based on genomic similarities plays a role in human marriages in the United States. Spouses are more genetically similar to each other than two randomly chosen individuals. The probability of marriage increases by roughly 15% for every 1-SD increase in genetic similarity. However, some researchers argue that this assortative mating is caused purely by population stratification (the fact that people are more likely to marry within ethnic subgroups such as Swedish-Americans). At the same time, individuals display disassortative mating for genes in the major histocompatibility complex region on chromosome 6. Individuals feel more attracted to odors of individuals who are genetically different in this region. This promotes MHC heterozygosity in the children, making them less vulnerable to pathogens. Apart from humans, disassortative mating with regards to the MHC coding region has been widely studied in mice, and has also been reported to occur in fish. In addition to genetic assortative mating, humans also demonstrate patterns of assortative mating based on sociological factors as well. Sociological assortative mating is typically broken down into three categories, mate choice based on socio-economic status, mate choice based on racial or ethnic background, and mate choice based on religious beliefs. Assortative mating based on socio-economic status is the broadest of these general categories. It includes the tendency of humans to prefer to mate within their socio-economic peers, that is, those with similar social standing, job prestige, educational attainment, or economic background as they themselves. This tendency has always been present in society: there was no historical area when most of the individuals preferred to sort, and had actually sorted, negatively into couples or matched randomly along these traits. Still, this tendency was weaker in some generations than in others. For instance, in the 20th century in the Western world, late Boomers had weaker aggregate preferences for educational homogamy than early Boomers had when being young adults; also, the members of the early Generation-X were typically much less "picky" about spousal education than the members of the late Generation-X were. This trend is evidenced by the search criteria of online dating site users. Another form of sociological assortative mating is assortative mating based on racial and ethnic background. Mentioned above in the context of the genetically similar preferring to mate with one another, this form of assortative mating can take many varied and complicated forms. While the tendency mentioned above does exist, and people do tend