Preference for Average Anatomy in African American Faces

Koinophilia asserts that average anatomy is viewed as more attractive. While supported in a cohort of Caucasian faces, whether this principle holds true for other ethnicities has yet to be determined.

This study aims to determine if averaged composites collated from separate male and female cohorts of African American faces will be considered more attractive than the individual images.

A 40-person female and a 40-person male cohort of African American faces was created using the Chicago Face Database. Python computer programing was used to detect facial landmarks, align the images, and generate an averaged composite image for each cohort. to generate a composite image for each cohort. A survey for each cohort was created and administered using the crowdsourcing tool Amazon Mechanical Turk (Amazon, Seattle, WA). Survey respondents were asked to rate facial images based on a Likert scale ranging from 1, extremely unattractive, to 7, extremely attractive.

A total of 1,024 responses and 1,057 responses were received for the male and female cohorts, respectively. The composite images were rated significantly more attractive as compared to the real images overall (p<0.0001). Young respondents (18-39) preferred the composite less than middle aged respondents (40-60+). The male composite was rated significantly more attractive across all ethnicities (p<0.01). The female composite was rated significantly more attractive across all ethnicities except Native American and Hispanic respondents (all p<0.01). Variant preferences were observed based on geographic location.

This study largely confirms the presence of koinophilia in the perception of African American faces. Middle aged respondents showed a greater preference for the composite image. Respondents of different regions and ethnicities displayed variant preferences for the facial average.