Studying twins has long been a way for scientists to get a more accurate reading on human behavior. A recent study even suggested, after an extensive twin study, that married men are nicer and better behaved than unmarried men.
S. Alexandra Burt and several of her associates at Michigan State University followed 289 pairs of male twins for over a dozen years. The men ranged in age from 17 to 29 at the beginning of the study. Burt reported that more than half the twin sets taking part in the study were identical.
Tracking them across the years, Burt and her colleagues found that, of the 40 percent of men who did not get married during the study, each of them had at age 29, on average, 1.3 antisocial behaviors. The antisocial behaviors observed in the married men were averaged to about .8 per person.
Burt surmised that married men are just not as antisocial to begin with. And when they get married, they get even less antisocial.
Possible reasons for these differences in politeness and antisocial behavior, the study concluded, were possibly due to the fact that married men spend more time with their spouses, which does not encourage antisocial behavior.
The accuracy of these tests is mainly based on genetically identical twins who, when raised in identical environments with highly similar childhoods, generally end up with nearly the same tendencies in older years. The study concluded that marriage possibly helps to keep bad behavior at bay.
The other studied benefits of marriage include a lower likelihood of depression, lowered chance of heart attacks and stroke, and even possibly longer lifespans.
