Studies Ask: Do Opposites Really Attract?

I've been told that birds of a feather flock together. I've also been told that opposites attract. So who's right? Does the avian adage apply to everyone, or only members of the animal kingdom? Are we ultimately attracted to similarities or differences?

According to many studies, reviewed earlier this year by Sam Sommers in The Huffington Post, "similarity rules the day." Sure, some couples have different religious values, different political beliefs, and different ideas about which team deserves to be in this year's Super Bowl, but for the most part, we are drawn to friends and romantic partners who are like us. Similarity, in fact, is an incredibly powerful force in many situations.

A paper written by researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada explored the ways physical similarity predicts seating choices. In their first study, the research team analyzed the seating arrangement of college students in a computer lab. Over the course of a few days, the team observed the students at several different times, taking note of how students' characteristics influenced where they sat. They found that students without glasses were significantly more likely to sit beside other students without glasses, while students with glasses were more likely to sit next to their bespectacled brothers-in-arms. Another study found similar results when analyzing hair color.

In a third study, participants arrived at the experiment's location and were introduced to a partner who was seated. The participants were then handed a chair and asked to take a seat next to their partner. When the participant was seated, the research team measured the distance between the seated partner's chair and the new participant, then sent a photograph of each of the participants to a second set of researchers for further evaluation. In keeping with the results from previous research, the team found that "the more physically similar the two were judged to be, the closer to the partner the participants tended to place their chair."

Digging deeper, Sommers then found a study conducted by researchers at Berkeley that examined the matching hypothesis - the idea that we have a tendency to select romantic partners of a desirability level similar to our own. In simple terms: "we try to date people in our own league." To test the hypothesis, the team defined "popularity" on an online dating site as the number of opposite-sex individuals who sent unsolicited messages to another member, then measured the popularity of 3,000 heterosexual users of the site. They found that high-popularity users contacted other popular users at a rate that was significantly greater than could be accounted for by chance. A second study of over a million members confirmed the results of the first study.

When it comes to dating, it looks like opposites aren't in high demand after all.