Observational studyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
From likely to likable: The role of statistical typicality in human social assessment of faces.
Observational study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Comparing Activation Typicality and Sparsity in a Deep CNN to Predict Facial Beauty.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Effect of facial and nasolabial asymmetry on perceived facial esthetics in children with non-syndromic cleft lip and palate.Clinical oral investigations · 2024Article
- Fluency, prediction and motivation: how processing dynamics, expectations and epistemic goals shape aesthetic judgements.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Sparsity in an artificial neural network predicts beauty: Towards a model of processing-based aesthetics.PLoS computational biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Assessing the roles of shape prototypicality and sexual dimorphism in ratings of the trustworthiness of faces.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Aesthetic preferences for prototypical movements in human actions.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Congruence in European and Asian perception of Vietnamese facial attractiveness, averageness, symmetry and sexual dimorphism.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Subjective consistency increases trust.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Facial typicality and attractiveness reflect an ideal dimension of face structure.Cognitive psychology · 2023Article
- A link between age, affect, and predictions?European journal of ageing · 2022Review
- Incomplete faces are completed using a more average face.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2022Article
- "Liking" as an early and editable draft of long-run affective value.PLoS biology · 2022Article
- The brain produces mind by modeling.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- From likely to likable: The role of statistical typicality in human social assessment of faces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Humans readily form social impressions, such as attractiveness and trustworthiness, from a stranger's facial features. Understanding the provenance of these impressions has clear scientific importance and societal implications. Motivated by the efficient coding hypothesis of brain representation, as well as Claude Shannon's theoretical result that maximally efficient representational systems assign shorter codes to statistically more typical data (quantified as log likelihood), we suggest that social "liking" of faces increases with statistical typicality. Combining human behavioral data and computational modeling, we show that perceived attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, and valence of a face image linearly increase with its statistical typicality (log likelihood). We also show that statistical typicality can at least partially explain the role of symmetry in attractiveness perception. Additionally, by assuming that the brain focuses on a task-relevant subset of facial features and assessing log likelihood of a face using those features, our model can explain the "ugliness-in-averageness" effect found in social psychology, whereby otherwise attractive, intercategory faces diminish in attractiveness during a categorization task.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.