It is a common belief that people are attracted to people of the opposite sex who have the opposite style to themselves. Scientists have speculated that this is due to a mechanism to secure genetic diversity.

However, research results have emerged that overturn this. People are actually attracted to people who are similar to them, not people who are opposite to them.

The research team at the Behavioral Genetics Research Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder published the results of analyzing more than 130 characteristics of millions of male and female couples in the international academic journal ‘Nature Human Behavior’ on August 31 (local time).

The results of the study showed that 82-88% of the overall analyzed characteristics tended to be similar between partners. It was analyzed that only 3% of the characteristics were strongly different between partners.

The researchers’ analysis is that this study has implications not only for human relationships but also for genetic research.

“Many models of genetics assume that human mating is random, but this study shows that that assumption is incorrect,” said Matthew Keller, director of the Behavioral Genetics Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Researchers analyzed past research and studied 22 characteristics of millions of married, engaged, and cohabiting couples. Additionally, using data from the UK Biobank, 133 characteristics were studied among approximately 80,000 heterosexual couples in the UK.

As a result, in both analyses, it was confirmed that male and female couples showed a high correlation in political and religious attitudes, education level, and even IQ .

When 0 means no correlation and 1 means the couple shares the characteristic, the correlation for political values ​​was 0.58.

Characteristics related to drug use also showed a high correlation. People who smoke or drink a lot or absolute abstainers also had a strong tendency to partner with people with similar tendencies.

In comparison, traits such as height, weight, health, and personality had much lower correlations, but still showed positive correlations. However, some characteristics, such as extroversion, had no correlation at all.

“People have the theory that extroverts like introverts or extroverts like other extroverts, but in reality, it’s similar to flipping a coin,” said doctoral student Tana Horwitz, first author of the study.

It was very rare for people to be attracted to opposite tendencies. In the meta-analysis, researchers concluded that there is no convincing evidence that opposites attract. In the UK Biobank sample, we found several traits with low negative correlations, including being a morning person or a night owl, a tendency to worry, and hearing impairment.

The most likely characteristic to be similar was, of course, year of birth, but couples also showed some positive correlations with characteristics such as how many sexual partners they had and whether they were breastfed as children.

“These findings suggest that even when메이저놀이터 we feel like we have choices about our relationships, there may be mechanisms at work behind the scenes that we are not fully aware of,” Horwitz said. If such casual encounters continue, there is a possibility that the gap between people will widen in terms of height, education level, and socioeconomic level.

However, there may be a variety of reasons why couples have similar characteristics, such as living in the same area and living together. Some couples become more similar the longer they are together. Meanwhile, the researchers also found that the strength of correlations between couple characteristics differed depending on the population group.