WoUtNW

[kirisutogomen]

The Word of Until the Next WoUtNW is propinquity.

People of similar demographic attributes tend to live near one another. People are more likely to fall in love with people with similar demographic attributes. People are more likely to fall in love with people they live near.

The tricky question is which way the causality is flowing. Is the tendency towards assortative mating driven by endogamous norms (with or without some innate endogamy drive), or is it just the statistical consequence of assortative residential location plus the tendency people have to fall in love preferentially with people they see fairly often (Russian mail-order brides notwithstanding)?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I bet if you did the proper controlled experiments you would find evidence of both.

"Propinquity" is a great word (and relatively common in 18th century literature), but it's hard to justify the blank stares when "proximity" works rather equivalently.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

JMA, is that you? You're usually the one who gets himself logged out.

I would enjoy very few things as much as the ability to test these hypotheses with randomized controlled experiments on sufficiently large samples. As long as I'm asking for the impossible, I could throw in the requirement that the experiments be double-blinded, but I don't even know what that would look like. Neither the experimenters nor the experimental subjects could tell if they were demographically or geographically in proximity or propinquity.