Do you believe that people who have lived together for 25 years will have the same facial features? I mean, it’s not just that people are more likely to find partners who look like them, but that partners will share more and more similar facial features over time. You may be skeptical of this idea, but psychologist Robert Zajonc and colleagues have confirmed through research that this is indeed true.
How did this study work?
The researchers showed 110 study participants photos of married men and women in their first year of marriage and 25 years later, asking them to judge how similar the men and women in the photos were and to guess how likely the men and women in the photos were to be married. By cropping the photos and excluding a series of external influences to ensure that the study participants could only make judgments through facial recognition, the study participants’ selections showed that the men and women who were married were more similar after 25 years of marriage. The results of this study cannot be simply interpreted to mean that people will all look the same when they get older. The data from the control group suggest that study participants were judged not by other criteria but by facial features.
So if you’re close to your partner, you’ll be surprised in a few years: How did you look so much like them?
So what are the factors that are “at work” here? Here are some possible reasons:
1.
If you and your partner have the same eating habits, that could be why you look more and more alike. Two people who become partners may both look chubby in the face if they both love fatty foods. The researchers eliminated the effect of this factor in the study.
2. Environment.
Married couples typically live together, which means that environmental factors such as sun exposure on the skin can also cause couples to look more alike. The researchers also made this consistent, with all couples in the study who provided photos being from the Midwest, and matched on variables such as socioeconomics.
3. Selection propensity.
This means that people prefer to choose people who are similar to themselves as partners. For example: people with depressive traits are more likely to be attracted to each other such that they show depressive traits in their faces over time. This was not of great interest to the researchers, so this was not strictly controlled for in the study.
4. The role of empathy.
This is what the researchers focused on trying to explore with the study. The reason people look more alike is because of the empathy between the two people who become partners. Empathy makes two people mimic each other’s facial expressions, and the mutual mimicry that results from prolonged empathy allows for more facial similarity between partners. For example, if one partner laughs in a particular way, the other partner will unconsciously mimic it, showing similar folds and muscle lines when they laugh.
For the fourth study, what the researchers also wanted to know was: Are those partners who look most alike the happiest partners? The study hypothesized that partners who got along better and had a more pronounced empathic effect would grow to be more similar. However, the study data did not turn out to be as statistically significant a difference as required, so the results did not confirm the hypothesis.
What will the future look like for you?
I interviewed some people about the results of this study, and there were two opposing views: some people thought it was a terrible thing to grow up with a partner, and some people thought it was sweet and romantic. And I’m in the latter group.
Only, this study also reveals a worrying possibility. Generally, if you want to know what your partner is going to be like in the future, you can get a good idea by looking at his or her parents. So, that means that by looking at your partner’s parents now, you’ll also know what you’ll grow up to be in the future. I think that’s the really scary thing!