If we see someone attractive, we say he or she is “easy on the eyes.” Now new research suggests that beautiful faces, paintings, objects or patterns are attractive because they are easy on the mind.
Previous research showed that people tend to find typical things more attractive, from watches to birds to faces. In fact, researchers found that the secret to creating an attractive face was to “average” many faces into a digital composite (right). One idea is that evolution adapted us to like typical-looking faces because they suggest good health in a prospective mate. But this notion does not explain why we would like typicality in cars, fish or other things we are not trying to mate with.
It turns out that our brains might simply “like” stimuli that do not take too much effort to process, says Piotr Winkielman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego. And that holds whether we are looking at a human face or a pattern of dots.
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Winkielman and his colleagues created two different random patterns out of eight dots. They called one of the patterns an “Ack” and the other one a “Blub.” Then they showed people variations of these two patterns and asked them to rate each pattern as either an Ack or a Blub.
The closer each pattern was to its prototype, the faster people were able to make the classification and the more attractive they found the pattern—even though it was just a series of random dots with no obvious aesthetic value. The easier the pattern was to perceive, the prettier people found it.
“I think ultimately there's a reward for successful perception,” Winkielman says. “There's an internal brain reward for processing efficiency. By making the pattern easier to perceive, we're letting the brain give itself a pat on the proverbial back.