The perception of similarities is influenced by a person’s personality
“Scientific Russia" published data from a study conducted by employees of the New York (USA) and Basel (Switzerland) universities.
In the course of several experiments, the material notes, the study participants said whether the people they were shown were similar. To do this, the scientists took portraits of Bieber, Putin, John Travolta, George Bush, Ryan Gosling and other popular personalities, as well as people unknown to the subjects.
It turned out that if a participant learned that two people were similar in character and other mental properties, then their appearance also seemed similar to him. The same applied to strangers. Jonathan Freeman, an associate professor of psychology at New York University, concludes that our perception of other people is influenced by social knowledge about them. Because of this, we can see others somewhat distorted: we will assume that there are similarities in appearance, even if this is not the case.
The article also says that face recognition is a function that we need to identify other people. Recently, it has also been used in technologies, for example, in iPhones and applications for combating terrorism.
