‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ The Founding Fathers probably didn’t expect that statement to ring true several hundred years later when talking about getting laid, but here we are.
The so-called ‘Ugly Friend Effect’ is something that conventional wisdom has believed to be true for decades. It is the idea that a person looks quantitatively more attractive (than they normally do) when they are surrounded by people considered less attractive. Say you’re a HARD ‘5’ at best on the 1-to-10 scale of attractiveness but you’re hanging out with a bunch of 2’s then you’re going to look like a 7 or an 8. Unless you made it through college with a crew of models for friends then chances are you’ve experienced this phenomenon once or twice yourself, looking better in the eyes of the ladies when you’re rolling with friends who skipped leg day. Well, science has recently all but proven this conventional wisdom after a study by Dr. Nicholas Furl at the Royal Holloway University of London.
The findings confirm a long-held belief that having ugly friends can boast your chances of attracting a member of the opposite sex on a night out.
It was recently highlighted by the teen comedy movie The Duff – standing for Designated Ugly Fat Friend – where a high school pupil learns she is the ugly friend in her group.
But the findings also suggest that the effect only works if you are the only attractive member of a group.
The presence of a less attractive face does not just increase the attractiveness of a single person, but in a crowd could actually make us even more choosey.
‘We found that the presence of a ‘distractor’ face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgement.’
‘We found that the presence of a ‘distractor’ face makes differences between attractive people more obvious and that observers start to pull apart these differences, making them even more particular in their judgement.’
There you have it. If you want to get laid more often you need to find a crew full of dudes that are uglier than you. None of them can be better looking than you or on your level, you need a crew of fuglies and you’ll be the Mayor of Pound Town in no time.
So I find this study kind of fun on a very personal level. My freshmen year at SMU I took Social Psychology and had to write a 40+ page paper on a study the professor had us all participating in, and it was on the judgment of facial attractiveness. Essentially we’d sit in a room and be shown hundreds of photos and have to make a judgment on how attractive that person was, but in the photos we’d only see the person’s eyes, nose, ears, eyebrows, mouth, etc. It’s been so many years since I participated in that study I don’t really remember the specifics, but I believe the goal was to come up with a composite of the perfect face and to show which features on the human face made someone qualitatively hotter than their very similar counterparts. I’ve always been fascinated by this sort of stuff, and it’s neat to see science confirming a trope that’s been used in Teen Comedies from Hollywood for decades.
…You can CLICK HERE to read more about this study over on The Daily Mail!…