Cheerleader Effect

The cheerleader effect, also called the group attractiveness effect, is the tendency for individual faces to be perceived as more attractive when seen in a group than when seen alone. The effect was named and demonstrated experimentally by the psychologists Drew Walker and Edward Vul in a 2014 study, which found that participants rated the same face as more attractive when it was presented as part of a group photograph than when it was presented individually. Proposed explanations include the visual system's tendency to compute an average of the faces in a group, which tends toward attractiveness because averaged faces are typically rated as more attractive, and a tendency for individual faces to inherit some of the perceived attractiveness of the group as a whole.