International Journal of Comparative Psychology

Data

are presented which give cross cultural generality to the observation by Langlois and Roggman (1990) that young southwest American college students found composite faces more attractive than the individual faces from which they were derived. These authors attributed the phenomenon to a cognitive mechanism of prototypicality originating in an evolutionary process of stabilising selection towards facial averageness. In this study New Zealand Caucasian and New Zealand Chinese students, together with indigenous students in China, Nigeria and India chose composite New Zealand Caucasian faces as more attractive than the individual faces from which they were constructed. The preference was greater for female than for male faces. Caution is expressed over attributing the phenomenon  to either typicality or stabilising selection.