ArticlePsychological science2025
Assortative Mating Is a Natural Consequence of Heritable Variation in Preferences and Preferred Traits.
Article in Psychological science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Selective Similarity Preference: People with a "Darker Core" Desire More Partner Similarity in Dark Traits but Not in Big Five.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2026Article
- What does psychopathology research have to gain by studying all mental disorders at the same time?Journal of psychopathology and clinical science · 2026Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Assortative mating-the tendency to choose partners similar to oneself-is a ubiquitous phenomenon in mate choice. Despite numerous proposed explanations, a parsimonious mechanism has been overlooked: When individuals choose mates on the basis of heritable traits and preferences, offspring inherit a trait and the corresponding preference from each parent, creating genetic correlations that link having a trait to preferring that same trait. We evaluated this mechanism with an agent-based model simulating 100 generations in which agents, with traits and preferences each uniquely determined by 40 loci, chose reproductive partners based on preferences. Genetic correlations formed between preferences and preferred traits, as well as between partner traits (i.e., assortative mating), demonstrating that heritable variation in preferences and preferred traits is sufficient to drive assortative mating. We presented a toy model here, so we cannot speak to the robustness of such genetic correlations or to the relative explanatory power of this mechanism over others.
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