male female faces social proof attractiveness experiment
Women, which of the two guys in the picture do you find more attractive?

According to Ben Jones and his colleagues at the University Of Aberdeen in Scotland, you’re likely to find the guy on the left more attractive. Here’s why…

They showed pairs of male faces to 28 women, who were asked to rate their attractiveness. The faces had been previously rated by 40 different women as of about equal attractiveness.

The researchers then showed the same pairs again, but added a third female face in-between the two male faces, with the female face looking at one of the two guys, and either smiling or not smiling.

The second time around, the women found the faces of the men being smiled at more attractive, while the faces that weren’t being smiled at were now rated as less attractive.

They also ran the same experiment on 28 men. Shockingly, the men rated the guys who were being smiled at by the female as less attractive! (And now you understand exactly why guys say, “I don’t know what she sees in him.”)

Now, I’m a marketer not a psychologist, so my educated guess as to why these females rated a male face as more attractive when the female face was looking and smiling at it, is because of the law of influence called social proof (which we talked about in the last post). They could see another female as appearing to like the guy (even though it was a picture), and so they liked him more!

Customers behave in a similar way to those men and women in the experiment. I should know, I’ve been a customer many times in my own life - and I’m sure you have too. When we see lots more people buying Brand X over Brand Y, we tend to think that somehow Brand X must be better, don’t we? Even though many times that may not be true.

We’ve already seen that a man’s attractiveness rating can be influenced simply by a picture of a female smiling at him! - implying that somebody already finds him attractive.

In other words, social proof.

That same principle can work for your products, too.

So how are you applying the law of social proof for your products, services and blogs? One popular method, for example, is to display testimonials from happy customers - although later on this week we’ll examine some of the ways in which you can multiply the effects of your testimonials.

In the meantime, thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts by leaving a comment.

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