Indulge us for a minute: if you’ve got your phone to hand, pick it up and take a selfie. Which way did you turn your head? Results of psychology research indicate that it’s likely you chose to show off your left cheek, but you probably don’t realize you’re doing it. This is an example of something called the left-cheek bias, and it goes way back to when oil paintings – not Instagram posts – were the way to show off.
What is the left-cheek bias?
The left-cheek bias was first noted in the 1970s. For their 1973 paper published in Nature, Christopher McManus and Nicholas Humphrey, then at the University of Cambridge, studied 1,474 portraits from Western Europe dating between the 16th and 20th centuries. They found that 891 of them showed more of the subject’s left cheek than the right.
“This 60 percent bias to the left is highly significant,” they wrote, after performing some statistical analysis.
Inspired by this study, in the same year, Martin LaBar took a look at a contemporary source – two 1972 college yearbooks – to see if the same bias was apparent. “I found a similar tendency to expose the left side of the face more than the right,” LaBar wrote in a letter to Nature.
Further research into this phenomenon found that when posing for a portrait, regardless of medium, people really do seem more likely to offer their left cheek to the artist. However, the opposite was found to be true for self-portraits, where the right cheek was found to be more predominant. This was put down to the fact that self-portraits would likely have been painted by using a mirror, so if the subject was observing their left side in the mirror it would be painted as a right-sided view.
As more and more people began to carry cameras with them – in the form of smartphones – wherever they went, the opportunity arose to explore this in more depth. A 2015 study found that when a standard selfie was taken, people were more likely to photograph their left side, as we’ve come to expect. When the selfie was taken in mirror mode, a right-cheek bias emerged, again suggesting that in general people prefer to appear in photos facing towards the left.
“The two biases are remarkably stable across different cities and between males and females,” wrote the authors, whose data covered selfie-takers in New York, São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, and Bangkok.
Other studies have since backed up these findings, with one paper reporting that left-oriented selfies got more likes and comments on Instagram, and another finding that humans’ preference for left-sided photos even extends to depictions of chimpanzees.
Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is just one of many examples of left-biased portraits.
Basically, we’re big fans of the left sides of faces. But why?
What’s behind the left-cheek bias?
The fact that the left-cheek bias exists has been established again and again over 50 years’ worth of literature, but the reasons behind it have proven more difficult to determine.
McManus and Humphrey suggested a few potential explanations in their first paper all those years ago. One of the most simple is also the most easily discounted: that artists are more likely to be right-handed and thus might find it easier to draw a left-facing profile. That may have been true, but then we wouldn’t expect the effect to persist into the age of photography and selfie-taking.
They also speculated that the left side of the face may be generally perceived as more attractive, or that the left side of the field of vision – under the control of the right hemisphere of the brain – is better at facial recognition. Another hypothesis was that there could be a reason why people are more likely to turn their heads to the right first.
“But the data do not give much support to any of these explanations,” they wrote at the time. Since then, however, more research has been carried out.
A 2017 paper in aptly named journal Laterality said, “Though we are rarely conscious of it, […] facial expressions of emotion are asymmetric: we tend to express greater emotion on the left-hand side of the face.” This is probably the most widely accepted explanation for the left-cheek bias.
“Previous studies in adults have confirmed that the left cheek bias is not simply the result of an aesthetic (i.e. preference for left cheek portrait poses) or perceptual bias by comparing responses to images in original and mirror-reversed orientations,” the authors elaborated. “These studies found that the left cheek’s greater anatomical expressivity is evident even when the images were digitally manipulated to make a left cheek pose look like a right cheek pose.”
Another factor that McManus and Humphrey noted back in 1973 was a difference between male and female portrait subjects: “Although the left-cheek bias is significant in portraits of both men and women, the bias in women’s portraits […] is much greater than in men’s.”
This is something that has been revisited as the body of research has grown. Some findings presented in a recent poster from researchers at the University of Oslo – which has been posted to preprint server PsyArXiv and not in a peer-reviewed publication – found that of 32 studies, 21 of them (66 percent) “did not find an effect of gender on posing bias”. It’s therefore unclear at this stage whether gender may play a role.
Also, context matters. A study of nearly 6,000 headshots used on academic web profiles found that there was a difference in orientation between different fields, with scientists being more likely to face the right and English scholars keeping up the traditional left bias.
People will keep on taking selfies (even in inadvisable locations), and psychologists will continue to conduct research into the left-cheek bias – it’s just one of the many quirky things that help make us human.
Source Link: Your “Good Side” Is Probably Your Left – Here’s Why
