A Group’s Physical Attractiveness Is Greater Than the Average Attractiveness of Its Members

Abstract

We tested whether the perceived physical attractiveness of a group is greater than the average attractiveness of its members. In nine studies, we find evidence for the so-called group attractiveness effect (GA-effect), using female, male, and mixed-gender groups, indicating that group impressions of physical attractiveness are more positive than the average ratings of the group members. A meta-analysis on 33 comparisons reveals that the effect is medium to large (Cohen's d = 0.60) and moderated by group size. We explored two explanations for the GA-effect: (a) selective attention to attractive group members, and (b) the Gestalt principle of similarity. The results of our studies are in favor of the selective attention account: People selectively attend to the most attractive members of a group and their attractiveness has a greater influence on the evaluation of the group.

Limited evidence of hierarchical encoding in the cheerleader effect

“…"), compared to the mathematical average of the attractiveness ratings given to each face in the group. Using eye-tracking, van Osch, et al 15 showed that observers spent more time gazing at the most attractive faces in each group, suggesting that selectively attending to only the most attractive faces caused observers to overestimate the attractiveness of the whole group. As noted by Carragher, et al 13,51 , it is possible that the cheerleader effect might also occur due to selective attention; rather than being biased toward the attractiveness of the ensemble representation, observers might instead give attractiveness ratings to the target face that are influenced by the most attractive face in the group.…”

“…Traditionally, attractiveness is associated with physiological traits in the face, including symmetry [4][5][6] , sexually dimorphic appearance [7][8][9] , and averageness [10][11][12] . Yet, a growing number of recent studies have found that the perceived attractiveness of an individual face can fluctuate in response to cues that are external to the face itself, such as social context [13][14][15][16][17][18][19] . One prominent example of the effect that social context has on judgments of facial attractiveness is known colloquially as "the cheerleader effect" 20 .…”

Ensemble perception of facial attractiveness

“…of group-level characteristics, forming a basis for social stereotypes and biases. Second, ensemble perception of facial attractiveness, in particular, the extraction of average attractiveness from multiple faces, could be an intermediate step for group-induced biases on attractiveness perception, including the cheerleader effect (Walker & Vul, 2014) and the group attractiveness effect (van Osch, Blanken, Meijs, & van Wolferen, 2015). In the cheerleader effect, individual faces are rated as more attractive when they are presented in photos of a group or when their photos are collocated with others' photos than when their photos are presented alone.…”

“…In the cheerleader effect, individual faces are rated as more attractive when they are presented in photos of a group or when their photos are collocated with others' photos than when their photos are presented alone. Similarly, in the group attractiveness effect, observers judge the overall physical attractiveness of a group to be greater than the average rating of each member in isolation (van Osch et al, 2015). Authors of these two studies proposed perception of average attractiveness of the group as a potential explanation: Observers may unconsciously morph all the faces in the group into one average face, and this average face could bias their judgment of group attractiveness or group member attractiveness (van Osch et al, 2015;Walker & Vul, 2014).…”

Two replications of "Hierarchical encoding makes individuals in a group seem more attractive (2014; Experiment 4)".

“…As a result, attractiveness ratings with the surrounding faces were significantly higher than those with no surrounding face, although there was no effect of the number of surrounding faces. They suggested the ensemble coding mechanism in the visual system, especially for processing facial parts, involves the cheerleader effect (see also van Osch, Blanken, Meijs, & van Wolferen, 2015). Therefore, researchers in this field should test this ensemble-coding hypothesis, and that is why we first tested the robustness of this phenomenon.…”