Richard Alleyne, Telegraph (London), March 6, 2009
We feel more altruistic to those who resemble us because in the past our early ancestors assumed that they were related, according to the study.
The instinct dates back to when there were no mirrors and people could learn what their kin looked like only by inspecting the faces of household members.
The study, published in Biology Letters, even found that we were more naturally drawn to people who looked like us than our own relatives, if the resemblance was strong enough.
The researchers came to the conclusion after a study of 70 identical adult twins who, although genetically the same, had over the years grown to look different from each other.
Then they manipulated the photographs of the participants by digitally mixing them with a model’s face so that the images would either resemble them or their co-twin.
Then they asked each one who they would prefer to rescue from danger and which one they would prefer a different sex sibling to marry.
In each case, the person most resembling themselves was preferred almost two thirds of the time—significantly higher than being down to chance alone.
Dr Paola Bressan, of the University of Padova, Italy, said: “Our work shows a stranger who resembles us elicits pro-social regard more than a stranger who resembles a close family member—even one as close as our identical twin, who is, incidentally, genetically identical.”
Original article
(Posted on March 9, 2009)
Comments
“We are friendlier to people who resemble us”
I wonder how much this study cost? Duhhhhhhhh, duhhhh. A casual trip to any school yard and a half hour of observation would have been suffiecient to reach this general conclusion.
It took a bunch of scientists to discover what cavemen knew?
More evidence for genetic similarity theory
:)
“I hate everything that merely instructs me without increasing or directly quickening my activity.” Goethe
Yes, I know this is misplaced here, but I did want to get it in someplace since I’m sure I’m not the only one who appreciates sites such as this, but wishes there was some political party that such a site is associated with so that we can actually DO something to get our views inserted in government where they will be meaningful and accomplish something concrete, instead of just reading about things and posting comments.
Check out the BNP site. It’s like this one, but has a political party along with it. http://bnp.org.uk/
There is a certain point of inbreeding where we prefer outsiders but I doubt there are any white communities left that are that homogeneous.
As I’ve posted here many times before, scientists have proven beyond a doubt that, “people like people whom are like themselves”. Opposites may attract for a very short period of time, but I doesn’t last. People are comfortable only with their own kind. Diversity is a trillion + dollar scam.
“The instinct dates back to when there were no mirrors and people could learn what their kin looked like only by inspecting the faces of household members.”
There were pools of water, however, which reflected the same back then as they do today. That point aside, what is the writer trying to say? Is he trying to say a man or woman had no clue what he or she looked like and tried to nail it down through the face of relatives? Or that relatives were picked out of groups through facial similarities of which the person was aware?
Roller wrote: —“People are comfortable only with their own kind. Diversity is a trillion + dollar scam.”—
It’s far worse than a monetary scam. It’s racial suicide to any nation that allows hordes of third worlders to come in and settle in their land.
There is simply a natural desire for your own group and its welfare. Why wouldn’t there be so?
Just imagine the following situations….You MUST CHOOSE..
Tomorrow there will be 100 million more people in the world. They can be….
A) White. B) Black. C) Brown-skinned south Asians.
2) Tomorrow a 100 million more speakers of the following languages will be added to the world. They can be..
A) English speakers. B) Chinese speakers. C) Arabic speakers.
The world is going to have a 100 million new followers of a religion.
A) Christianity. B) Islam.
Which would you choose? Since I am a White, English-speaking Christian I would choose three A’s in a row. That does not mean of course, that I have any natural or ingrained antagonism towards the others, simply that I feel no affinity to groups unlike myself.
I actually read the original paper. It does not control for race, so you cannot use this report to support any “race preference”-type argument. That’s very unscientific.
First of all, I find the paper quite weak. The ratio of the model face to the test face is 65:35, where the test face is either that of a twin or his/her co-twin. The questions asked are “Which of these two people would you help in case of danger?” and “If you wished to encourage your brother [female participants]/sister [male participants] to marry one of these two people, which one would you choose?” However, we have no idea how the choices are scored. The authors just sneak in their data into a rather bad histogram with standard deviations. How the standard deviations are derived we can’t know since we don’t know how choices are scored.
Besides that, the way the paper presents its only graph is bad. On the y-axis it plots “choice of self-morph (%)” per question asked against “twin type” on the x-axis. How are the values are distributed? We don’t know.
Also, how does this relate to genetics? I know people who resemble me much more than my siblings, however my siblings and I are more likely to share similar genetic material than the stranger who resembles me. Therefore, this paper has little to say about genetics, and even if it does, it’s controversial.
The best conclusion I can gather from the data is that we are “nicer” to people with similar facial structure as us. However this conclusion is only tentative. If I were the authors, I would vary the ratio of model to test face composition to find limits were relationships hold and break down. But they didn’t do this. They didn’t explain why they chose 65:35 as a ratio.
It’s more likely that in the absence of knowledge of family, we assume people who resemble us (AS INDIVIDUALS) facially, probably possess similar genetic material as us. However, it’s possible for a diverse allele set to create similar result, that is, similar facial structure. Hence there’s error in kin assignment, although the probability of error is likely less than that of correct assignment. I will also interpret the result of the paper as supporting self-propagation over other. Therefore, group arguments cannot be made from this study.
