It’s true: you might look better beside a less attractive friend

Admittedly, this doesn’t sound very nice. Nevertheless, new research has shown an attractive face will seem more attractive when it’s presented with a less attractive one.

Previously, classical theories of decision making have indicated the perception of attractiveness was “fixed, regardless of what other alternatives are encountered”.

A new study published in Psychological Science would indicate a face's "context" has a much larger role to play.

Dr Nicholas Furl, a psychology lecturer at the Royal Holloway University of London, recently measured how people rate an attractive face when it’s beside a less attractive one.

The study used faces from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database, which houses nearly 5,000 images of human facial expressions.

Participants were shown a series of attractive faces which were labelled “targets”. Targets were rated first on their own, after which two attractive faces were shown again alongside an unattractive “distractor” face.

A similar trial was run as a control, this time measured for “averageness” instead of attractiveness.

The results showed the distractor affected the perceived attractiveness of the target.

“Rightly or wrongly, the way people look has a profound impact on the way others perceive them,” said Dr Furl. “We live in a society obsessed with beauty and attractiveness, but how we measure and understand these concepts is still a grey area.”

He said the research challenges the theory that attractiveness is a “steady” attribute.

"If you saw a picture of George Clooney today, you would rate him as good-looking as you would tomorrow. However, this work demonstrates that the company we keep has an effect on how attractive we appear to others."

The effect of the distractor didn’t just increase the rating of attractiveness of the targets. When two attractive faces were shown with a distractor, people were choosier between the two attractive faces.

The more unattractive the distractor face, the more one of the attractive faces was preferred.

“We found that the presence of a ‘distractor’ face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgement,” said Dr Furl.