This interactive shows that a beautiful face is greater than the sum of its partsby Thu-Huong Ha|#Beautiful Face |
Psychologists
have postulated for some time that composites of faces tend to be more
attractive than individual ones. It's what's known as the "averageness
hypothesis," firstsuggested by statistician and eugenics theorist Francis Galton in 1907 anddemonstrated with computer-generated composites in 1990.
And you can see it in action for yourself.
Researchers
at the University of Glasgow built a tool in 2009 (since updated) to
demonstrate the effect of piling on more faces. And the results are
still pretty striking.
Explore their interactive to
see how the more faces you "add," the more attractive a person becomes.
Two faces together isn't necessarily better than one, but once you get
up to five or six, the composite consistently looks surprisingly good.
The power of two faces.
The power of five.
Evolutionary scientist Lisa DeBruine and psychologist Ben Jones run the site, calledFace Research,
which houses interactives and online experiments that analyze how we
process faces. This tool is called the "Averager," and there's a celebrity version, too. (Oddly, Benedict Cumberbatch + Idris Elba + John Cho + Chris Pine looks a bit like a classic Ken doll.)
As the team tells Quartz, "averageness cannot fully explain attractiveness." In a1994 study researchers
demonstrated that "hyper-attractive" faces (compiled from 15
particularly pretty faces) were rated higher than the average composite
made from the general set of 60 faces. But as Face Research shows, if
you "add" faces and take the average of their features, the composite
generally is more attractive than any individual face. And the more you
add, the more attractive the average.
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