If you’ve ever wondered why so many people find a specific actor so handsome or puzzled as to why others didn’t share your viewpoint that a certain leading lady was a total hottie, a new study published last week in the journal Current Biology has the answer.
As it turns out, that old saying about beauty being in the eye of the beholder is true, according to Laura Germine, a psychiatric researcher at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital, and her co-authors. By conducting an in-depth analysis of twins, they discovered that an individual perceives attractiveness depending upon his or her own personal experiences.
Essentially, CBS News and The Telegraph reported, a person’s environment plays a larger role than their genes in determining which men or women he or she will find attractive—meaning that not even identical twins share exactly the same opinion about who’s hot and who’s not.
The authors note that some aspects of attractiveness tend to be universal, and may be coded into our DNA. For example, they note that as a general rule people tend to have a preference for faces that are symmetrical. Beyond that, however, people do have different “types,” they found.
“We estimate that an individual’s aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others,” the authors explained. “This fits with the common intuition that on the one hand, fashion models can make a fortune with their good looks, while on the other hand, friends can endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not.”
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Germine, along with fellow investigator Jeremy Wilmer of Wellesley College, said that previous research on how people responded to faces focused primarily on things universally viewed to be attractive. They decided instead to focus their studies on those features that cause disagreements in order to learn more about why people differ in what they find beautiful.
They studied the results of an online quiz to develop a test of the uniqueness of a person’s face preferences, and then recruited 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-sex, non-identical twins and had them rate the attractiveness of 200 faces. They used these rating to develop what they referred to as “individual preference scores” that measured the degree to which a person’s ratings differed from the averages of all of the study participants, CBS News said.
Germine and Wilmer went on to compare the results of the identical twins to one another as a way to determine whether genes or environmental factors were a larger influence on how people perceived attractiveness. Using calculations frequently used in twin studies, they determined that a person’s environment accounted for 78 percent of perceived differences in attractiveness.
“The types of environments that are important are not those that are shared by those who grow up in the same family, but are much more subtle and individual, potentially including things such as one’s unique, highly personal experiences with friends or peers, as well as social and popular media,” said Germine. In other words, attractiveness depends not on where you went to school or who your next door neighbor was, but your own personal, unique social interactions.
“The discovery that personal experiences have such a significant impact on a person’s individual face preferences provides a novel window into the evolution and architecture of the social brain.” They added that future research could more closely examine which aspects of the environment play the greatest role in determining what each of us finds beautiful.
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Feature Image: Wikimedia Commons
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