AI-modified smiles can boost attraction, speed dating study shows

A well-timed smile can be the ultimate speed dating hack. Artificial intelligence-enhanced smiles during video chats led to greater romantic attraction, researchers report Oct. 28. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Face filters, available to social media users around the world, can smooth out blemishes, whiten teeth and highlight hair. They can age you by decades or turn back time. They can even turn your face into a talking potato.

These digital manipulations are endlessly fun, but they can affect the way we see ourselves and others in ways we don’t fully understand. “The effect of these filters on human psychology remains largely unknown — even if billions of individuals use them,” says Pablo Arias-Sarah, an engineer and cognitive scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Fake out

A computer program subtly increased (top example) or decreased (bottom example) people’s smiles as they chatted. While the participants couldn’t tell the difference, the questionnaires they filled out afterward revealed that the artificial differences had the power to influence how attracted potential suitors were to each other.

Arias-Sarah and colleagues focused on a very subtle change in facial tuning—an increasingly easy change to smiling, expressions that can carry a great deal of social information. “Smiles are among the most emblematic and ubiquitous of human emotional expressions,” says Arias-Sarah, capable of communicating attraction, sincerity, competence, and confidence, perhaps even when forced (SN: 9/2/15).

In the four-minute video chats, the 31 participants either had their smiles slightly raised or lowered. For some of the conversations, both people’s smiles increased or decreased similarly. In others, the smiles were wrong, with one person’s smile facing up and the other facing down.

Timing was everything, it turns out. When two conversationalists increased their smiles, they reported higher levels of attractiveness than in other conditions, questionnaires after their conversation revealed. “Romantic attraction was affected by whether the participants were perceiving each other as smiling at the same time,” rather than just being attracted to the other person’s smile, says Arias-Sarah.

Showing that artificially enhanced smiles can affect romantic feelings raises broad questions about the ethical use of face-altering technology. After the speed dating experiment, the volunteers were told that their faces had been manipulated. But as this kind of technology permeates the digital world, these discoveries may not be so forthcoming.

Next, the researchers want to explore other digital transformations, changing gender, expressiveness, gaze or age, to study how they affect social interactions, such as job interviews.