Sloshed Symmetry

It turns out that alcohol dulls our ability to recognise cockeyed, asymmetrical faces, according to researchers who tested the idea on both sober and inebriated college students in England.

It turns out that alcohol dulls our ability to recognise cockeyed, asymmetrical faces, according to researchers who tested the idea on both sober and inebriated college students in England. Interestingly, men appear to be less prone to losing this ability than women when drinking, which may well explain why so many men try and get women drunk. To find out if alcohol interfered with the ability to distinguish faces of which the left and right sides were uneven, Lewis Halsey of Roehampton University in London and his colleagues designed an experiment involving images of faces that were doctored to make them perfectly symmetrical or subtly asymmetrical. The results of the study were published in the journal Alcohol. Twenty images of a pair of faces—one symmetrical, the other asymmetrical—and then 20 images of a single face were shown to 64 students. Participants were asked to state which face of each of the pairs was most attractive and symmetrical. They found that the sober students had a greater preference for symmetrical faces than did the intoxicated students, and were better at detecting whether a face was symmetrical.