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From Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix to Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, celebrity couples often look alike.
But the phenomenon is not exclusive to the rich and famous – one Instagram page called @siblingsordating is dedicated to snaps of couples who look eerily similar.
Now, speed dating experiments show that we find people who look like us more attractive because we see them as “friendly and trustworthy.”
Looking like someone can create a sense of “kinship,” which can lead to more pro-social behavior and a higher chance of becoming a couple.
The study comes shortly after the new phrase “doppelbanger” was coined to refer to dating someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to you.
Many celebrities, including actress Rooney Mara and actor Joaquin Phoenix (pictured), look alike
A new study shows that we tend to find people who look like us more attractive because we see them as “more friendly and trustworthy.” In the photo, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons
The new study was led by psychologists from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and was published in the journal Evolution and human behavior.
“The results suggest that people are looking for romantic partners who are facially similar,” said lead study author Amy Zhao of the University of Queensland.
“They are seen as kinder, more understanding and more trustworthy because of a possible overlap between facial similarity and relatedness.”
Multiple studies have attempted to explain why there is attraction between people who look alike, with many attributing it to subconsciously being attracted to someone who resembles a family member.
A 2008 study by Hungarian scientists found that women are more likely to choose partners whose faces resemble their fathers, while men are also more likely to be in a relationship with a woman who resembles their mother.
Meanwhile, a 2012 French study found that some men were most attracted to images of women that had been digitally manipulated to resemble their own facial features.
For the new study, the team wanted to explore what facial features make us attractive – not just looking like us, but also having a male or female face and being perceived as “prosocial” or nice.
Similar Eyes: LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian attend MusiCares Person of the Year in Los Angeles, California
Unrelated: Husband and wife Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in New York last September
Comparable? American actor David Burtka (left) married TV presenter and fellow actor Neil Patrick Harris (right) in 2014
The psychologists recruited 682 heterosexual participants and recorded a total of 2,285 speed dating interactions in the lab.
A total of 1,188 interactions were based on participants interacting with a partner of the same ethnicity, and the remaining 1,097 interactions were with a partner of a different ethnicity.
Each interaction lasted three minutes, after which participants completed a questionnaire to rate their dating partner’s attractiveness and friendliness.
Photos of the participants were used to determine facial similarities between the pairs.
Researchers found that facial similarity influenced perceptions of attractiveness — in other words, participants who rated someone attractive often appeared to look like them.
Participants also received higher ratings of the facial attractiveness of partners of the same ethnicity, compared to those of a different ethnicity.
Interestingly, facial similarity predicted friendliness ratings even when the partner was of the same or different ethnicity than the rater.
The experts believe that similar faces are a sign of kinship – a sense of being alike and therefore of belonging and trust.
This is despite previous studies suggesting that kinship signals may reduce sexual desire due to an unconscious awareness of the ‘cost of inbreeding’.
The team thinks there is “probably a genetic basis” for what kind of faces we find attractive, and that preferences for certain facial features may have evolved as a result of fitness benefits signaled by those features.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, the team also found that facial masculinity was positively associated with men’s facial attractiveness, and negatively associated with women’s facial attractiveness.
Photos of the participants were used to determine facial similarities between the pairs
Males were considered more attractive the more masculine they appeared (unsurprisingly, females were considered less attractive if they looked more masculine)
In other words, the more masculine a man looked, the more attractive they were generally perceived, while women were considered less attractive if they looked more masculine.
The team says previous studies in this area had “major limitations” because participants judged a series of photos or computer-generated faces.
For example, a 2002 study found that participants who faced computer game opponents who resembled them in facial appearance were more willing to trust the opponent.
“It was not clear that the findings of those studies would be generalized to real-life interactions, where people move, talk, change facial expressions, show their personality, and so on,” the team says.
They conclude, “It would be worth exploring how the objective facial features we found are associated with attractiveness may or may not also be associated with real couples here.”