But WHY…?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAccording to the same study, our false perceptions of the attractiveness of groups can be blamed on our brains’ tendency to selectively pay attention to only some of the stimuli around us. Our cognitive processes aren’t powerful enough to pay attention to all of the stimuli constantly occurring around us or in a certain moment. So, when this group of girls walks into the bar we selectively attend to only one or few of their faces. The way the attended-to faces are chosen is that they are deemed most important by our cognitive processes. During selective attention, the most important or prevalent stimuli are attended to and the less important are blurred into the background. Evidently, our brains deem attractiveness as an important thing to attend to and we attend to the most attractive people in a group. This process can be compared to the cocktail party effect which is a commonly known phenomenon of auditory selective attention. It explains the way we can filter out several sounds going on at a cocktail party and only pay attention to the ones we consider important, like hearing our name. This process of selective auditory attention helps to explain the selective visual attention process taking place when we experience the cheerleader effect.<\/p>\n
Noted…<\/span><\/p>\nSO if you are not sure what to take away from all of this information, here is some help. If you want to maximize your attractiveness travel with your squad. Like Barney said, The Cheerleader Effect is dangerous. Not in a way that it can put you at serious risk of anything, because let\u2019s check ourselves and realize we\u2019re only talking about attractiveness in this case, but dangerous in the sense that your cognitive processes can make you think you are seeing something much different in a group of people than what is actually there. The episode of \u201cHow I Met Your Mother\u201d backs this up when they group of girls is zoomed in on and Barney and his friends see what they all really look like up close and individually. On the flip side, the next time you see a group of people who you think are all drop dead gorgeous, take a closer look at their individual faces. You might be surprised at how much your brain was able to trick you.<\/p>\n
References<\/p>\n
Carragher, D. J., Lawrence, B. J., Thomas, N. A., & Nicholls, M. E. (2018). Visuospatial asymmetries do not modulate the cheerleader effect. Visuospatial Asymmetries Do Not Modulate the Cheerleader Effect<\/em>. Retrieved April 5, 2018, from https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41598-018-20784-5.<\/p>\nOjiro, Y., Gobara, A., Nam, G., Saski, K., Kishimoto, R., Yamada, Y., & Miura, K. (2015). Two replications of “Hierarchical encoding makes individuals in a group seem more attractive. 11<\/em>(2). doi:https:\/\/www.tqmp.org\/ReplicationStudies\/vol11-2\/r008\/r008.pdf<\/p>\nOsch, Y. V., Blanken, I., Meijs, M. H., & Wolferen, J. V. (2015). A Group\u00e2\u0080\u0099s Physical Attractiveness Is Greater Than the Average Attractiveness of Its Members. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,<\/em>41<\/em>(4), 559-574. doi:10.1177\/0146167215572799<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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Have you ever been out with friends when a squad of girls walks in, and, although you hate to admit it, they look so good that they catch everyone in the room\u2019s eye? Fortunately, as jealous as they might make you, and as much as you might want to look like them, there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8758,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[266316],"tags":[150206,150439],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8758"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4426"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4618,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4426\/revisions\/4618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/cogblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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