4 ms·

Critique of these images: http://jezebel.com/5758201/see-the-average-face-of-women-from-40-different-countries/ http://jezebel.com/5758201/see-the-average-face-

by irickt 13y ago

Critique of these images: http://jezebel.com/5758201/see-the-average-face-of-women-from-40-different-countries/ http://jezebel.com/5758201/see-the-average-face-of-women-fro... Purported origin of the work: http://faceresearch.org/ http://faceresearch.org/

spullara 13y ago
The obvious take away is that good looking people are actually average looking (as opposed to median looking). The first comment on that blog is from the creator of the images and he explains some of the issues with the collection.
- chrischen 13y ago
  So is being "average-looking" a misnomer then? Because it's usually not used positively.
  - ijk 13y ago
    Slightly different meaning. The colloquial idiom of an "average" face is one that is unremarkable in a crowd, one of median attractiveness. Taking the average of all of the faces in that crowd results in a face that has median features, but measurably higher attractiveness. Reality can be counter-intuitive.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      But supposedly what's defined as average is someone who's features look like most other people. So by definition, the good looking should be a plurality in the population right? That's probably a good thing, otherwise most of the population would end up with people they think are ugly.
      - jonahx 13y ago
        The good looking are certainly not a plurality. JERRY: Elaine, what percentage of people would you say are good looking? ELAINE: Twenty-five percent. JERRY: Twenty-five percent, you say? No way! It’s like 4 to 6 percent. It’s a twenty to one shot. ELAINE: You’re way off. JERRY: Way off? Have you been to the motor vehicle bureau? It’s like a leper colony down there. ELAINE: So what you are saying is that 90 to 95 percent of the population is undateable? JERRY: UNDATEABLE! ELAINE: Then how are all these people getting together? JERRY: Alcohol.
      - ijk 13y ago
        Again, different meanings of "average": median attractiveness vs. balanced, symmetrical facial features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness Also, if you believe OKCupid Trends, "2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women" and "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium": http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati... (Says nothing about what they think about the people they eventually end up with, of course.)
    - T-hawk 13y ago
      Right. The average of a number of samples can exhibit characteristics not present in each sample, and so it does here. One characteristic often considered attractive in a woman's face is a rounded soft jawline. The average of a large number of samples will tend towards rounded soft features, just by the nature of averaging which blurs together any large outliers. A starker example: People who weigh 80 pounds and people who weigh 240 pounds are both considered unattractive. But average a bunch of each and you get a perfectly attractive mean or median of 160.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
  > good looking people are actually average This makes a lot of sense if mutational load causes bad looks. Mutations cause individual deviations from the more ideal underlying template.
Radim 13y ago
TL;DR of the critique: These images are a blend of many "real" images, and these real images may have been sampled in a way that doesn't represent the country's real distribution of women.
- victorf 13y ago
  I prefer to have no input from that site whatsoever. Particularly after I read them and their commenters celebrating an actual assault on someone who made a tasteless comment. They only care about victim blaming in specific circumstances, it seems. They are not for equality but are instead for gossip-mongering and creating false controversy; just like the entire rest of the Gawker network.
melange 13y ago
That's not a 'critique', rather it is uninformed prejudice. The concept that averaging faces produces attractiveness has been well studied: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness The jezebel author asserts that this must be the result of selection bias while ignoring the research, thus revealing their own prejudice.
- niels_olson 13y ago
  I was contacted through some posts on Edward Tufte's forum by the admin of an anthropology forum about filtering for hate speech. Suffice to say, my big take-away after taking a look is that anthropology on the internet attracts a tremendous number of xenophobes, racists and bigots. That these folks are not known for their intellect, let alone intellectual integrity, is not surprising. My only regret is not knowing how to solve that problem other than massive education overhaul at the K-12 level.
- Someone 13y ago
  I always wondered how much of that effect was due to the smoothing out of irregularities in the skin that averaging produces. Reading http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/zusammen/zusammen1.htm http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychol..., I get the impression that that is a main cause of the effect. I base that on the findings that "the more attractive the original faces, the more attractive the resulting compound face (r=0.75 for female and r=0.68 for male faces). Thus, not simply the number, but also the attractiveness of the original faces influences the average attractiveness rating of compound faces. This result is in contrast to the 'attractiveness is averageness' hypothesis." and "Rather, it seems that not the proportions but the surface characteristics (e.g. skin texture) of a face decide wether it is regarded attractive or not. In terms of facial proportions, this means that the 'attractiveness is averageness' hypothesis is clearly falsified." Edit: of course, further research is needed. For example, the subjects doing the ratings all did their shoppings in Regensburg. That's way better than the typical selection of around-20-years-old psychology students (at least 80% female) of late 20th century Western European upbringing, but it will have had an effect on what constitutes beauty.
mmastrac 13y ago
There's a good rebuttal to the critique in the comments of that story: --- 8< --- There is no ethnic cleansing. Some site on the net stole these from me, by not sourcing them to me. I created all of these and more (ones for men) right here: [pmsol3.wordpress.com] My account on FaceResearch.org is Rasfarengi. I have e-mailed the editor about this already. The "South Africa" composite on here is labeled wrong, because who ever took it from my site did not label it correctly. It is actually the Argentina composite. The South African composite I did only uses Khoi-San and South Bantu populations found in South Africa, not whites or colourds. I am African American, so there is no racism here. I didn't make specific composites of many African nationalities because it is just too difficult. My process requires front facing photos with limited smiles. I have to look through nearly 2,000 photos online to find good pictures of Italians. Let alone a Fin. In Africa it is just too hard outside of Nigerians and South Africa, because there are less pictures on the net, because those people don't have good internet access or access to digital cameras the way East Asians and Europeans do. It is even hard to find pictures of Latin Americans of specific nationalities outside the larger nations. I did one of "West Africans" specifically to see if I can tell how much Euro and Native American admixture changed the African American population, whose ancestors mostly originated from the areas between Senegal and Angola (with a very very small % from Mozambique) I tried to use the same % that came to America from specific regions, like the Blight of Biafa, during the slave trade. I think you can see a difference. I did do a separate South African and Ethiopian one. Doing specific tribes is too difficult.
- creamyhorror 13y ago
  His website itself is interesting - check out the "Random Averages" post (http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/strange-averages/ http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/strange-averages/): - the average Golden Age male actor looks similar to his modern-day counterpart, maybe a bit older going by the receding hairline - the Golden Age actress looks somewhat different from the modern - rounder eyes, somehow? Was that the preferred look for actresses of the era? (they doesn't look like averages, though...) - the average porn actress is blonder than the celeb Relatedly, it seems quite natural for average faces to be attractive - all the blemishes and asymmetries and extremes get evened out, leaving a very neutral look that most people don't have. Extremes are usually not attractive, after all.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

