Slashdot: Do the Faces of People In Long-Term Relationships Start To Look the Same?

Do the Faces of People In Long-Term Relationships Start To Look the Same?
Published on October 12, 2020 at 11:30PM
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Working with her Stanford colleague, Michal Kosinski, [Pin Pin Tea-makorn, ]a PhD student at Stanford] scoured Google, newspaper anniversary notices and genealogy websites for photos of couples taken at the start of their marriages and many years later. From these they compiled a database of pictures from 517 couples, taken within two years of tying the knot and between 20 and 69 years later. To test whether couples’ faces grew alike over time, the researchers showed volunteers a photo of a “target” person accompanied by six other faces, one being their spouse, with the other five faces selected at random. The volunteers were then asked to rank how similar each of the six faces were to the target individual. The same task was then performed by cutting-edge facial recognition software.

In the original study in 1987, the late psychologist Robert Zajonc, at the University of Michigan, had volunteers rank the photos of only a dozen couples. He concluded that couples’ faces became more alike as their marriages went on, with the effect being greater the happier they were. The explanation, psychologists have argued, is that sharing lives shapes people’s faces, with diet, lifestyle, time outdoors, and laughter lines all having a part to play. However, writing in Scientific Reports, Tea-makorn and Kosinski describe how they found no evidence for couples looking more alike as time passed. They did, however, look more alike than random pairs of people at the start of their relationship. Tea-makorn said people may seek out similar-looking partners, just as they look for mates with matching values and personalities.