![]() ![]() People of both cultures preferred the face that was more average - that is, compiled from 20 faces instead of five. The other was an average of 20 British faces or 20 Hadza faces. One image was an average of five British faces or five Hadza faces. She showed people from both groups two images and asked which was more attractive. Apicella chose them for her experiment because they had not been exposed to Western culture and standards of beauty. The Hadza are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, a nation in East Africa. Apicella and Little worked with two groups of young adults: British and Hadza. “Perhaps average faces are more attractive because they seem more familiar.” She is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. ![]() It’s well-known in psychology that familiar things are more attractive, says Coren Apicella. Coren Apicella/University of Pennsylvania So infants quickly come to prefer these faces, Schein says.Ĭoren Apicella asks a Hadza woman to choose the face she thinks is more attractive. Research conducted at the University of Delaware found that babies’ brains are better at processing faces from their own race. After all, Schein points out, “By the time we test infants, they already have experience with faces.” However, it’s still possible that we learn that preference. These findings suggest that people prefer pretty faces very early in life. That meant they preferred the pretty faces, says psychologist Stevie Schein. The scientists then recorded how long the infants looked at each face.īabies spent longer viewing the attractive faces than the unattractive ones. One face was more attractive than the other. The researchers showed each baby photos of two faces. Some of their young recruits were just two to three months old. Nature or nurture?Īre we born with a preference for certain kinds of faces? Or is it just something that people learn, without realizing it? To find out, psychologist Judith Langlois and her team at the University of Texas in Austin worked with young children and babies. Both those distances match the population average, or are close to it. It should be just over one-third the height of her face. Just as important, they found, is the distance between a woman’s eyes and mouth. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Toronto in Canada discovered that ratio. People find her most attractive when that distance is just under half of the width of the face. “Such as the size of the features of your face and their arrangement.”įor example, the distance between the centers of a woman’s eyes affects whether she is considered beautiful. “Averageness includes all kinds of factors,” says Little. And, in general, people find such faces quite attractive. Average, here, does not mean “so-so.” Rather, average faces are a mathematical average (or mean) of most people’s features. This averageness, Little points out, refers to how similar a face looks to most other faces in a population. ![]() “So,” he explains, “symmetry looks normal to us. In the end, many of these faces seem symmetrical. Everyone’s face is slightly asymmetrical, but in different ways, he says. He is a psychologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland. “People’s faces usually only differ subtly in symmetry,” says Anthony Little. But our eyes read faces with similar proportions on both sides as symmetrical. In a symmetrical face, the left and right sides look like each other. They also tend to have measurements similar to the population average. Attractive faces also are average.Īttractive faces, such as this one, tend to be symmetrical. Faces that we deem attractive tend to be symmetrical, they find. Researchers have begun turning up some answers, though. But few can say precisely why those faces seem so beautiful. Different people will usually agree on which faces those are. Looking at a set of photos, it’s easy to say which faces we find attractive. Or it may simply be easier for our brains to process. A pretty face may belong to a healthier person. Scientists are also learning that there may be a practical side to our obsession with beauty. Through this work, especially, they have discovered some of the features that make an individual attractive to others. Researchers have, however, begun probing how beauty affects the behavior of humans and other animals. We can’t take our eyes off a good-looking actor, actress or model. Something about attractive people makes us want to watch them. Or anything else about their personality.īut it’s hard to ignore the way a person looks. Moreover, someone’s appearance doesn’t tell us anything about how kind they are. Beauty is only skin-deep, as the saying goes. We all know we shouldn’t judge people based on their looks.
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