Opposites don’t actually attract finds new scientific study

A new study has found that the old adage "opposites attract" hardly works when it comes to opposite sex couples.

A man and a woman, seemingly a couple, having coffee together.

The study found that opposite-sex couples tend to share similar traits and values. (Pixabay)

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Opposites attract. But a new study suggests that is only true in the case of magnetic poles and not in the case of humans. The new study confirms what individual studies have indicated for decades, rubbishing the old adage that “opposites attract.”

“Our findings demonstrate that birds of a feather are indeed more likely to flock together,” said Tanya Horwitz, first author of a study published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, in a press statement. Horwitz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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The sweeping study included millions of couples over a century and analysed over 130 traits. For between 82 per cent and 89 per cent of the traits analysed—everything from political leanings to the age of first intercourse to substance use habits—partners were more likely to be similar than not. In fact, individuals only tended to partner with those who were different from them for 3 per cent of the traits and only in one part of the analysis.

How did the study work?

The new article presents a study that is both a review and a meta-analysis of previous research along with original data analysis. The meta analysis consisted of 22 traits across 199 studies that included millions of male-female co-parents, engaged pairs, married pairs or cohabitating pairs.

Along with that, the researchers used a dataset called UK Biobank to study 133 traits across 80,000 opposite-sex pairs in the United Kingdom. Same-sex couples were not included in the research because the patterns there may differ significantly, according to the University of Colorado, Boulder. The researchers are exploring them separately.

Both analyses suggested a high correlation between traits like political and religious attitudes levels of education and certain measures of IQ. Take the example of political values. On a scale where zero means there is no correlation and 1 means couples always share the trait, the correlation for political values was 0.58.

Interestingly, even though traits like height and weight, medical conditions and personality traits seemed to be much less common, they still showed a positive correlation. For example, the correlation for neuroticism was 0.11.

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romantic relationships