Back in the 1870s, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galeton wanted to define the face of a criminal. He assembled photographs of men convicted of heinous crimes and made a composite by lining them up on a single photographic plate. The surprise: everybody liked the villain, including Galton himself. He reasoned that the villainous irregularities he supposed belonged to criminal faces had disappeared in the averaging process. In the next century, scientists began to show reliably that faces combined digitally on computers were likable—more so than the individual faces from which they were composed. Although people clearly admire the long legs of Brazilian model Ana Hickmann or Dolly Parton’s breasts, in general humans like averages.
Researchers confirmed that humans judge real faces by their differences or similarities from a norm. But they also found that the norm can change quickly: When researchers showed 164 people sets of 100 computer-generated faces
A. our definition of what’s normal varies with gender
B. our focus of attention varies with gender and age
C. our definition of what’s average changes over time
D. our focus of attention is distracted when interfered
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