To study the visual aspects of attractiveness, some researchers did a great study on faces, with what they called eigenheads.

Each head was a topograhical computer scan of a person's head, broken down into features. They had fifty heads or so. They asked people to say which one they found most attractive. The researchers also included one head that did not belong to any one person, but was an average of the various features of all the heads on the database.

The averaged eigenhead won. What does this tell us about human nature?

The eigenhead experiment tells us nothing. Not just nothing about human nature, but nothing about anything. According to legitimate, procedurally valid experiments, physical attractiveness is based mostly on symmetry, not on any one physical trait. I'd bet anything the fake face was perfectly symmetric, and with no extreme features (by the nature of averages) to counteract that, perfectly attractive.

The experiment could be made scientific by modifying the averaged head to be only as close to perfect symmetry as the average of the real heads, or by modifying the real ones so they were perfectly symmetric.

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