply to assortative mating in animals, where many of the explanations proposed for humans wouldn\u2019t make sense.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Abdellaoui, A., Hottenga, J.-J., Willemsen, G., Bartels, M., van Beijsterveldt, T., Ehli, E. A., Davies, G. E., Brooks, A., Sullivan, P. F., Penninx, B. W. J. H., de Geus, E. J., & Boomsma, D. I. (2015).\u00a0Educational attainment influences levels of homozygosity through migration and assortative mating<\/a>.\u00a0PLoS ONE,\u00a010(3), Article e0118935.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Harper, K.T. & Zietsch, B.P. (in press). Assortative mating is a natural consequence of heritable variation in preferences and preferred traits.\u00a0Psychological Science,\u00a00(0), 0\u20130.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Horwitz, T. B., Balbona, J. V., Paulich, K. N., & Keller, M. C. (2023).\u00a0Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analysis of 133 traits<\/a>.\u00a0Nature Human Behaviour,\u00a07(9), 1568\u20131583.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jiang, Y., Bolnick, D. I., & Kirkpatrick, M. (2013).\u00a0Assortative mating in animals<\/a>.\u00a0The American Naturalist,\u00a0181(6), 125\u2013138.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Luo, S. (2017).\u00a0Assortative mating and couple similarity: Patterns, mechanisms, and consequences<\/a>.\u00a0Social and Personality Psychology Compass,\u00a011(8), Article e12337. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Newswise \u2014 It is no secret that people are often drawn to\u00a0romantic partners\u00a0who seem similar to themselves. This…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":166854,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[1943,95877,92179,815,1941,92180,95876,159,7964,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-166853","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-all-journal-news","9":"tag-association-for-psychological-science","10":"tag-behavioral-science","11":"tag-genetics","12":"tag-newswise","13":"tag-psychology-and-psychiatry","14":"tag-psychologytraitsinterdisciplinary-researchsimilaritygenetic-correlation","15":"tag-science","16":"tag-sex-and-relationships","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115073263655406392","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166853","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166853"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166853\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166853"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166853"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166853"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}