by irickt 13y ago

spullara 13y ago

The obvious take away is that good looking people are actually average looking (as opposed to median looking). The first comment on that blog is from the creator of the images and he explains some of the issues with the collection.

chrischen 13y ago
So is being "average-looking" a misnomer then? Because it's usually not used positively.
- ijk 13y ago
  Slightly different meaning. The colloquial idiom of an "average" face is one that is unremarkable in a crowd, one of median attractiveness. Taking the average of all of the faces in that crowd results in a face that has median features, but measurably higher attractiveness. Reality can be counter-intuitive.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    But supposedly what's defined as average is someone who's features look like most other people. So by definition, the good looking should be a plurality in the population right? That's probably a good thing, otherwise most of the population would end up with people they think are ugly.
    - jonahx 13y ago
      The good looking are certainly not a plurality. JERRY: Elaine, what percentage of people would you say are good looking? ELAINE: Twenty-five percent. JERRY: Twenty-five percent, you say? No way! It’s like 4 to 6 percent. It’s a twenty to one shot. ELAINE: You’re way off. JERRY: Way off? Have you been to the motor vehicle bureau? It’s like a leper colony down there. ELAINE: So what you are saying is that 90 to 95 percent of the population is undateable? JERRY: UNDATEABLE! ELAINE: Then how are all these people getting together? JERRY: Alcohol.
    - ijk 13y ago
      Again, different meanings of "average": median attractiveness vs. balanced, symmetrical facial features. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness Also, if you believe OKCupid Trends, "2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women" and "women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium": http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/ http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dati... (Says nothing about what they think about the people they eventually end up with, of course.)
  - T-hawk 13y ago
    Right. The average of a number of samples can exhibit characteristics not present in each sample, and so it does here. One characteristic often considered attractive in a woman's face is a rounded soft jawline. The average of a large number of samples will tend towards rounded soft features, just by the nature of averaging which blurs together any large outliers. A starker example: People who weigh 80 pounds and people who weigh 240 pounds are both considered unattractive. But average a bunch of each and you get a perfectly attractive mean or median of 160.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
a8da6b0c91d 13y ago
> good looking people are actually average This makes a lot of sense if mutational load causes bad looks. Mutations cause individual deviations from the more ideal underlying template.

