Love is not a hardwired battlefield

By Razib Khan | April 28, 2011 2:59 am




Human mate choice is central to individuals’ lives and to the evolution of the species, but the basis of variation in mate choice is not well understood. Here we looked at a large community-based sample of twins and their partners and parents…to test for genetic and family environmental influences on mate choice, while controlling for and not controlling for the effects of assortative mating. Key traits were analyzed, including height, body mass index, age, education, income, personality, social attitudes, and religiosity. This revealed near-zero genetic influences on male and female mate choice over all traits and no significant genetic influences on mate choice for any specific trait. A significant family environmental influence was found for the age and income of females’ mate choices, possibly reflecting parental influence over mating decisions. We also tested for evidence of sexual imprinting, where individuals acquire mate-choice criteria during development by using their opposite-sex parent as the template of a desirable mate; there was no such effect for any trait. The main discernible pattern of mate choice was assortative mating; we found that partner similarity was due to initial choice rather than convergence and also at least in part to phenotypic matching.

Much of the paper is given over to a review of previous research. Some of these did find heritable preferences (e.g., some women might have a stronger preference for tall men than other women, and this can be explained by genetic differences across the range of women). And you’ve probably encountered the stuff on MHC, opposite sex imprinting, etc., in the mainstream press. The MHC results are usually of the form “women prefer the smell of t-shirts of men with different MHC profiles.” Sometimes the results are really strange and counterintuitive. One study was of the form “women prefer the smell of t-shirts of men with the MHC profiles similar to their fathers.” And from this a lot of reasoning about how genomic imprinting manifested ensued. Though I hadn’t encountered John Ioannidis’ work on the prevalence of false positives in the research literature yet, I started wondering how so much strange, often contradictory, results were getting through peer review. Who is an honest individual to trust? In this paper the authors basically seem to be contending that in previous studies with smaller sample sizes the random noise ended up meeting the statistical significance threshold. You do enough studies, that will happen, and you’ll find that those false positives are the ones that will be published, especially in a sexy field like social or evolutionary psychology.

So what did they find? Basically they had a total sample size of over 20,000 Australian twins and their parents consisting of pair bonds of various lengths. They didn’t have values for all of the individuals for the traits of interest, so the real sample size for a given trait may be considerably smaller. But, they’re still at least an order of magnitude larger than the N of the range of studies which reported positive findings and which they reviewed in their introduction.

This is a paper with tables, not charts. So let’s start with table 3. On the left you have the mean value for a given trait. Some of these are transformed from categorical to numerical. For example, religiosity is a number which corresponds to a rank order in the frequency of church attendance. The second pair of columns has the correlation between partners. Age is a very impressive correlation. I’ve seen the same value for educational attainment in the General Social Survey, in that I actually ran that specific correlation and came out with that result. The attitudes trait is really a composite which  measures social liberalism/conservatism. It is relatively high along with religiosity. The low values for personality variables really make me just wonder how good the measures of personality which psychologists have at their disposal are. Height and income are surprisingly low correlations. Finally, in the last column they look at the heritability of the trait itself. For example, within the Australian population nearly 70% of the variation in body mass index in the population is controlled by variation in genes in the population. Many psychological traits are around 25-50% heritability. Notice the high value for height. This is in keeping with what you find in other developed nations where nutritional inputs are saturated.

A major issue that they wanted to test was whether partners become more similar over time, or whether their similarity was a function of assortative mating. For example, do their body mass indices converge over the duration of their relationship? Overall they found that no, there was no convergence. The correlations just didn’t vary as a function of relationship length. The similarity on a trait like religiosity is apparently mostly a function of initial matching.

But what about family background? Assortative mating can be viewed simply as a matter of individuals expressing their preference, but obviously choices aren’t made in a vacuum by H. economicus. And yet this is a very interesting question for any given trait that can’t be taken for granted in terms of the answer. In The Nurture Assumption Judith Rich Harris pointed out on many personality traits there was actually only marginal evidence for the effect of family socialization. Rather, there was about equal effect of genetics and “non-family environment,” which is really just an unaccounted for grab-bag. Harris’ thesis was, and is, that peer effects account for much of this residual. So what’s going on with mate choice specifically?

Below you see a list of correlations for traits. The abbreviations are straightforward. MZ = monozygotic, DZ = dizygotic, F = female, M = male, and OS = opposite sex. So there isn’t an MZOS because monozygotic twins are the same sex, by definition. The correlation differences between MZ and DZ twins are pretty comprehensible. MZ twins share 100% of their genes. DZ twins share an expected value of 50% (in reality, there’s a standard deviation of 3%). But notice the last six rows. There’s really not much difference between MZ and DZ pairs here. That’s strongly indicative of marginal additive genetic variance effecting mate choice. In this table it is clear that twins’ partners were not more similar in any trait to the twins’ opposite-sex parent than to the twins’ same-sex parent. That’s a strike against the imprinting thesis.

