Averageness
He had devised a technique called composite photography, which he believed could be used to identify 'types' by appearance, which he hoped would aid medical diagnosis, and even criminology through the identification of typical criminal faces.
To test the hypothesis, he created photographic composite images of the faces of vegetarians and criminals to see if there was a typical facial appearance for each.
Galton published this finding in 1878,[9] and also described his composite photography technique in detail in Inquiries in Human Faculty and its Development.
[8] Similar observations were made in 1886 by Stoddard, who created composite faces of members of the National Academy of Sciences and graduating seniors of Smith College.
During this year psychologists Langlois and Roggman wanted to systematically examine whether mathematical averageness is linked with facial attractiveness.
[1][2][3][11][12][13][14] To test this, they selected photographs of 192 young male and female white faces; each of which was computer scanned and digitized.
For instance, Coren Apicella and her co-workers from Harvard University[22] created average faces of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe of 1,000 in Tanzania, Africa, the Hadza people.
Apicella[22] attributes this difference to the wider visual experiences of the Europeans, as they had been exposed to both Western and African faces.
[19][24] That the preference for the average is biological rather than cultural has been supported by studies on babies, who gaze longer at attractive faces than at unattractive ones.
Thus the ability to extract the average from a set of realistic facial images operates from an early age, and is therefore almost certainly instinctive.
[24] The explanation for the averageness phenomenon covers two distinct, but complementary fields of inquiry: cognitive and developmental psychology, and evolutionary biology.
Adults and infants organize and consolidate sensory information into categories (e.g. "trees", "chairs", "dogs", "automobiles", "clouds" etc.).
[1][2] It is thus possible that an average of only 32 facial exemplars is sufficient to approximate the population mean, and thus produce a prototype that is shared by almost everyone in a community.
Developmental stability is the ability of an organism to buffer its development against environmental or genetic disturbances and produce a specific phenotype.
