AI-Enhanced Smiles Increase Attraction, Reveals Speed-Dating Study

A well-timed smile could be the ultimate speed-dating hack. Smiles enhanced by artificial intelligence during video chats led to higher romantic attraction, researchers report October 28 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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

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

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

Arias-Sarah and colleagues focused on one very subtle face-tuning change — an ever-so-slight tweak to smiles, expressions that can hold a trove of social information. “Smiles are among the most emblematic and ubiquitous human emotional expressions,” says Arias-Sarah, capable of communicating attraction, sincerity, competence and trust, perhaps even when they’re forced (SN: 9/2/15).

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Across four-minute video chats, 31 participants either had their smiles slightly dialed up or down. For some of the chats, both people’s smiles were similarly enhanced or diminished. In others, smiles were misaligned, with one person’s smile turned up and the other turned down.

Timing was everything, it turns out. When two chatters both had their smiles boosted, they reported higher levels of attraction than in the other conditions, questionnaires after their chat revealed. “Romantic attraction was influenced by whether participants were perceiving each other smiling at the same time,” and not just attracted by the other person’s smile, Arias-Sarah says.

Showing that artificially enhanced smiles can influence romantic feelings raises broad questions about the ethical use of face-altering technology. After the speed-dating experiment, volunteers were told their faces were manipulated. But as this sort of technology pervades the digital world, those disclosures might not be as forthcoming.

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