Cheerleader effect
The cheerleading effect states that a single person appears more attractive in a group of people than viewed on their own. This applies to both men and women .
Origin of expression
In the US television series How I Met Your Mother in the episode The Non-Father's Day ( Season 4, Episode 7 ), the character Barney Stinson explained to his friends the cheerleading effect, as a group of women who all looked appealing, entered the bar. He said that people look more attractive in a group than when they are looked at individually.
science
In the study “Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in a Group Seem More Attractive” by Drew Walker and Edward Vul (University of California), the cheerleading effect was examined and confirmed in five experiments with 25, 18, 20, 37 and 39 participants. In the first two experiments, the subjects rated the attractiveness of female faces (exp. 1) and male faces (exp. 2). Faces were presented to the test subjects once in a group (group photo) and once in isolation (individual photo). As a result, the faces of both women and men in the group were rated as more attractive than their isolated individual photos. In Experiment 3, the available viewing time for the isolated portrait was matched to that of the group picture in order to avoid a distortion of the result due to the fact that faces that are viewed for shorter periods are considered more attractive. The cheerleading effect could also be demonstrated here. In experiment 4, among other things, the group size was varied. The results showed, no matter how large the group was (4, 9 or 16 people), that the rating of attractiveness differed only marginally. In Experiment 5, the faces were manipulated and presented to the subjects in a more blurred manner. Here, too, the cheerleading effect could again be proven.
Summary of the results: The effect that individuals are perceived as more attractive within the group than on their own could be demonstrated in all five experiments. The effect occurs regardless of the viewing time of the images, the context of the group presentation (natural group or sum of individual images, group size) and the image manipulation such as blurring.
Explanation: According to Drew Walker and Edward Vul, the cheerleading effect can be traced back to three phenomena. The human visual system processes a group of individuals as a unit (ensemble), known under the term “ensemble coding”. On the other hand, individuals in the group are positively influenced by the group average. Average faces are still considered attractive.
If a group of people is seen, the visual system processes a kind of summary or average. This influences the perception of the group as such and also the perception of an individual within the group. Thus, an individual in the group is viewed as more similar to the group average than when viewed on its own. In addition, the average of a certain number of faces (the average face for short) appears more attractive to the viewer than a single face of this totality. Unattractive facial features of a single person in the group are balanced out by the (complementary) features of other people in the group.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Non-Father's Day
- ↑ Walker, Drew and Vul, Edward (2013): Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in a Group Seem More Attractive, Psychological Science
- ↑ Langlois, JH & Roggman, LA (1990): Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, pp. 115-121.