• On Good Things Utah this morning – They say opposites attract, but a new study says, “Hold on a minute, maybe they don’t.” Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder analyzed research that included millions of couples over more than a century and took into account over 130 traits. They found that, more often than not, we end up with someone similar to them.
    • “Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together,” said first author Tanya Horwitz, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics (IBG). According to the study published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, 82% and 89% of traits examined were similar among partners, ranging from political leanings and the age you lost your virginity to nitty gritty physical traits like whether people needed to wear glasses or their waist circumference. Other areas where couples tended to be similar? Religious attitudes, level of education, how likely a person was to drink or smoke and some measures of IQ all showed particularly high correlations.
    • “I think that the biggest takeaway is simply that the process of choosing a partner is not necessarily random and that certain traits may play a larger role in partner selection than others,” Jared Balbona, a postdoctoral data scientist and co-author of the study, told HuffPost. Importantly, though, results can’t tell us exactly why partners might be similar on a given trait, Balbona said.
    • “For example, it’s possible that people with similar political values are actively seeking one another out, but it’s also possible that partner similarity on political values is due, at least partially, to them living in the same geographic area, as political values tend to congregate within certain regions,” he said. There were a handful of categories where couples weren’t exactly alike; extroversion, for instance, was one category with little correlation ― meaning an extrovert is just as likely to end up with another extrovert as with an introvert. To read more about this study click here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/do-opposites-attract-a-new-study-may-have-given-us-the-answer_l_65037cabe4b045a142a48f2c