In order to research the behaviour of the Himba, a group of semi-nomadic agro-pastoralists, Sean Prall, an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Science, travelled to northwest Namibia in southern Africa.
The research was published in Science Advances. Prall discovered that not only are individuals who have similar attractiveness more likely to start relationships, but they are also more likely to succeed in those relationships.
As per recent research, individuals who share similar attractiveness are more likely to not only start relationships but also have successful relationships.
People’s opinions of other members of the community were the subject of interviews by Prall. He discovered that couples who shared comparable mate values were more likely to start dating and had happier unions as a result. The majority of desirability research, according to Prall, focuses more on people’s expressed preferences, which are impacted by societal forces, while this study places more emphasis on people’s actions.
Prior to the COVID-19 epidemic in 2019, Prall and his research colleague Brooke Scelza, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, would spend more than a month living with Himba pastoralists each summer to study human behavior.
Prall has been researching the population for five years. He and his team have studied information on marriage, parenting choices, child health, food insecurity, and even how picky people are with their spouses during that period.
The results of this study, according to Prall, can be applicable to a wider context even if a large portion of his earlier research was concentrated on this demographic. He claimed that the population’s features were ideal for the kind of data they were obtaining.
Parvathy Sukumaran 
