Heritability of Sociability and a Bit of Online Dating

While reading the Christakis and Fowler reading for today's class, there was something nagging at the back of my mind about the statistics that kept popping up for the twin studies. Everything about sociability hovered around fifty percent. Admittedly, this is likely true of most genetic factors, but one important genetic yet also extremely culturally influenced factor also differs between fraternal twins at a rate of fifty percent: sex. Sex carries a large amount of cultural baggage along with it and the behavior of the sexes is in large part due to norms and cultural expectations. As a result, I would expect women and men to perform differently on the dictator test. As far as I can tell from examining the paper (linked here) this was not accounted for within the data analysis. I am not saying that their conclusions are wrong (sex is after all genetic) but only that this relatively important cultural variable could account for a large chunk of the variation between fraternal and identical twins. As they established earlier in the same chapter different cultures around the globe already vary in their behavior in the dictator game due to differing cultural norms, so sex playing a similar role would hardly be unexpected as so much of it is affected by cultural expectations.

As for the speed dating study today, I wonder if similar eye-tracking technology as that they used might be devoted to studying how people search for mates on online dating sites. The results could shed light on what people actually examine as they search for prospective partners and could be videotaped in order to have other observers guess whether or not the model liked the match the site gave them. If body language, vocal tone, and BMI of the target are the prime indicators, it would seem that observers would fare poorly at guessing whether or not the person was interested in the target (the facial expressions would be the main tell). Sadly I personally lack the resources to do this kind of study, but I think the results would be extremely interesting all the same.