Twenty-one separate facial landmarks were marked and measured, from which researchers were able to calculate an individual asymmetry score. Their results were clear: Facial asymmetry in adolescents is in no way related to early childhood heath. The results were published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The researchers suggest that our attraction to symmetry might be a byproduct of our sensitivity to these major asymmetries — or possibly just a reflection of our aesthetic appreciation of symmetry in art and nature. Register or Log In.
The Magazine Shop. Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. In sum, the Evolutionary Advantage view suggests that attraction to symmetric individuals reflects an attraction to healthy individuals who would be good mates. The second theory to explain the preference for facial symmetry is Perceptual Bias. If this is true, the ease of processing symmetrical stimuli would cause us to naturally prefer them to asymmetrical stimuli.
Under this view, preferences for symmetrical faces would be no different than for any other object. So according to this, as well as preferring symmetrical faces, humans would also prefer more symmetrical objects of any kind. This has been supported as it has been found that people much prefer symmetrical pieces of abstract art and sculptures to asymmetrical ones.
Little and Jones did a study to investigate why people prefer symmetric faces to asymmetric ones, by testing and attempting to apply predictions from both the Evolutionary Advantage theory and Perceptual Bias. Previous studies found that the symmetric preference is stronger for attractiveness of opposite sex than same sex. Little and Jones found that the manipulated, symmetric faces were judged more attractive when shown the right way up, but not when the faces were inverted.
These findings suggest that symmetry is more important in mate choice stimuli than in other stimuli, supporting the Evolutionary Advantage theory and presenting multiple difficulties for the Perception Bias theory if symmetry of any kind was preferred then the more symmetrical face would have been indicated as more attractive both the right way up AND when inverted.
Mark Shriver, a geneticist, who conducts research in Brazil on facial symmetry. I think that both theories are highly plausible when it comes to understanding why people find symmetry attractive. I have heard of people talking about how symmetrical faces are more attractive, and that really never made sense to me.
But I also had no idea these theories exist. Most objects in the real world are symmetrical. This is particularly true of nature: the radial symmetry of starfish or flower petals, the symmetrical efficiency of a hexagonal honeycomb, or the uniquely symmetrical crystal patterns of a snowflake.
In fact asymmetry is often a sign of illness or danger in the natural world. And, of course, human beings are symmetrical, at least on the outside some internal organs like the heart and liver are off-center.
Decades of research into sexual attraction have proven that both men and women find symmetrical faces sexier than asymmetrical ones. The leading explanation is that physical symmetry is an outward sign of good health, although large-scale studies have shown no significant health differences in people with symmetrical or asymmetrical faces. Since severe physical asymmetries are strong indicators of genetic disorders, our brains might just be overreacting.
The simple explanation for our attraction to symmetry is that it's familiar. Symmetrical objects and images play by the rules that our brains are programmed to recognize easily. Symmetry is also economy. Symmetry is simplicity. Symmetry is elegance. A more esoteric explanation for the satisfaction we feel at seeing a creatively symmetrical work of art, or a perfectly stacked display of soup cans in the grocery store, is that the "stuff" of our brains is inseparable from the "stuff" of nature.
The neurons and synapses in our brain, and the processes by which they communicate, connect and conjure thoughts, evolved in parallel to the stars and the starfish. If nature is symmetrical, then so is our mind. If you're lucky enough to have two functioning eyes and an undamaged brain, you'll say, "a bright white triangle on top of another triangle. The visual trick, called the Kanizsa triangle, is so powerful that your brain fills in border lines separating the two triangles and makes the top one look brighter, even though the white spaces throughout the image are in fact the identical shade of white.
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