Seeing faces in common objects is not unusual. You might have seen the “man in the moon”, or seen faces in electrical outlets or sliced bell peppers. A new study from the National Institute of Mental Health has now shown that people tend to recognize these faces as having a particular age, emotion or gender - and they’re usually male.
Seeing faces in inanimate objects is a common type of pareidolia, the tendency to assign meaning to patterns. Neuroscientists have been trying to understand how and why our brains imagine faces that aren’t really there. In 2014, research from China and Canada found that it’s very common, and that our brains are just very primed to recognizing faces - even when they’re not really there.
Now, Susan Wardle and colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, revealed something interesting about the faces we see in imaginary objects. Even though these faces aren’t real, people tend to associate them with a particular age, emotion or gender. Specifically, the researchers discovered that most faces in inanimate objects are perceived as male.
That seems odd, because remember that we’re talking about the imagined, featureless faces you see in wood grain, potatoes, and mailboxes. But most of the over 3,800 volunteers in this research study saw the majority of these faces as male. It didn’t matter if the person looking at the images was a man or a woman, and it didn’t matter whether they considered the object they were looking at (the potatoes or mailboxes) as being particularly masculine or feminine. By and large, the pattern of two dots as eyes and a third shape as mouth made people think “yes, this face is clearly male”.
It’s an interesting cognitive bias, and it’s part of a much larger phenomenon. In all of the most simple depictions of faces, the female version is usually shown as having something extra, like long hair, eyelashes, or lipstick. By extension, the basic face without those added features is considered “male”.
And now it seems that this interpretation of unadorned simple faces as male is so pervasive that it even seems to have affected how we think of the imaginary faces in inanimate objects. It’s why we see a man in the moon, and not a woman.
But the study doesn’t explain why we interpret faces that way. There are a lot of questions that still need to be answered. For example, it could be that there are cultural differences in how we see these illusions of faces. Maybe there are cultures that don’t assign gender to them at all, or that would find most of them female.
So next time you see a face in an inanimate object, ask yourself what gender the face has. If you’re anything like the research subjects in Wardle’s research, you’ll likely think that the three shapes that make up the imaginary eyes and mouth look like a man.