From Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix to Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, celebrity couples often look alike.
But the phenomenon is not exclusive to the rich and famous: a Instagram page called @siblingsordating is devoted to snapshots of couples who seem eerily similar.
Now, speed dating experiments show that we tend to find people who look like us more attractive because we perceive them as “friendly and trustworthy.”
Seeing yourself similar to someone can create a sense of ‘kin’ which can lead to more prosocial behavior and a higher chance of becoming a mate.
The study comes on the heels of the new phrase ‘doppelbanger’ being coined to refer to dating someone who bears a striking resemblance to you.
Many celebrity couples, including actress Rooney Mara and actor Joaquin Phoenix (pictured), look alike
A new study shows that we tend to see people who look like us as more attractive because we perceive them as more “kind and trustworthy.” In the picture, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons
The new study was led by psychologists at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
“The results suggest that people may seek out facially similar romantic partners,” said study lead author Amy Zhao, from the University of Queensland.
“They are perceived as more kind, understanding and trustworthy due to a potential overlap between facial similarity and relationship.”
Multiple studies have tried to explain why there is attraction between people who look alike, and many attribute it to being unconsciously attracted to someone who looks like a family member.
A 2008 investigation by Hungarian scientists found that women are more likely to choose partners whose faces resemble their parents’, while men were also more likely to be in a relationship with a woman who resembles their mother.
Meanwhile, a 2012 French study found that some men were more attracted to images of women that had been digitally manipulated to resemble their own features.
For the new study, the team wanted to investigate what facial features make us consider someone attractive — not just looking like us, but also having a masculine or feminine face and being perceived as “prosocial” or kind.
Similar Eyes: LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian attend MusiCares Person of the Year in Los Angeles, California
Unrelated: Husband and wife Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in New York last September
Similar? American actor David Burtka (left) married television presenter and fellow actor Neil Patrick Harris (right) in 2014
The psychologists recruited 682 heterosexual participants and recorded a total of 2,285 speed-dating interactions in the lab.
In total, 1,188 interactions were based on participants interacting with a partner of the same ethnicity, and the remaining 1,097 interactions were with a partner of a different ethnicity.
Each interaction lasted three minutes, after which the participants completed a questionnaire to rate their partner’s facial attractiveness and friendliness.
Photos taken of the participants were used to help determine the facial similarities between the couples.
The researchers found that facial similarity influenced perceptions of attractiveness; in other words, participants who rated someone as attractive tended to be like them.
Participants also received higher facial attractiveness ratings from partners of the same ethnicity, compared to those of a different ethnicity.
Interestingly, facial similarity predicted agreeableness ratings even when the partner was of the same or different ethnicity as the rater.
Experts think that similar faces are a sign of kinship: the feeling of being similar and therefore belonging together and being able to trust each other.
This is despite the fact that previous studies have suggested that kinship cues may decrease sexual desirability due to a subconscious awareness of the “costs of inbreeding.”
The team believes that “there is probably a genetic basis” for the kinds of faces we find attractive, and that preferences for certain facial features potentially evolved because of the fitness benefits signaled by those features.
Unsurprisingly, the team also found that facial masculinity was positively associated with men’s facial attractiveness ratings and negatively associated with women’s facial attractiveness ratings.
Photos taken of the participants were used to help determine the facial similarities between the couples.
Men were considered more attractive the more masculine they appeared (unsurprisingly, women were considered less attractive if they looked more masculine)
In other words, the more masculine a man looked, the more attractive he tended to be perceived to be, while women were considered less attractive if they looked more masculine.
The team says that previous studies in this area have had “significant limitations” as they involved participants rating a series of computer-generated photographs or faces.
For example, a 2002 study found that participants who faced computer game opponents who resembled themselves were more willing to trust the opponent.
“It was not clear whether the findings from those studies would generalize to real-life interactions in which people move, talk, change facial expressions, display their personality, etc.,” the team says.
They conclude: “It would be worth investigating how the objective facial features we found to be related to attractiveness here may or may not also be related in real couples.”
If you’re dating someone who looks like you, then you’re in good company with celebrities like Kristen Stewart and Courteney Cox.
Rather than opposites attracting, studies have long shown that people are more inclined to date partners who look like them.
Celebrities around the world are demoing the idea, including blonde bombshells, Oscar nominee Kristen Stewart and her fiancé Dylan Meyer.
Meanwhile, Friends star Courteney Cox and her partner Snow Patrol guitarist Johnny McDaid stand out for their incredibly similar face shape and bone structure and piercing blue eyes.
But the phenomenon is not exclusive to the rich and famous: a Instagram page called @siblingsordating is devoted to snapshots of couples who seem eerily similar.
It may be that we are innately attracted to other people who look like us because seeing them creates a feeling of familiarity or affinity.
Human rights attorney Alexi Ashe and her husband, comedian Seth Meyers, attend the 2023 Met Gala in New York City.
A study from the Institut des Sciences de l’Evolution, in Montpellier, France, in 2012 found that more than a third of men were more attracted to images of women that had been digitally manipulated to resemble their own features.
There’s also the idea that after years together, couples start to look more and more alike, a theory supported by a 1987 University of Michigan study that found that couples who didn’t look alike at the start of marriage experience a “degree of convergence positively”. correlated with couples’ assessments of the quality of marriage.
However, this idea has been debunked by a more recent 2020 Stanford University study published in Scientific Reports.
The researchers compiled a database of photos of more than 500 couples taken in the first two years of their marriage and between 20 and 69 years later.
They asked the volunteers to examine a photo of a person and six other people, including their spouse, and classify them by similarity, in addition to performing the same task using facial recognition software.
However, they found no evidence that couples morphed with age and concluded that spouses’ faces tended to be similar to begin with.
