4 Comments »

1. Comment by MechanicalCrowds — 12/10/2006 @ 2:26

   Good one!!

2. Comment by mr. orange — 12/10/2006 @ 3:50

   It’s worth noting that she’s the average of 15 faces that were rated as “attractive.” I’ve seen averages of 15 random faces, and they’re not nearly as striking. So in that way, I guess, the researchers cheated a bit. The original research site has some other cool examples…

   http://www.faceresearch.org/feedback/

3. Comment by zoss — 13/10/2006 @ 13:49

   Good point, mr. orange. Thanks for stopping by.

   I had visited their website, but didn’t find much detailed information about the research methodology or the findings. I guess I should go for the papers if I really wanna find out.

4. Comment by Lisa DeBruine — 5/11/2006 @ 18:54

   I supplied the face image for that SEED article and I co-run the faceresearch.org website, but was not involved in the reported research in any way. The journalist asked me for images of an average white man and white woman (I don’t know why, we have average faces of non-white people on our website, as well) and I also sent the average of the 15 most attractive female faces from the set of 60 faces that our average female was made from to illustrate a 1994 finding by Dave Perrett. The experiment shows that although average faces tend to be very attractive, you could construct a face that is an average of highly attractive people and it is both sytematically different from average and more attractive, proving that averageness isn’t 100% of attractiveness.

   You can read more about this at http://www.faceresearch.org/students/averageness and also see more pictures.

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