With the Hugh Hefner effect, a person’s attractiveness is increased by having a better-looking partner, such as his former girlfriend Crystal Harris ReutersWhile many dismiss the “ugly friend effect”, in which someone surrounds themselves with people who are less beautiful to appear more attractive, new research has suggested there may be some truth in it. Nicholas Furl from Royal Holloway at the University of London asked participants to rate faces in photographs and then to reassess them after seeing a gallery of less attractive images. People ranked higher in terms of attractiveness when they were judged alongside those less pleasing on the eye — and it was found that disparate levels of beauty within a group made viewers even pickier. “The presence…

Source: The Times September 29, 2016 23:03 UTC