In the new study, published today (Oct. 1) in the journal Current Biology, the researchers looked at 547 sets of identical twins (who have identical DNA) and 214 sets of fraternal twins (who share half their DNA) in the Australian Twin Registry. The participants looked at 98 male faces and 102 female faces, and gave them a rating based on how attractive they thought the faces were. The researchers then used these ratings to come up with what they called "individual preference scores", which were a measure of how much each participant’s ratings differed from the ratings of the average of all people in the study, according to the study.
In the first part of the study, the researchers found that if they selected two participants at random, the participants agreed on the attractiveness of a face 48 percent of the time on average, and disagreed 52 percent of the time.
That's consistent with a previous study that found that, on the one hand, fashion models can "make a fortune with their good looks" but friends can still "endlessly debate about who is attractive and who is not," the researchers wrote in the study, quoting an earlier study of the topic.
Next, the researchers set out to determine whether genes or the environment was a bigger influence on how people perceived attractiveness. In other words, they wanted to figure out what accounted for the 52 percent disagreement rate they saw in the first part of the study.
For each twin pair, the researchers compared the preferences of one twin to those of the other, to determine how similar they were. Then, they compared the similarity of all of the identical twins’ preferences to those of the fraternal twins, Germine said.
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