Investigation of the concept of beauty via a lock-in feedback experiment

TL;DR

This study applies a lock-in feedback algorithm, traditionally used in physics, to behavioral economics and social psychology by identifying attractive features of an avatar based on subjective human opinions.

Contribution

It extends the use of lock-in feedback algorithms to analyze subjective concepts like beauty in a large-scale socio-psychological experiment.

Findings

Identified the most attractive avatar features based on participant feedback.

Demonstrated the feasibility of using physics-inspired algorithms in social science research.

Collected data from 7414 volunteers to analyze beauty preferences.

Abstract

Lock-in feedback circuits are routinely used in physics laboratories all around the world to extract small signals out of a noisy environment. In a recent paper (M. Kaptein, R. van Emden, and D. Iannuzzi, paper under review), we have shown that one can adapt the algorithm exploited in those circuits to gain insight in behavioral economics. In this paper, we extend this concept to a very subjective socio-philosophical concept: the concept of beauty. We run an experiment on 7414 volunteers, asking them to express their opinion on the physical features of an avatar. Each participant was prompted with an image whose features were adjusted sequentially via a lock-in feedback algorithm driven by the opinion expressed by the previous participants. Our results show that the method allows one to identify the most attractive features of the avatar.