For those who have ever wondered whether beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, new research published in the journal Current Biology has an answer.
According to the new study, the simple answer is yes. In order to reach this conclusion, the researchers behind the study, which was published October 1, examined differences in opinion between twins. They found that differences in opinion exhibited by twins participating in the study to be mostly the result of personal experiences unique to the individual.
The study’s joint leaders — Harvard University’s Laura Germine, who is also with Massachusetts General Hospital, and Jeremy Wilmer with Wellesley College — were quoted by Science Daily as having said that they “estimate that an individual’s aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others,” which matches “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.”
We estimate that an individual’s aesthetic preferences for faces agree about 50 percent, and disagree about 50 percent, with others (…) 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.
In order to explore disagreements over facial beauty, the researchers analyzed the face preferences of more than 35,000 volunteers. With the insight they gained from their analysis, they developed a test measuring the face preferences of individuals and applied it to 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of non-identical twins of the same sex.
The pairs of twins were asked to rate 200 faces on attractiveness. By comparing the results of the identical twins to the non-identical twins, the researchers were able to estimate the relative contribution of environments and genes to preferences in faces.
In contrast to prior research suggesting that human traits are largely the result of genetic heritage, the new study found that the uniqueness of face preference is primarily based on personal experience, not genetics.
