The Metropolis blog

Imagine that attractiveness could be scored from 1 to 10, measuring everything that makes a person attractive: looks, wealth, personality, intelligence, etc. You'd want to be a 10, right? The world would be your oyster: you could date anyone you wanted, and you'd never be lonely. Well, maybe not ... Sexual attraction is driven by our lizard brains, and they don't lower their standards. So if you were a 10, you probably wouldn't be attracted to anyone lower than a 9. But that's not so bad is it? Dating 9's and 10's sounds awesome. The tyranny of the normal distribution The problem is that 9's and 10's are pretty thin on the ground. Many human characteristics follow a normal distribution , a.k.a. a bell curve . Intelligence does. Height does. Weight does. So it's reasonable to assume that attractiveness does too. If that's the case, there are a lot of people rated 4, 5, 6, or 7, but relatively few rated 1, 2, 9, or 10. A quick look around a sho

The term assortative mating  refers to the tendency for people to partner with someone similar. Similar in terms of things like height, ethnicity, religion, language, education, and socioeconomic background. But how much of this is due to innate preferences, and how much to limited opportunities? An example of innate preferences would be if women prefer men who are taller than them (which appears to be the case). Then tall women would end up with taller men and short men with shorter women, so couples would (on average) tend to be of similar height. But consider a scenario where people's main opportunity to socialize is at a local church. Many people would meet their partners there, who would be of the same religion. In this case their similarity would be due to limited opportunities. They might have an innate preference for — or be neutral to — other religions, but have fewer chances to meet those people. With endless choice, who do we choose? So, what happens in the world of unli