Beauty is in the hand of the beholder

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In our daily lives, we engage in various activities involving different body movements. We inspect products and advertisements with our eyes, but test products or browse through websites with our hands.

Consider two types of adverts, both featuring a model; one is a print ad that mostly aims to capture the visual attention of the consumer without further involvement, whereas the other is a banner ad that encourages the consumer to move their hand to click on it. Alternatively, imagine a shelf where the consumer looks at a product versus when they need to reach for the product.

Does this difference – looking versus reaching – mean the decision processes are different? According to our research, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the answer is yes.

Our research involved examining how we move our eyes and hands, specifically in response to beauty. In the lab, participants engaged in a very simple numerical task – similar to how consumers would compare prices – in the presence of faces of varying degrees of ‘attractiveness’.

For each trial, participants were presented with three, two-digit numbers: the first one (‘basis’) was located at the bottom of the screen and the other two (‘targets’) at the top left and right corners of the screen. They were asked to click on the target that was numerically closer to the basis. Next to each target, one face was presented. Participants were asked to ignore the faces and execute the task correctly and fast.

We arranged the pairs of faces according to three conditions: congruent (the correct number was paired with an ‘attractive’ face), incongruent (the correct number was paired with an ‘unattractive’ face), and control (the correct number was paired with one of the two moderate faces).

The images were taken from a standardised and validated database of Southeast Asian faces. ‘Attractive’ and ‘unattractive’ faces were selected based on the ratings of a different sample, where faces with an average rating of 0.5 standard deviations above (below) the mean among both female and male raters were categorised as attractive (unattractive). Moderate faces are those with ratings falling in between the range of mean +- 0.5 standard deviations.

Seventy participants ( 54% females) from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore completed the task while we tracked their mouse movements, and a second set of participants – including 63 people ( 58% females) from the same university – took part in the eye-tracking study.

We found that the hand and eye respond to facial ‘attractiveness’, but in different ways. Specifically, people’s hand movements are driven by the attraction towards faces categorised as ‘attractive’, but are much less affected by ‘moderate’ or ‘unattractive’ faces.

‘Being moved by beauty’ is not simply a metaphor; rather, beauty automatically engages hand movement. The eyes, however, tend to fixate on faces on the extreme ends of the attractiveness spectrum, rather than ‘moderate’ faces.

Advertising perspective

In advertising, the use of attractive models is prevalent, well beyond the marketing of beauty products. At the same time, some brands feature models that are not necessarily conventionally ‘attractive’. In fact, Ugly Models, a London-based modelling agency that promotes extraordinary features, has been operating for half a century. It has promoted its models to various brands, from Burberry to Mercedes to Jack Daniel’s, and has made additions to various fashion showcases and catwalks.

According to our study, the effectiveness of these approaches from the consumer’s perspective might be contingent on whether the media platform of the ad involves their eye or hand movement.

In media where the aim is simply to alert viewers to the message, the extremeness – how ‘distinctive’ a face is – of the model’s face may be more important. In this case, either ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’ models would capture the attention of viewers. In media that requires hand movements, such as pay-per-click ads or online selling platforms, models with ‘attractive’ faces might be more effective.

In the study, faces of moderate attractiveness did not seem to influence either eye or hand movement. Recently, companies have started to feature real models to appear more inclusive and authentic. While the merit of this approach might be appreciated by consumers, it may not be effective in gaining their attention to begin with.

Expanding to product aesthetics

This phenomenon could extend to other products – different mechanisms might be engaged when a consumer inspects a product on display (that is, when only the visual system is engaged) compared with when a consumer tests and selects the product (when the hand is also engaged).

In product design, aesthetics can be critical to consumer acceptance and the market success of a product. Meanwhile, products with bizarre and unusual designs – which might not be considered beautiful, yet could attract attention – exist. Both strategies might work equally well in getting the consumer’s attention to a product on display; however, a beautifully designed product will mostly have the advantage when the consumer is expected to reach to use the sample.

While our small sample size did not allow us to test the effect of gender (that is, the gender of the participant and gender of the face), future research could examine the effect for each gender combination – women’s attention to men’s and women’s faces or men’s attention to women’s and men’s faces.

Expanding to product aesthetics, more research could also be conducted to examine consumers’ attention towards ‘ugly food’. Recently, there have been initiatives by start-ups and large retailers to promote the consumption of fruit and vegetables that, while being edible and nutritious, fail to meet retailers’ and consumers’ cosmetic standards, so end up being wasted.

Using our paradigm, future research could look at whether these products can, in fact, capture consumers’ eyes – not just on the shelf, but also in marketing campaigns, such as the ‘inglorious fruits and vegetables’ campaign by French retailer Intermarché, which encouraged consumers to see the beauty of ‘ugly’ products.

By Natalie Truong Faust, assistant professor of marketing at Nova School of Business and Economics (Portugal); Anjan Chatterjee, professor of neurology, psychology, and architecture at the University of Pennsylvania (USA); and Georgios Christopoulos, associate professor of decision neuroscience at Nanyang Business School, NTU (Singapore).

This article was first published in the July 2020 issue of Impact.