Individual faces are judged more attractive in a group than alone, because the perceptual system averages the set.
Popularised by a character in How I Met Your Mother in 2008, and tested experimentally by Walker and Vul, who published online in 2013 and in print in 2014 and found it real. A rare instance of a sitcom joke surviving experimental verification.
In practice
- A candidate photographed with the leadership team on the website is judged more impressive than the same photograph cropped to one person.
- Four unremarkable songs on a well-sequenced album are rated higher than any of them released alone.
- Standing
- A sitcom joke that a later experiment found to be real.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind