Koinophilia - Physical Attractiveness

Physical Attractiveness

Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, created composite portraits of a number of convicted criminals, hoping to generate a prototypical criminal face. Surprisingly, the composite portrait became more and more attractive with the addition of each new face. Galton published this rather inexplicable finding in 1878, concluding that average features combine to create good-looking faces.

Despite of the novelty of this finding, Galton’s observations were forgotten until Judith Langlois and Lori Roggman created computer generated composite images in the late 1980s. They found that facial attractiveness increased in proportion to the number of faces that went into creating the composite. Many studies, using different averaging techniques, including the use of line drawings and face profiles, have subsequently shown that this is a general principle: average faces are consistently more attractive than the faces used to generate them.

This principle transcends culture. For instance, Coren Apicella and her co-workers from Harvard University created average faces of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania in Africa, the Hadza people. Hadza people rated the average Hadza faces as more attractive than the actual faces in the tribe. While Europeans also rated average Hadza faces as attractive, the Hadza people did not express any preference for average European faces. Apicella attributes this difference to the visual experiences of the Europeans and the Hadza tribespeople. While the Hadza had never been exposed to human races outside their immediate environment, the Europeans had been exposed to both Western and African faces. Thus the indifference of the Hadza towards average European faces could have been the result of lacking the European ‘norm’ in their visual experience. These results suggest that the rules for extracting attractive faces are culture-independent and innate, but the results of applying the rules depend on the environment and cultural experience.

That the preference for the average is biological rather than cultural has been supported by a number of studies on babies. Neonates and infants gaze longer at attractive faces than at unattractive faces. Furthermore, Mark Stauss reported that 10-month old children respond to average faces in the same way as they respond to attractive faces, and that these infants are able to extract the average from simply drawn faces consisting of only 4 features. Adam Rubenstein and coworkers showed that already at six months of age, children not only treat average faces the same as they treat attractive faces, but they are also able to extract the central tendency (i.e. the average) from a set of complex, naturalistic faces presented to them (i.e. not just the very simple 4-features faces used by Strauss). Thus the ability to extract the average from a set of realistic facial images operates from an early age, and is therefore almost certainly instinctive.

Despite these findings, David Perrett and his colleagues at St Andrews University in Scotland found that both men and women considered that a face averaged from a set of attractive faces was more appealing than one averaged from a wide range of women's faces. When the differences between the first face and the second face were slightly exaggerated the new face was judged, on average, to be more attractive still. However, the three faces are difficult to distinguish one from the other, although close examination shows that the so-called “exaggerated face” looks slightly younger than the average face (composed of women's faces aged 22–46 years). Since the same results were obtained using Japanese subjects and viewers, these findings are probably culture-independent; indicating that people generally find youthful average faces sexually the most attractive. (European viewers saw no differences between the three female Japanese faces created by David Perrett.)