A group of psychologists at St. Andrews University in Scotland has debunked the theory that opposites attract. They say people really want a partner who looks a lot like what they see in the mirror. After recruiting volunteers to rate the attractiveness of faces flashed on a computer screen, the researchers found that both men and women gave higher scores to the countenances that more closely resembled their own. When the researchers used a program to morph each subject's face into a gender-reversed version, the responses got even more enthusiastic. "The ideal was a slightly changed version of themselves, what an identical twin of the opposite sex would look like if such a thing were possible," says David Perrett, who led the study.
The search for lookalike lovers is probably driven less by narcissism than by sexual imprinting, the common tendency of animals to choose mates that resemble their parents in order to continue the species. In the St. Andrews study, women who were born to older couples were more likely to overlook wrinkles when evaluating the desirability of men. Men were willing to overlook a few extra years only if their fathers had married older women and if they were judging the face for a long-term relationship. "So there may be a bit of truth in Freud after all," Perrett says.
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Interesting article. I always thought that the theory "Opposites Attract" is a load of bull.
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