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Too often we tend to look at biases with mistrust, but what if we told you that there is one that is able to make us look more attractive? Would you reject it regardless?

It’s called the cheerleader effect, the cognitive bias that leads us to think that individuals are more attractive than they really are when they are in a group, rather than alone.

Barney Stinson, fictional character from the tv series How I met your mother, whose pilot aired in 2005, is the one to thank for the notoriety of this effect, in the seventh episode of the fourth season.

Barney points out to his friends that a group of women initially look very attractive, but their appeal lowers when they are examined individually. The effect does not spare men either. It’s not by chance that Barney’s own friends are victim of this effect later in the episode.

The beauty of the group

Scientists from the San Diego University managed to show our irrationality through a series of studies published on Psychological Science¸ in which they proved that the distortion is caused by the fact that: “The visual system automatically computes summary representations of ensembles of objects, such as the average size of an array of dots, the average orientation of an array of gratings, and even the average emotional expression of a group of faces. Not only does the summary that is formed influence observers’ perception of the group as a whole, but it also biases their percepts of individual items to be more like the group average”.

In practical terms, the impression we have of a group influences our perception of every single element, and this affects us in such a way that we consider single members more similar to the group and much more attractive than what they really are.

This distortion affects both women and men, within a group composed of both four and sixteen people, and not necessarily in person. This effect is present even when we judge people in videos or photos, or when we interact with them both on social media and in person.

Optical illusions

The effectiveness of the cheerleader effects shows us how our brain and our perception work very well.

Our brain, in order to reduce the effort, rather than pay attention to every single object present in the environment, prefers to group together information. On one side, this allows us to process much more data, on the other, we lose accuracy and precision, as it is easily proven by the fallacy in optical illusions.

We have a hard time interpreting these illusions correctly.

If there are still any lingering doubts, what better way to remove them than playing this next game, measuring our perception ability with the Ebbinghaus and the moon illusion.

In the Ebbinghaus illusion, a dot of average dimension looks much smaller when it is surrounded by a field of bigger dots. Vice versa, it looks much bigger when surrounded by smaller dots.

In the moon illusion, the moon looks much bigger when it’s on the horizon, rather than when it’s up in the sky.

Such optical illusions show that what we “see” is not reality. What we see depends on the physical stimulus that is codified by our sight systems, the context, the expectations and previous knowledge. Such illusions are evident for animate and inanimate objects and are difficult to ignore, even when we are aware that our eyes are betraying us.

Next time someone or something in a group catches your attention, isolate it (or them) to form an idea that is more bound to reality. Instead, in case you want to increase your appeal, now you know which tricks to use.

Laura Mondino

Sources:

• Hamblin J., Cheerleader Effect:why people are more beautiful in groups, The Atlantic, December 5, 2015.
• Walker D., Vul E., Hierarchical Encoding Makes Individuals in a Group Seem More Attractive, Psychological Science, October 25, 2013
• Ariely D., Seeing sets: representation by statistical properties, Psychological Science, Vol 12, N. 2, March 2001
• Alvarez G.A., Oliva A., The representation of simple ensemble visual feature outside the focus of attention, Psychological Science, 19(4); 392-8, April 2008
• Haberman J., Whitney D., Rapid extraction of mean emotion and gender from sets of faces, Current Biology, Vol 17, Issue 17, Pr751-R753, September 2007
• Langlois, Judith H.; Roggman, Lori A. (1990), Attractive Faces Are Only Average, Psychological Science, 1(2): 11
• Brady T.F., Alvarez G.A., Hierarchical encoding in visual working memory: ensemble statistics bias memory for individual items, Psychological Science, 2011 Mar; 22(3):384-92.
• Titchener E.B., 1901, Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice, Vol I, London, MacMillan
• Kaufman L., Kaufman J.H., Explaining the moon illusion, PNAS, January 4, 2000, 97(1) 500-505