Study: Faces Like Our Parents Seem Most Attractive
June 28, 2002 -- Look carefully at the face of your partner. Remind you of anyone else you know?
According to recent studies you might be seeing traces of yourself — or your mother or father.
Unlike what the old saying "opposites attract" suggests, cognitive scientist David Perrett of St. Andrews University in Scotland has found the reverse is more often true. His studies show the faces we find most attractive are appealing because they look like our own.
"Our results showed that faces similar to the participant were more attractive than faces dissimilar to the participant," said Perrett.
Love Thyself or Thy Genes?
Could this be narcissism? Possibly. Or researchers suggest it may be a natural instinct to pair with people who resemble our parents. Perrett says this could be an unconscious means of keeping successful family gene pools small.
Inbreeding is usually considered an unhealthy idea since it can trap flawed genes in a small gene pool. But some suggest a certain level of inbreeding can be beneficial.
"Going after someone with a resemblance may make sense since your family has already made it through an evolutionary niche," he says.
To test whether people are attracted to others who look like themselves, Perrett asked 30 male and female students to participate in a survey. As each person arrived at the test location, someone took his or her picture. Later, each person was asked to rate a group faces of the opposite sex in terms of attractiveness. Results showed that each person consistently found one face among the group particularly more attractive than the others.
Little did they know it was their own.
In each group of pictures, Perrett had included a version of the subject's face that had been changed to the opposite sex. He and his colleagues used a special computer program to feminize or masculinize the face in the photograph of each person. They then hid key characteristics like hairstyle, earrings and clothing. None of the subjects recognized any of the faces as their own.
Instead, what they saw was a very good-looking person.
Looking for Love in Parents’ Faces
Perrett cautions, however, that this test was not definitive proof that people's version of beauty reflects their own looks. He says the people in his experiment may have preferred images of their own faces because the faces had been altered to have more average features of the opposite sex. Studies by Judith Langlois at the University of Texas have shown that people are generally attracted to average characteristics in a face.
Instead of pursuing self-love as a possible explanation, Perrett and his colleagues decided to see if people's attraction is driven by impressions left by their parents' faces.
Studies of other creatures in the animal kingdom have shown that parents' appearances strongly influence mate selection in their offspring.
Biologists have demonstrated that newborn goats adopted by female sheep choose sheep over goats as mating partners when they become sexually mature. And a study of a young Javanese manikin, a brown bird, showed that when red feathers were glued to the chests of a chick's parents, the young bird later sought mates with red crests.
One way to detect parental influence in people is to look at age. Perrett's team presented male and female students with computer-generated images of average faces of the opposite sex at different stages of life and asked them to rate each face in terms of attractiveness. The students were also asked to answer questions about their parents — including their parents' ages.
What Perrett found was students who were born when their parents were older than 30 overwhelmingly preferred older faces. Students whose parents were younger when they were born selected younger faces as more attractive.
Those with older parents, Perrett said, "were less impressed by youth."
Perrett's colleague Anthony Little, also of St. Andrews University, has since followed up with another study looking at hair and eye color. His results show that people generally prefer faces with the same eye and hair color as their parent of the opposite sex (as in a woman's father or a man's mother).
One way to more accurately test whether our parents' looks influence our attraction to others would be to test adopted children to learn if they preferred features in their adopted or birth parents. Perrett says this could offer more definitive results, but he hasn't yet been able to do such extensive tests.
Kissing Cousins
Why would we be drawn to faces that look like our parents? The theories of Sigmund Freud obviously come to mind, but researchers have offered a number of other possibilities.
As Perrett pointed out, it could be driven by an unconscious desire to keep successful gene pools small. And Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, and author of The First Sex, suggests there are cultural considerations. She argues marriages generally work better when two people come from similar backgrounds, which can also reflect similar gene pools.
"Marrying someone very different from you can introduce a lot of stress," she says.
She adds that marrying a cousin could be even more advantageous since a mother is more likely to gain support from her husband's family (since it's also her own).
A study released last April from the Journal of Genetic Counseling found that the children of first cousins showed no higher risk of genetic disease. It might also be noted that the father of the theory of evolution, himself, Charles Darwin, married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood.
Others caution it may be too easy to jump to conclusions when it comes to explaining what draws one person to another.
"It can be intriguing to think of reasons of why we're attracted to people," said William Graziano, a psychologist at Texas A & M University, "but it's very difficult to prove them."