Cheerleader effect

In 1979, Donald Symons first proposed this evolutionary explanation, suggesting that the evolving physical attractiveness results from mate assessment favoring partners who exhibited signs of good health and fertility, including face averageness.

Based on them, mate choice,[9] marketing,[10] and social media[11] tactics are designed to increase the attractiveness of a target individual or item via the help of the group.

The phrase was coined by the fictional character Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) in "Not a Father's Day", an episode of the television series How I Met Your Mother, first aired on November 10, 2008.

This point is made again by two other characters, Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), later in the episode, who note that some of Barney's friends also only seem attractive in a group.

This occurrence may be explained by the processing of Barney's visual system, in which his brain automatically calculated a combined beauty level of that group of ladies.

Drew Walker and Edward Vul proposed that this effect arises due to the interplay of three cognitive phenomena:[3] When all three of these phenomena are taken together, researchers proposed that the cheerleader effect results from a "hierarchical encoding" and that the hierarchical structure of visual working memory makes observers summarize the group into an ensemble average.

[19] Based on the effect, the research team offered two other potential explanations for it:[19] They claim that selective attention fits with the gathered data better.

[19] The explanation based on the Gestalt psychology was objected to in this study since researchers found that the effect only occur in the group with large variation in attractiveness.