Guys without girls

Guys without girls

April 19th, 2008 by Mike Love

In 2007, researchers at Aberdeen University’s Face Research Laboratory showed that women found the face of a man more attractive when the face of a woman was smiling at it. (NewScientist) Biologists have a term, “mate choice copying”, for similar behavior in birds.

I was looking at some photos of couples on FaceStat and wanted to run a quick and dirty version of this experiment, and including the other FaceStat variables. I photoshopped out the girl from guy/girl photos and reuploaded. The results followed the same trend as the Aberdeen study (although the Turkers are mixed gender). The strongest, most consistent difference for the photoshopped photo was in relationship status (more single, obviously) and in attractiveness (25% of people found them less attractive). Some examples:

Some details and other results:

The guy’s face was clearly identified in the couple photo. I know this because 100% of Turkers classified the person in the couple photo as male.

The single guys were also consistently identified as more conservative and heavier.

-Mike