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FACE PERCEPTION

Examining the cheerleader effect

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, page 316 (2022)Cite this article

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The cheerleader effect is a phenomenon first described in the television show How I Met Your Mother. The character Barney Stinson hypothesizes that the same person looks more attractive in a group than they do alone, just like cheerleaders, who are stereotypically attractive and seen in groups. Although the line was probably meant as a joke, this hypothesis was confirmed in 2014 by Walker and Vul. They demonstrated that observers perceive individual female and male faces to be more attractive when presented in groups of faces than when presented alone. These findings remained consistent across five experiments, despite changes to face viewing time, group size and image quality.

Walker and Vul’s paper is delightfully simple. But its importance comes from the authors’ novel explanation for the cheerleader effect, which has implications for the wider study of first impressions from facial appearance. Drawing creatively on diverse fields of psychological research, the authors propose that the cheerleader effect arises owing to the interplay of three separate phenomena. First, the visual system creates a summary representation of the scene through ‘ensemble coding’, which allows the observer to rapidly summarize the average facial characteristics of the group. Second, faces with average characteristics are often perceived to be highly attractive. Finally, the observer incorrectly remembers an individual face from the group as having been more similar to the highly attractive summary representation, owing to the hierarchical structure of visual working memory. However, this explanation was not tested in Walker and Vul’s paper. Ironically perhaps, this omission contributed to initial interest in the paper, as several research groups began to test this proposed account of the cheerleader effect.

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References

Original article

  • Walker, D. & Vul, E. Hierarchical encoding makes individuals in a group seem more attractive. Psychol. Sci. 25, 230–235 (2014)

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Related articles

  • Carragher, D. J. et al. The dissociable influence of social context on judgements of facial attractiveness and trustworthiness. B. J. Psychol. 112, 902–933 (2021)

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  • Burns, E. J. et al. Friend effects framework: contrastive and hierarchical processing in cheerleader effects. Cognition 212, 104715 (2021)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Daniel J. Carragher

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  1. Daniel J. Carragher
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Correspondence to Daniel J. Carragher.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Carragher, D.J. Examining the cheerleader effect. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 316 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00063-x

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