Attractiveness Learning from Partially Occluded Faces

Facial attractiveness tends to be overestimated when it is partially occluded by a sanitary mask ( mask bias ). However, it remains unclear why people have not developed a cognitive strategy to accurately judge the attractiveness of partially occluded faces, despite repeatedly encountering this bias in daily life. Are we simply unable to learn such a strategy? This study examined whether people can learn to adjust their attractiveness judgments of mask faces by receiving repeated feedback on the “true” attractiveness (the uncovered face along with a rating previously assigned by a large majority). Through one week, participants were exposed daily to mask faces followed by feedback. Interestingly, female participants learned to adjust their judgments more quickly than male participants. These findings suggest that people can, to some extent, acquire a strategy for judging facial attractiveness with massed learning. Otherwise, the bias is likely to persist, as it does in everyday settings.