Describing a pattern where similar things tend to group together or pair with each other, especially used in biology and social science.
From 'assort' plus the suffix '-ative' (tending to). This term became prominent in 20th-century evolutionary biology and social science to describe non-random mating patterns.
Assortative mating—where tall people tend to marry tall people and intelligent people tend to partner with intelligent people—is a real phenomenon that geneticists study, and it actually changes how traits spread through populations over generations.
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