Luke Shields
Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in A Group Seem More Attractive
In a recent study, psychologists Drew Walker and Edward Vul wanted to test the validity of the hypothesized “cheerleader effect”, a phenomena arguing that a person is likely to be perceived more attractive while in a group as opposed to when he or she is seen alone. The “cheerleader effect” proposes that individual faces will seem more attractive in a group because the individual face will appear more similar to the average group face (a combination of all the faces in a group), which is contended to be more attractive than the individual face itself. Walker and Vul hypothesized that the “cheerleader effect” could accurately be observed in an experiment, …show more content…
In this experiment some subjects were presented the pictures at a shorter amount of time, and the experimenters observed that the subjects who saw the faces for a shorter amount of time rated them as more attractive. Another possible confounding variable that could have undermined the validity of the “cheerleader effect” hypothesis was the possibility that a face was perceived as more attractive in a group because it was surrounded by other faces making similar expressions being from the same context or scene in the moment the picture was taken. In order to account for this potential confounder, the experimenters presented subjects with individual pictures from different contexts combined together in a synthetic group picture. The individual faces were presented in a grid, and the face that the subjects were to rate was highlighted. The results to this fourth experiment showed that subjects felt no less attraction to the faces when they were placed in this synthetic group, which confirmed Walker and Vul’s belief that faces are perceived as more attractive in groups because of the “cheerleader effect”, not because of a similar context or facial expression being shared by the individual members of the scene in the
Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in A Group Seem More Attractive
In a recent study, psychologists Drew Walker and Edward Vul wanted to test the validity of the hypothesized “cheerleader effect”, a phenomena arguing that a person is likely to be perceived more attractive while in a group as opposed to when he or she is seen alone. The “cheerleader effect” proposes that individual faces will seem more attractive in a group because the individual face will appear more similar to the average group face (a combination of all the faces in a group), which is contended to be more attractive than the individual face itself. Walker and Vul hypothesized that the “cheerleader effect” could accurately be observed in an experiment, …show more content…
In this experiment some subjects were presented the pictures at a shorter amount of time, and the experimenters observed that the subjects who saw the faces for a shorter amount of time rated them as more attractive. Another possible confounding variable that could have undermined the validity of the “cheerleader effect” hypothesis was the possibility that a face was perceived as more attractive in a group because it was surrounded by other faces making similar expressions being from the same context or scene in the moment the picture was taken. In order to account for this potential confounder, the experimenters presented subjects with individual pictures from different contexts combined together in a synthetic group picture. The individual faces were presented in a grid, and the face that the subjects were to rate was highlighted. The results to this fourth experiment showed that subjects felt no less attraction to the faces when they were placed in this synthetic group, which confirmed Walker and Vul’s belief that faces are perceived as more attractive in groups because of the “cheerleader effect”, not because of a similar context or facial expression being shared by the individual members of the scene in the