I always wondered why people overused the term, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Based upon my knowledge of the celebrity world, it seems that there tends to be a general idea of who is considered good-looking and who is not. But maybe I was wrong, and not as many people agree as I had thought.
Scientists believe that a person’s liking for a particular height or the build of a person’s body may be a genetic predisposition, but new studies are showing that our attraction to another face is determined by the path of our individual life. I found an article on Sciencemag, in which a new study is discussed to evaluate the nature versus nurture problem, and whether or not it really does play a role in how attracted we are to another person. In the study, “researchers asked 547 pairs of identical twins and 214 pairs of same-gender fraternal twins to view 200 faces and rate them on a scale of one to seven…one being the least attractive” (Burton). Along with these twins, there were 660 people who were not twins that took the same survey. Interestingly, the surveys that the twins (especially those in the identical group) took were not as similar as researchers expected them to be, leading them to believe that their preference did not have that much to do with their family environment.

So from this, they were really only able to think that it’s neither familial influence or genetics, but the path that a person travels throughout their life that makes them attracted to a person’s looks. The researchers feel, however, that they still haven’t done enough in this specific topic, so they actually opened up the survey to the public! If you’re interested in participating, here is the link: www.TestMyBrain.org.

I find this topic of research interesting, mostly because the nature v. nurture battle is such a controversial topic in the science world. I had never even really considered why I found someone attractive and others unattractive, while my sister would find the exact opposite.
I think in order to fix the original study (not including the part that is now open to the public), they should make the sample size more diverse. During this study, the participants were all from the same general region of the world, and were mostly all the same race. Although, at this point, the researchers were simply trying to find whether it was nature or nurture, I still think that to really know for sure, they should be testing a more diverse group of people, and maybe that will help them to better understand if it is familial influence, an individual’s path of life, or genetics! I believe that it is most definitely something to look further into, though, and do more research on because the more we know about ourselves and the reasons we think the way we do, no matter what the topic, the more we will be able to know about humans in every aspect.