David Perrett - In Your Face: The New Science of Human Attraction

IN YOUR FACE

The New Science of Human Attraction

David Perrett

David Perrett 2010

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First published 2010 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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ISBN 9780230201293

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Printed in China

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Plates

I thank Louise Barrett, who shaped the entire work, who did so much with the first few drafts, and who was there for almost all of the adventure; Anne Perrett, who watched over each sentence and argument, and who has lived and breathed faces our whole life together; Tamsin Saxton, whose care clarified so much of the book; Monika Harvey, whose apt opinions improved the logic; Beatriz Martin-Andrade, who kept the story line from being too wide of the mark; Jaime Marshall, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, whose belief and coaxing sustained the project; Andrew Nash, whose thorough line editing transformed the text into a readable form; the many people, including Vinet Coetzee, Lisa DeBruine, Juan Carlos Gomez, Ben Jones, Ferenc Kocsor, Jennifer Lewis, Tony Little, David Milner, Marisa Parker, Daniel Re, Ian Stephen, and Ross Whitehead, who checked the text, giving praise when they felt it was merited, yet pointing also to places where the text was inadequate, flippant, patronizing, depressing, or soppy; Davis Buls, for some splendid artwork; Bernard Tiddeman, for the powerful computer graphics; and all those colleagues whose work in the Perception Lab at the University of St Andrews created the stuff to write about, including Lesley Ferrier who patiently organized us all.

DAVID PERRETT

The Perception Lab is based at the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Scotland (http://perception.st-and.ac.uk/).

Colour plates

This book is for anyone who is curious about beauty. Its purpose is to explain, from a scientific point of view, our attraction to faces an attraction that has driven the evolution of our species for millions of years, but that has only recently begun to give up its secrets to scientific study.

While we can normally agree on who has an attractive face, one of my central motivations in writing this book was to bring together the scientific results that demonstrate the diversity in attraction, that is, the reasons why different people find different faces attractive. While the work in my lab at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, has produced some general rules of attractive faces, it didnt take long for results to emerge that showed that not everyone plays by the same rules or focuses on the same cues when deciding who has an attractive face. Facial attraction is personal and as we will see, it is heavily influenced by each of our unique upbringings, our experiences as well as our own appearance.

Perception is a well-established and widely taught branch of psychology and medical science that concerns how we make sense of the information coming at us through our senses. Visual perception is the most developed branch of this field. My interest in faces started as a student when I realized that the scientific methods for studying visual perception could be used to study more than just simple things like lines, distance, colour, and movement they could be extended to more interesting aspects of our visual world. During the course of my doctoral training I became convinced that our brains have sections dedicated to helping us interpret faces. One night, sleepless with excitement, I knew that I would spend my whole career working with faces. I knew that it would be possible to answer many questions about how we see faces, but even then I knew that the subject would be so complex that there was not enough time in one life to address them all.

Once I began working on what makes faces attractive, the reactions my work received from fellow academics and others really surprised me: some people argued that human beauty should not be studied; most questioned whether it could be studied scientifically at all. I still fail to understand both of these convictions. Those that claimed that human attractiveness should not be studied were pointing to the wonderment and sense of magic alchemy surrounding beauty and attraction, which would be despoiled by scientific scrutiny. They argued that objectifying beauty, particularly female beauty, was dehumanizing and discriminatory, and turned individuals into statistics.