The ugliness-in-averageness effect: Tempering the warm glow of familiarity.

Mere exposure (i.e., stimulus repetition) and blending (i.e., stimulus averaging) are classic ways
to increase social preferences, including facial attractiveness. In both effects, increases in preference
involve enhanced familiarity. Prominent memory theories assume that familiarity depends on a match
between the target and similar items in memory. These theories predict that when individual items are
weakly learned, their blends (morphs) should be relatively familiar, and thus liked — a beauty-inaverageness effect (BiA). However, when individual items are strongly learned, they are also more
distinguishable. This “differentiation” hypothesis predicts that with strongly encoded items, familiarity
(and thus, preference) for the blend will be relatively lower than individual items — an ugliness-inaverageness effect (UiA). We tested this novel theoretical prediction in five experiments. Experiment 1
showed that with weak learning, facial morphs were more attractive than contributing individuals (BiA
effect). Experiments 2A and 2B demonstrated that when participants first strongly learned a subset of
individual faces (either in a face-name memory task or perceptual-tracking task), morphs of trained
individuals were less attractive than the trained individuals (UiA effect). Experiment 3 showed that
changes in familiarity for the trained morph (rather than inter-stimulus conflict) drove the UiA effect.
Using a within-subjects design, Experiment 4 mapped out the transition from BiA to UiA solely as a
function of memory training. Finally, computational modeling using a well-known memory framework
(REM) illustrated the familiarity transition observed in Experiment 4. Overall, these results highlight how
memory processes illuminate classic and modern social preference phenomena.