Finally, there is some evidence of family effects. In particular, there was statistically significant results for female MZ and DZ twins in terms of correlations in their choice of mates for income & age. What does this mean? The authors imply that this is suggestive of family socializing effects. In other words, parents have particular expectations of the type of man that a daughter is supposed to bring home, and the daughter complies with those expectations on many occasions. Notice that there’s not a difference between MZ and DZ females for income. In fact, there’s a slight tendency for there to be more correlation between DZ twins! (I wouldn’t make much of this, look at the standard errors in the parentheses). The individual preference difference here seems to be marginal. Most of the correlation is due to family background and the individual’s own trait (e.g., high earning females pair up with high earning males not because they have genes which predispose attraction to high earning males, but because they have a tendency to pair up with men who resemble them).

Where does this leave us? First, there are obvious limitations to this study. Heritability estimates are sensitive to environmental background effects. In India the correlation between twins and siblings in terms of the religious identity of their partners is going to be very high. That’s because of cultural norms. If the offspring have particular preferences, they’re going to be tightly scaffolded by the parameters set by the extended family. The authors themselves admit that they were focusing pair bonds. Studies of “speed dating” and such might give different results because humans may facultatively engage in different strategies in different circumstances. In a non-developed nation the class effect will probably be stronger, bosting the “family effect” of income correlation, because the range is going to be so much higher in terms of the realized impact of income and household maintenance (i.e., poor people in developed nations live well enough to get fat).

I think the big picture is to be very cautious of sexy positive results from sample sizes in the hundreds. Especially if you double check the literature and see results pointing in different directions!

Citation: Zietsch BP, Verweij KJ, Heath AC, & Martin NG (2011). Variation in human mate choice: simultaneously investigating heritability, parental influence, sexual imprinting, and assortative mating. The American naturalist, 177 (5), 605-16 PMID: 21508607

* We’re talking purely of heterosexuals here and in the study below.

CATEGORIZED UNDER: Evolution, Psychology
  • ellen

    * when you say ‘spouse’ here you mean parent?

  • Razib Khan

    tx. fixed.

  • ellen

    very interesting. and how do you rate judith rich harris’s conclusions in the nurture assumption? Are her sample sizes big enough to make her claims robust do you think?

  • EcoPhysioMichelle

    I’d also like to know how multiple marriages by a parent affects mate choice in offspring.

  • John Emerson

    There might be a split between serious marriage preferences and transient fooling around preferences.

    During the French 19th c. there was a fetish for slender, pale, hyper-emotional young women with tuberculosis (then a common disease). Normally they were peasant women from poor families which couldn’t support them who came to Paris and ended up deciding that being a kept woman was preferable to working in a sweatshop. The operas “La Boheme” and “La Traviata” were based on the lives of two such actual women. It was a real demographic; French bourgeois marriages were arranged, and every guy who was a real man had a girlfriend on the side. (Often someone else’s wife, but usually a back-street girl).

    I have no idea how deep in the psyche this fetish went, but it didn’t have anything to do with raising healthy children and a lot to do with the guy’s being able to escape the relationship at the end.

  • Chris T

    I think there is a bit of a difference between what people enjoy watching or looking at and what they’d actually want in a partner.

  • Pingback: Love and arranged marriage | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine()

  • Pingback: Love and arranged marriage | Gene Expression |

  • Matt B.

    How do you find search queries? I’ve been confused about this with every Friday Fluff.

    Also, the last row is age, the last column is heritability. I think this caused me some confusion in a previous post.

  • Razib Khan


    google analytics.

  • Dulantha

    This is an interesting topic to me.

    The sex drive of a person is heavily depends on the psychological factor of the sex. That depends on the society as well. Family background is the most powerful factor.

    Actually there are 3 main factors which are determining the sex.

    1) Genetic factor – This is the genetic constitution of male and female sexes (XY-male/XX-female). Sex chromosemes are determining the phenotype of the individual.

    2) Physical factor- Male and female bodies and genitals.

    3) The psychological factor- This is known as gender, and it is depending on the family bacground and the whole society. (Gender specific activities, ex: specific clothing….etc)

    The 3rd one is the most important factor in this case……

    Gender specifications are evolutionally advanced features. They are for better attraction between two sexes.

    Actually this must be deeply discused according to the psychological sex differentiation.


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