Seeking the most attractive possible mate produces human-matching assortative mating without preference for similarity.

Evidence

When the likelihood of an offer was set to correlate with the attractiveness of the potential partner (e.g., . for a 9/10 on attract iveness, . for a 1/10), the result was a correlation in attractiveness of the two agents of around . to .6—matching the observed level among humans. The simulation showed that this result occurs because the most attractive agents tend to pair up early and are, therefore, removed from the population. As time passes, the attractiveness of the remaining agents decreases. Once again, the value of this model is in demonstrating the counterintuitive effects of a simple rule (seeking the most attractive possible partner) iterated dynamically across many agents and over time. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 827

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to my noise/silence theme of simple rules iterated across agents producing surprising emergent patterns, and to the figure-ground ideas in The Soundscape about emergence from simple elements.