Attractive Friends Make You Look More Attractive
When we meet a person, without even having to think about it, we instantly make a snap judgement about their beauty. It’s impossible not to. We know, within a fraction of a second, whether that person is what we would consider attractive or unattractive.
But what happens when we encounter a group of people, all at the same time?
Let’s say you enter a bar, and, because you’re a dastardly pick up artist, you’re looking about for someone to chat up. But most people are congregated in small friendship groups. There’s one group of friends sat over there in the corner. There’s another at the end of the bar. There’s a third, inevitably, blocking the entrance to the toilets. You would prefer to infiltrate the group with the most attractive members. So, what do you do?
You might be thinking, “C’mon, Rob, this is hardly a problem. You just look at the members of each group and judge them individually, as you would if you met them one-on-one. Then you could reach a nice, reliable, accurate, average assessment of attractiveness”.
But is that what we really do? If the group has more than a few members, it might take a long time. And it sounds very rational, too. Are humans that mechanical and mathematical? Or do we use a rule of thumb, a quick and dirty formula for estimating the attractiveness of a group?
Yvette van Osch and her colleagues from Tilberg University in the Netherlands set out to answer these questions. She showed 160 female volunteers a set of photographs of female faces. Each volunteer saw the faces in one of three different ways. One third saw the faces individually. They rated each face for attractiveness, in sequence, one at a time. Another third saw the women arranged in a group, all at once. These volunteers didn’t judge each woman for attractiveness. Instead they gave one rating: they picked a number from one to seven that best represented the attractiveness of all of the women in the photo. The final third of the volunteers was a control group. They also saw the women altogether. But this time they gave each woman her own rating of attractiveness.
It’s important to have this control condition because it’s possible that when we see faces in a group, we compare each face with the ones that surround it. Say you were rating a photograph of my face, on its own. You would probably give me a very high score, because I am a phenomenally attractive chap. But if you saw me pictured amongst my even more attractive friends, you might begin to think I compare unfavourably. I’m balder, my ears are bigger, and I’m the only one with a beard that looks like a sporran dug out the back of a Glaswegian bin lorry by an angry ferret. So, you might mark me down. The control condition allowed van Osch to be sure that any differences between the ratings provided by the other two sets of volunteers weren’t simply down to faces being viewed on their own or in a group.
Van Osch found that when groups of women were given an overall rating, that rating was significantly higher than the average of their individual ratings. This was true regardless of whether the individual ratings were based on photographs of the women on their own, or the group photograph. Yes, judging women’s individual attractiveness when they were pictured with their friends did result in slightly lower ratings than when the women were seen on their own. In other words, they dragged each other down, as I would expect my own rating to be dragged down by comparison to my friends. But the effect wasn’t all that strong.
However, when volunteers had to make a snap judgement about the overall attractiveness of a group, their scores were quite a bit higher than we would expect if we just averaged the attractiveness of each woman. Higher by one whole point on a seven point scale.
One point on a seven point scale might not sound like much, but remember: these are the same people being rated. They shouldn’t be any more attractive just because they’re part of a group. But, they are.
Van Osch thinks this is because we pay more attention to the most attractive members of a group when we make an overall assessment. Attractive people draw our eyes, and our group-level judgement of attractiveness is therefore based more on the better looking people in a group than their less attractive peers.
This is probably true, because in a follow up experiment van Osch was able to show that the effect was eliminated when volunteers were asked to first rate all faces in a group individually, and only later provide an overall group rating. By being forced to look at all the faces first, regardless of their attractiveness, the volunteers could no longer ignore the less attractive group members when giving their overall rating.
In other follow up studies, van Osch showed the same effects hold in male and mixed-sex groups, and that the effects are larger when groups comprise more people.
The take home message is clear. People are more likely to approach you and your group if you hang out with lots of attractive friends. Although if you’ve got lots of attractive friends, you probably don’t need any help. Just go out with one of your attractive friends. That’s what the friends did in popular TV sitcom, Friends. They were at it like rabbits! By the way: David Schwimmer? Be honest, if he hadn’t spent the 90s playing fusball with Jennifer Aniston and Joey Tribbiani, you wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Science in action!
van Osch, Y., Blanken, I., Meijs, M. H. J., & van Wolferen, J. (in press). A group’s physical attractiveness is greater than the average attractiveness of its members: The group attractiveness effect.Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the 05 May 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
