If you want to appear more attractive, just hang out with your friends. Or someone else's friends. Or any group, really.

Seriously. Scientists have found that human faces appear more attractive in groups, in a phenomena they are calling The Cheerleader Effect. Which sounds like a Lifetime Original movie, but isn't.

When you look at a series of faces, your brain very rapidly scans the series as a whole and presents you with a whole bunch of information without you even realizing it: the average size of the faces, for example, or what pattern they might be arranged in. If you take a group picture with some friends, the viewer of the picture, if asked to look at your face in the photograph, subconsciously rates your face in relation to the other faces in comparison of not the individual faces in the photograph but instead as a whole.

The brain creates a composite face, a perceived average of other faces in the crowd, which is usually found to be more aesthetically pleasing than the faces used to create it. The viewer then compares your face to the composite face and, unless you're the Elephant Man or have a mug like a tire fire, you'll most likely be considered similar to the average face and thus be made that much more attractive in the minds eye.

Sound too complicated? The Cheerleader Effect is quite similar to the Ebbinghaus Illusion, another eye-brain trick. It all has to do with the split-second computations in your brain when you see something familiar in a new context.

While this won't necessarily turn the Average Joe into Ryan Gosling, it will make picking a new Facebook profile photo a little easier, so long as you aren't doing duck face.

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