The Mystery of Lust and Trust Revealed

Love

When we see people with similar facial features as our own, it builds trust and not lust, report the BBC News and the Telegraph of research from psychologists at the United Kingdom universities of St. Andrews and Aberdeen. But when it comes to sexual attraction and lust, we tend to seek those whose faces are very different from our own.

The study: In this study that was titled "Trustworthy But Not Lust-Worthy," 144 students were shown a series of paired faces. They were not told that some of the photographs had been subtly altered by psychologists to resemble the actual student who was looking at the pictures. The other photos were not altered.



The results:

When it comes to sexual attraction, the students chose faces that had different characteristics than their own. No doubt, there is some ingrained force causing us to reject people who look like we do to avoid inbreeding.

When it comes to trust, the students chose faces with similar characteristics as their own. "This supports the idea that people--perhaps unwittingly--detect facial resemblance," researcher Lisa DeBruine told the BBC News. "It means to them, on some level, that this person is 'family' and they are more trusting of them." They also described these faces as unattractive sexually.

"These results back the notion that people trust kin but avoid them in a sexual setting due to the costs of inbreeding," DeBruine summarized to the BBC.

The study findings were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Biological Series.