He continued, "The second surprise was that when we asked where unique preferences, this eye of the beholder, comes from.
In the eye of the beholder full#
"When we looked at the preferences of a typical pair of randomly chosen persons, a full 50 percent of those preferences did not overlap so the aphorism about beauty being in the eye of the beholder appears to have a lot of truth to it." "The first surprise was how varied people’s aesthetic preferences for faces were," Wilmer said. In an email, Wilmer said there were two big surprises for him in the results. The hope was that by studying people who are genetically the same, or very similar, and who grew up and in the same environment, insights could be gained into nature or nurture effects in attraction. Prior studies of twins and families have shown that virtually every human trait-from personality to ability to interests-is to some large degree genetically passed down from one generation to the next. "We found that even though identical twins share all of their genes and their family environment they were really, really different from each other in their facial aesthetic preferences," Wilmer said. On the other hand, if family environment is highly influential fraternal twins could be expected to have similar preferences. "If something is really influenced by genes, you would expect identical twins to be more similar to each other than the fraternal twins," Wilmer explained to Time. Wilmer and his colleague Laura Germine of Massachusetts General Hospital, who were joint leaders of this project, then tested the preferences of 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins by having them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces.Ĭomparisons between identical and non-identical twins allowed the researchers to estimate the relative contribution of genes and environments to face preferences.
The study, which was covered by Time, Smithsonian, Discovery News, The Guardian, and several other news outlets, first tested the face preferences of over 35,000 volunteers through a research website. The research, which was published yesterday in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, found that attraction is likely incredibly specific to an individual’s life experiences.
A new study co-authored by Jeremy Wilmer, assistant professor of psychology, confirms that beauty is in fact in the eye of the beholder.
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