Are Individuals Perceived as More Attractive within a Group? A Confirmative Study of Group Attractiveness Effect and the Cheerleader Effect in China

Abstract

The stereotype “what is beautiful is good” suggests that having an attractive physical appearance is very important to people’s lives. Physical attractiveness, as an important personal trait, plays vital roles for shaping one’s first impression, and for influencing one’s subsequent evaluation and selection, based on obvious visual features. However, the contextual difference of the physical attractiveness between a group and its group members has been given less attention. For this reason, Van Osch et al. proposed and tested that the perceived physical attractiveness of a group is greater than the average attractiveness of its members (GA-effect), while Walker and Vul found that an individual as a group member is perceived to be more attractive in group context than in isolation (cheerleader effect). Our present work seeks to replicate these two effects on a sample of 1005 Chinese participants to check whether such effects also exist in China, a collectivist culture. Participants were asked to rate the degree of attractiveness presented in each photo stimuli and in each rating condition, and the results show that: (a) the participants’ ratings of physical attractiveness of a group was significantly higher than the average attractiveness of its members (i.e., replicating the GA-effect); (b) the participants’ ratings of physical attractiveness of an individual was evaluated higher in a group than in isolation (i.e., replicating the cheerleader effect); and (c) the larger the group size, the larger the GA-effect. This validating study may aid in understanding human behavior, judgments, and perceptions according to the GA-effect and the cheerleader effect used in a different context in China.

The dissociable influence of social context on judgements of facial attractiveness and trustworthiness

“…An effect of assimilation towards the attractiveness of the other group members (Bar-Tal & Saxe, 1976;Wedell et al, 1987) would produce a pattern of results similar to those predicted by hierarchical encoding, which was not supported in the current study. Recently, it has been reported that the number of faces in the group contributes to the size of the cheerleader effect (Peng et al, 2020). However, this finding has been inconsistent (Walker & Vul, 2014) and would not explain why groups of the same size can experience different sized cheerleader effects (Carragher et al, 2019).…”

“…The cheerleader effect Facial attractiveness is typically considered to be signalled by physiological characteristics of the face, such as symmetry, averageness, and sexually dimorphic appearance (Little, Jones, & DeBruine, 2011;Rhodes, 2006). Yet, many recent studies have shown that facial attractiveness is also influenced by social context (Carragher, Thomas, Gwinn, & Nicholls, 2019;Furl, 2016;Hsieh et al, 2020;McDowell & Starratt, 2019;van Osch, Blanken, Meijs, & van Wolferen, 2015;Peng, Mao, Pagliaro, Roberts, & Livi, 2020;Walker & Vul, 2014;Ying, Burns, Lin, & Xu, 2019). Many of these studies describe 'the cheerleader effect' (Rashid & Fryman, 2008), which is said to occur when an observer judges the same face to be more attractive in a group compared to when it is seen alone (Walker & Vul, 2014; see also 'friend effect', Ying et al, 2019).…”