Abstract
Our judgment of a target is influenced by its context. So is it for the judgment of facial attractiveness. The current research aimed to explore when there were multiple social groups in the context, how faces of different social groups affected the attractiveness of an individual face, resulting in varying degrees of cheerleader effect. We presented the target face individually or in the context containing two social groups: both the own group and the other group of the target face and manipulated the context into five conditions: HOHT (high attractive own group and high attractive other group), HOLT (high attractive own group and low attractive other group), LOHT (low attractive own group and high attractive other group), LOLT (low attractive own group and low attractive other group), ALONE (no surrounding faces). Target faces were nine faces with continuously increasing attractiveness. We used Black female faces and White female faces as two social groups in Experiment 1a and 2a, and Asian female faces and White female faces in Experiment 1b and 2b. The task in Experiment 1 was to judge whether the target face in each context was attractive or unattractive. The task in Experiment 2 was to rate the attractiveness of the target face in each context. Both experiments showed the contrast effect that the attractiveness of target faces increased significantly in LOLT, with ALONE as the baseline. Besides, Experiment 2 showed that the attractiveness increment of the target face in LOHT and HOLT was also significant with the effect in LOLT being greater than that in LOHT which was greater than that in HOLT. Our results indicated that low attractive surrounding faces increased the attractiveness of the target face, and the weight of the own group was greater than that of the other group.