In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton
developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating
composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.
Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite
criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were
shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14
criminals.) Studies have since established that people find
prototypical facesthose with average featuresto be
attractive.
An average of 15 female faces rated as
attractive Credit: The Face Research Lab
A paper published in the September issue of the journal
Psychological Science proposes a new explanation for this
phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy
for the brain to process.
"There is always this question in psychology or in experimental
aesthetics: Is there some sort of psychological principle that can
explain a lot of what people find attractive, not only in terms of
faces or people, but things in general?" said Piotr Winkielman, a
psychologist at the University of California, San Diego and the
study's lead author. "This idea of ease-of-processing seems like a
good candidate."
To test this hypothesis, Winkielman and his team created a
geometric pattern. They then made random variations in the
prototype and showed the resulting patterns to subjects, who were
asked to assign them to certain visual categories. The researchers
also measured the subjects' subtle facial responses to determine
whether they were responding positively or negatively to each
pattern.
The researchers found that the response was more positive to
patterns that were close to the prototypical pattern. Furthermore,
the more similar a pattern was to the prototype, the more quickly
subjects could categorize it.
Such speed indicates that patterns close to the prototype were
easier for subjects to process, Winkielman said.
When the researchers controlled for these differences in processing
time, the correlation between attractiveness and similarity to the
prototype disappeared, suggesting that processing ease itself can
in fact cause objects to be attractive.
"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent
that you classify the pattern fast," Winkielman said.
The authors challenge the popular idea from evolutionary psychology
that people find prototypical faces attractive because average
features indicate good health.
One psychologist specializing in faces said he is skeptical that
data from responses to computer patterns can be applied directly to
questions of facial attractiveness.
"Not using faces limits conclusions that can be made about face
preferences, particularly given that humans are proposed to possess
specialized face processing mechanisms," said the researcher, who
responded under condition of anonymity, via email.
The researcher also said that the authors' conclusions, even if
they are accurate, do not necessarily conflict with an evolutionary
explanation for the beauty-in-averageness effect.
"The evolutionary argument, as I see it, hasn't proposed a
mechanism but a selection pressureaveragness of faces is related
to actual health, for example, and choosing healthy partners is
important," he wrote. "If we choose healthy partners because our
visual system picks them out due to perceptual fluency, then we may
still have an evolved mechanism to prefer averageness."
Winkielman acknowledges that averageness does not fully account for
human attractivenessafter all, sexually coded features such as
lips often follow the maxim "bigger is better." But, he notes that
his easier-is-better theory may extend beyond attractiveness.
"When I talk on the phone, it's very easy to explain this idea of
connection between ease and liking, because when people cannot hear
me well, or they think my explanation is confusing, people get
somewhat irritated," he said. "So it's very easy to understand how
complexity of processing is connected to our emotional
responses."
http://seedmagazine.com/news/2006/10/beauty_is_in_the_processingtim.php
