When you look at someone’s face, what’s the first thing that goes through your mind? You probably first determine the most important things about the person that the face belongs to. Are they a man or a woman? Do they look friendly? Could they be dangerous? But before any of these thoughts can even manifest in your consciousness, your brain determines something else: Do they have a pretty face?
That’s right, it only takes a fraction of a second to determine if someone’s face is attractive or not. In a 2020 study, where researchers presented subjects with human faces, they could tell as early as 150 milliseconds after the appearance of a face whether the subjects found the face attractive or unattractive by recording the brain’s electrical signals (EEG)! This is fast enough to likely precede any conscious evaluation of whether someone is beautiful or not, let alone thoughts on their personality. In other words, it’s a highly automatic process that we generally don’t have any control over and that evolution has deeply ingrained into our visual system. Now, why is that?
To answer this question, many fMRI studies have been conducted, trying to figure out where the brain processes beauty. All of them generally point towards one brain area: orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), the lower part of the prefrontal cortex, sitting right above your eyes.
This area was shown to respond to many features that make an attractive face: for instance, the OFC responded stronger to faces that had shiny skin, good facial proportions, used makeup, and this effect seemed to be stronger for sexually relevant faces (e.g., male faces for heterosexual women and homosexual men). On the other hand, one study found that the sense of beauty that people experience when looking at a piece of art instead engages an entirely different section of the prefrontal cortex (aMPFC). In other words, the OFC reacts selectively to facial attractiveness rather than all forms of beauty.
However, the OFC is not exclusively responsible for processing attractiveness. The OFC is also known as the value region of the brain, storing the value of all kinds of different things in a universal currency. This judgement of value helps us make complex decisions. This works for simple choices like which investment we make, based on which we think will yield the higher financial gain. It also works for more complex and subjective choices like which university we want to apply to, perhaps based on our personal goals and how they align with the programme descriptions on the university website. In more concrete terms, the values stored in theOFC are used to determine what is “good for us” and thus helps us guide our decision-making. In the case of human faces, this means that more attractive faces hold a higher value and are ”better for us”. Does this mean that we inadvertently gravitate towards attractive faces because we perceive them as more valuable and hence as “good”? We like to tell ourselves that we would never be biased in such a fundamental way, but the research says we do. The “attractiveness halo” phenomenon has been observed in countless areas: attractive people are perceived to be more intelligent, successful, sociable, morally good — the list goes on. The halo effect also explains the countless women advocating for the release of the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. Aside from his charisma, he was more attractive than you would imagine a serial killer to be, so people simply chose to believe he was innocent. In other words, attractiveness determines how morally good we perceive someone.
In another fMRI study researchers asked participants to rate the attractiveness of faces and found responses in the OFC (nothing new here). But when they independently showed them sentences describing certain actions that they had to evaluate on their moral value, their brain activity looked just as if they were rating faces: actions rated as morally good were associated with stronger OFC responses!
Where does all of this leave us? Our brain assesses if someone is pretty before we even have a chance to intervene. Is our brain hard-wired to give attractive people better treatment? As we just saw, it is in a way. When we look at someone, our brain instantly checks their looks to see if they’re a good person. This makes the most sense when we view it from an evolutionary perspective. Attractive facial features tend to indicate one thing above all else: good health and reproductive fitness. If someone is objectively attractive (symmetrical face, good skin, etc.) that’s a sign that they’re probably in good health and thus able to succeed in their environment. Because of that, they’re likely to produce healthy offspring, which makes them a good choice as a sexual partner. So, one plausible interpretation is that a person’s attractiveness determines the utility we believe that person will have to us, which is what the brain represents in OFC. This process is incredibly strong and automatic—very different from the kind of beauty that we perceive in other things like art or nature. Instead, the brain assigns value to that person from the moment we meet them, shaping our first impressions and how we interact with them.
Even though we pride ourselves in seeing past appearances, our brain casts its judgement long before we even know it. So, next time you look at someone for the first time, pay attention to just how quickly you get the feeling that they’re attractive or not, and see how little control you actually have over this judgement. But this is no reason to be pessimistic: Our brain may be wired by evolution to recognise evolutionary utility in the fraction of a second, but this is not all that counts. Beyond the brain’s initial evaluation, character traits and subjective preferences go a long way in shaping how we view a person. Your first impression might be out of your control, but a lasting impression is earned!
Author: Emil Stroecker
REFERENCES
Chuan-Peng, H., Huang, Y., Eickhoff, S. B., Peng, K., & Sui, J. (2020). Seeking the “Beauty Center” in the Brain: A Meta-Analysis of FMRI studies of beautiful human faces and Visual art. Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, 20(6), 1200–1215. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-020-00827-z
Gulati, A., Martínez-Garcia, M., Fernández, D., Lozano, M. A., Lepri, B., & Oliver, N. (2024). What is beautiful is still good: the attractiveness halo effect in the era of beauty filters. Royal Society Open Science, 11(11), 240882. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240882
Ishai, A. (2006). Sex, beauty and the orbitofrontal cortex. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 63(2), 181–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2006.03.010
Kaiser, D., & Nyga, K. (2020). Tracking cortical representations of facial attractiveness using time-resolved representational similarity analysis. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 16852. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74009-9
Sakano, Y., Wada, A., Ikeda, H., Saheki, Y., Tagai, K., & Ando, H. (2021). Human brain activity reflecting facial attractiveness from skin reflection. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 3412. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82601-w
