Assortative Mating - Humans

Humans

In humans, assortative mating occurs along many dimensions, including religious beliefs, physical traits, age, socioeconomic status, intelligence, and political ideology, among others.

An experiment published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior had test subjects choose their preferred image out of three with one image modified to resemble the test subject, another a non-resembling attractive face, and a face more attractive than the resembling face, as determined by an outside group. The study found that male subjects preferred the female faces that resembled their own, while females did not prefer the male faces that looked like their own. Furthermore, both males and females rated the most attractive faces highly, as attractiveness may signal genetic quality.

In a 2011 study from the University of Vienna, researchers found that marriages between men and women with equivalent levels of education were less likely to suffer from reproductive failure, or childlessness. Though the study found no difference in the mean number of children in marriage between couples with similar and different levels of education, individuals with similar levels of education also had a lower than average age at first marriage.

Controversially, some have suggested assortative mating may play a role in the number of children diagnosed with autism. Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen is studying the prevalence of autism in children born to Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates. The research aims to see if there is a correlation between assortative mating in high functioning MIT graduates, who may fall on the autism spectrum, and rates of autism in their children. Baron-Cohen has found a correlation between rates of autism in regions of the Netherlands where a high concentration of people work in IT and engineering.