People Prefer the 'Average Joe' Look

If we know anything about most people, they don't like change. Now, recent findings published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science shows that having an "average" looking snoot in most ways is a good thing, when it comes to trustworthiness and likability.

"Face typicality likely indicates familiarity and cultural affiliation - as such, these findings have important implications for understanding social perception, including cross-cultural perceptions and interactions," said psychological scientist and lead researcher Carmel Sofer of Princeton University and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, in a news release.

For part of the study, researchers created a "typical" face by digitally averaging 92 female faces that also created an "attractive" face via averaging the 12 most attractive faces from another set of faces. Then, they combined two faces into one and created nine variations that had differing levels of attractiveness and typicality, resulting in 11 faces that ranged from least attractive to most attractive with the most typical face occupying the midpoint.

Female participants saw these face variations and used a 9-point scale to rate them with either trustworthiness or attractiveness throughout the course of the study, as participants saw and rated each face three times. Researchers also included female participants so to eliminate potential cross-gender differences in how people perceived and evaluated faces.

Findings revealed that the closer a face shape was to the most typical face, the more trustworthy it was considered to be. Furthermore, when it came to attractiveness, typicality didn't seem to play much of a role.

"Although face typicality did not matter for attractiveness judgments, it mattered a great deal for trustworthiness judgments," Sofer explained. "This effect may have been overlooked, because trustworthiness and attractiveness judgments are generally highly correlated in research."

Another experiment showed that the relationship between averageness and trustworthiness was not driven by the specific faces used or the by the transformation process that the researchers had employed to digitally combine and alter the faces.

"By showing the influence of face typicality on perceived trustworthiness, our findings cast a new light on how face typicality influences social perception," the researchers write. "They highlight the social meaning of the typical face because trustworthiness judgments approximate the general evaluation of faces."

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