Radim 13y ago

TL;DR of the critique: These images are a blend of many "real" images, and these real images may have been sampled in a way that doesn't represent the country's real distribution of women.

victorf 13y ago
I prefer to have no input from that site whatsoever. Particularly after I read them and their commenters celebrating an actual assault on someone who made a tasteless comment. They only care about victim blaming in specific circumstances, it seems. They are not for equality but are instead for gossip-mongering and creating false controversy; just like the entire rest of the Gawker network.

melange 13y ago

That's not a 'critique', rather it is uninformed prejudice. The concept that averaging faces produces attractiveness has been well studied: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness The jezebel author asserts that this must be the result of selection bias while ignoring the research, thus revealing their own prejudice.

niels_olson 13y ago
I was contacted through some posts on Edward Tufte's forum by the admin of an anthropology forum about filtering for hate speech. Suffice to say, my big take-away after taking a look is that anthropology on the internet attracts a tremendous number of xenophobes, racists and bigots. That these folks are not known for their intellect, let alone intellectual integrity, is not surprising. My only regret is not knowing how to solve that problem other than massive education overhaul at the K-12 level.
Someone 13y ago
I always wondered how much of that effect was due to the smoothing out of irregularities in the skin that averaging produces. Reading http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychologie/Psy_II/beautycheck/english/zusammen/zusammen1.htm http://www.uni-regensburg.de/Fakultaeten/phil_Fak_II/Psychol..., I get the impression that that is a main cause of the effect. I base that on the findings that "the more attractive the original faces, the more attractive the resulting compound face (r=0.75 for female and r=0.68 for male faces). Thus, not simply the number, but also the attractiveness of the original faces influences the average attractiveness rating of compound faces. This result is in contrast to the 'attractiveness is averageness' hypothesis." and "Rather, it seems that not the proportions but the surface characteristics (e.g. skin texture) of a face decide wether it is regarded attractive or not. In terms of facial proportions, this means that the 'attractiveness is averageness' hypothesis is clearly falsified." Edit: of course, further research is needed. For example, the subjects doing the ratings all did their shoppings in Regensburg. That's way better than the typical selection of around-20-years-old psychology students (at least 80% female) of late 20th century Western European upbringing, but it will have had an effect on what constitutes beauty.

mmastrac 13y ago

There's a good rebuttal to the critique in the comments of that story: --- 8< --- There is no ethnic cleansing. Some site on the net stole these from me, by not sourcing them to me. I created all of these and more (ones for men) right here: [pmsol3.wordpress.com] My account on FaceResearch.org is Rasfarengi. I have e-mailed the editor about this already. The "South Africa" composite on here is labeled wrong, because who ever took it from my site did not label it correctly. It is actually the Argentina composite. The South African composite I did only uses Khoi-San and South Bantu populations found in South Africa, not whites or colourds. I am African American, so there is no racism here. I didn't make specific composites of many African nationalities because it is just too difficult. My process requires front facing photos with limited smiles. I have to look through nearly 2,000 photos online to find good pictures of Italians. Let alone a Fin. In Africa it is just too hard outside of Nigerians and South Africa, because there are less pictures on the net, because those people don't have good internet access or access to digital cameras the way East Asians and Europeans do. It is even hard to find pictures of Latin Americans of specific nationalities outside the larger nations. I did one of "West Africans" specifically to see if I can tell how much Euro and Native American admixture changed the African American population, whose ancestors mostly originated from the areas between Senegal and Angola (with a very very small % from Mozambique) I tried to use the same % that came to America from specific regions, like the Blight of Biafa, during the slave trade. I think you can see a difference. I did do a separate South African and Ethiopian one. Doing specific tribes is too difficult.

creamyhorror 13y ago
His website itself is interesting - check out the "Random Averages" post (http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/strange-averages/ http://pmsol3.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/strange-averages/): - the average Golden Age male actor looks similar to his modern-day counterpart, maybe a bit older going by the receding hairline - the Golden Age actress looks somewhat different from the modern - rounder eyes, somehow? Was that the preferred look for actresses of the era? (they doesn't look like averages, though...) - the average porn actress is blonder than the celeb Relatedly, it seems quite natural for average faces to be attractive - all the blemishes and asymmetries and extremes get evened out, leaving a very neutral look that most people don't have. Extremes are usually not attractive, after all.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]