Does your date still look as hot today?

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but the question is - how constant is that eye?

What's hot or not? A study suggests our judgments on aesthetics and attractiveness can be formed instantaneously and can be altered by exposure to the judgment and views of others.
What's hot or not? A study suggests our judgments on aesthetics and attractiveness can be formed instantaneously and can be altered by exposure to the judgment and views of others. FILE PHOTO: THE NEW PAPER

Back in the days before Facebook, YouTube and even Tinder - yes, it's hard to believe there really was such a time - two young male engineers at Berkeley got into a disagreement over the attractiveness of a passing woman.

The disagreement spurred them to develop a website, HOTorNOT. com, which hit the Web in late 2000 and quickly became one of the Internet's hottest properties. For a few years HOTorNOT drew millions of visitors, young and old, who burned through hours of time busily rating the hotness or otherwise of anyone who cared to upload their photo.

It might seem unremarkable now, but back in the early 2000s, the idea was ground-breaking. HOTorNOT pioneered the now widespread concept of rating things and became a trailblazer in the now pervasive world of social media. It even influenced the earliest incarnation of what started out as The Facebook (the pronoun did not last long).

As a professor of marketing, the emergence of HOTorNOT and its many imitators and successors has opened up exciting new insights into understanding the processes of human attraction and the factors at play when Cupid's arrow strikes.

I'm interested in how consumers evaluate marketing communications such as advertisements, and how this shapes their choice of products and brands. So understanding how we judge attractiveness and the factors influencing this process are keys to explaining what draws people to certain things above others.

For centuries, we have been told that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". It's a saying supported by several studies which suggest that eons of natural selection have hardwired our perceptions of what is physically attractive, all driven by the ultimate goal of finding healthy mates and perpetuating our genes.

Another factor long assumed to influence aesthetic taste: changes in socioeconomic or cultural norms, for example whether a fuller or slimmer figure is considered more attractive. Such norms generally change only very slowly, over decades or even centuries.

But in recent research using data gathered from a dating website similar to that pioneered by HOTor NOT, a rather different picture has emerged; one that challenges the notion that what we see as beautiful or attractive is rigid or inbuilt.

In a series of studies and experiments conducted by myself at NUS Business School and Assistant Professor Haiyang Yang at the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, we found that what we see as beautiful is dynamic - in other words, constantly changing - and is highly influenced by the views of others.

In fact, we found that individuals often automatically modify their standards of assessing beauty when they are exposed to the views of others, and do so virtually instantaneously.

In our first study, we used data gathered anonymously from the activities of more than 60,000 visitors to a dating website, giving us a data-set of around 800,000 separate ratings in which users evaluated a random series of photos on a scale of 10 (hot) to one (not).

Following the standard practice of rating websites, after each individual had posted his or her rating, the site then displays the combined average score given by every user who had previously rated the photo in question.

This, we noticed, triggered an interesting effect. Over time, as individual users rated more photos, their ratings of who was "hot" and who was "not" would shift - becoming closer and closer to the average.

This shift occurred even though each user's attractiveness ratings were posted anonymously, without anyone else observing, and hence free from the effects of any direct social pressure to conform to the norm.

Given this pattern in the data, we took the study into a lab-based experiment, and tweaked some of the conditions.

For some users, the average rating for a photo was posted before they posted their own rating; for others, the average was revealed afterwards; and in a third category, no average was revealed at all.

In both of the first two categories, as more images were shown and rated, users would steadily shift the assessment closer to the average rating.

However, those who saw no average score did not shift their perceptions to align with a broader consensus.

We then added a fourth variable to the experiment, showing users an average group rating after they had rated each photo, but in some cases creating a fake average, lower than the actual average of previous scores. In this case, users shown the fake low averages began, over time, to post ratings further from the true average.

Most participants interviewed after the study said that seeing the average scores of the group had not played any role in affecting their judgment.

These results raise the notion that our perceptions of what is attractive - or "hot" - is not only highly dynamic and subject to being shaped by the views of others, but could also be artificially manipulated.

Our study casts new light on how perceptions of physical attractiveness are formed with implications for business and many other fields.

Rather than being inbuilt as a result of natural selection, or shaped by gradual changes in cultural or societal trends, it suggests that our judgments on aesthetics and attractiveness can be formed instantaneously and can be altered by exposure to the judgment and views of others.

In other words, when Cupid draws back his bow, the target may be constantly changing - right up until the arrow starts to fly. Beauty may indeed be in the eye of the beholder, but what our eyes see as "hot" is by no means set in stone.

  • The writer is Associate Professor and Dean's Chair in the Department of Marketing at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on March 06, 2016, with the headline Does your date still look as hot today?. Subscribe