審美會一直變化，所以你一直沒有“喜歡的類型”
Before the beard trend, I preferred the look of a clean-shaven man. Then beards went mainstream. Now, after seeing countless men donning this look, I find myself giving five o’clock shadows a second glance. Apparently, I’m not alone.
鬍鬚還沒風靡的時候，我更喜歡男人把鬍子刮乾淨。之後，鬍鬚成了主流審美。現在，看多了鬍鬚男，我對清晨刮過臉傍晚又長出的胡茬的那一型總會多看兩眼。顯然不只我是這樣。
“I find men with beards more attractive. Before it was not important, but now half of the men I know have beards,” one survey respondent told The Guardian when asked about facial hair.
一名受訪者在接受英國《衛報》關於面部毛髮的採訪時說：“我覺得留鬍鬚的男人更有魅力。以前鬍鬚對男人的外表並不重要，但現在我認識的一半男人都留著鬍鬚。”
It’s often thought that we are hardwired by millennia of natural selection to gravitate towards certain traits, like facial symmetry. We know our standards of beauty change over time – but those shifts have been thought to be relatively long-term, responding to the media and popular culture. And even if we know that our sense of beauty still differs somewhat from person to person, most of us believe that we each have a certain ‘type’ that stays somewhat constant throughout our lifetime.
普遍認為，經過數千年的自然選擇，我們會特別傾向於某些特徵，比如面部對稱。我們都知道審美標準會不斷改變，變化一般都是源於大眾媒體和流行文化，而且每個標準維持的時間也相對較長。儘管我們知道人們的審美標準不一，但大都認為人一生會有某種保持不變的“喜歡類型”。
But it turns out ‘over time’ is a shorter window than it once was. Our standards of beauty don’t just change over months or years. They can change in an instant.
但事實證明，“隨著時間的推移”所指代的週期比從前更短了。我們的審美標準可能幾年就變，也可能幾個月就變，甚至還可能一下就變。
“Beauty still is in the eye of the beholder, but our on-going work suggests that the beholder may be changing constantly,” says Haiyang Yang, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and author of a study that found that our sense of beauty can change based on other people’s opinions. “It can be argued that the advent of the internet age may be causing people to change their beauty standards faster than ever before in human history.”
美國約翰霍普金斯大學凱里商學院助理教授楊海洋(音譯)說：“審美標準仍然存在於觀者眼中，但我們正在進行的研究表明，觀者的看法可能會不斷改變。”他發表的一項研究認為，審美會根據他人的意見發生變化。“可以說，互聯網時代的到來可能正讓人們的審美標準比以往任何時候都變得更快。”
You can blame how much we’re bombarded today with images of other people – as well as, yes, internet dating.
你可以將此歸咎於他人的圖片轟炸，以及，網上約會。
Recent research has found that our judgments of attractiveness not only change, but that we actually see the next face as more or less attractive, based on faces we have just seen. With a dating site or app, of course, this happens repeatedly and in mere milliseconds.
近期的研究發現，我們對吸引力的判斷不僅會改變，而且還會對比先前看到的面孔判斷下一張是否更好看。有了約會網站或程序，這是常有的事兒，而且改變速度是以毫秒計算的。
In one study at the University of Sydney, female participants rated 60 men as ‘attractive’ or ‘not attractive’ after pictures of their faces flashed on a screen for about one-third of a second. Researchers found that participants were more likely to rate a face as attractive if they thought the preceding face was attractive. (This went the other way, too: they were also more likely to rate a face as unattractive if they thought the preceding face was unattractive.) When participants viewed 242 female faces and were asked to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to eight, they viewed people as more or less beautiful based on their previous responses – so much so that their perception of beauty changed with each new face.
悉尼大學的一項研究中，受訪女性會在屏幕上逐一看到60名男性面孔，並對他們依次按照“有吸引力”或“沒有吸引力”進行評價，每張面孔出現的時間大約為三分之一秒。研究人員發現，如果受訪者認為前一張面孔有吸引力，就更有可能評定下一張也有吸引力。(反之亦然：如果認為前一張臉沒有吸引力，就更有可能評定下一張也沒有。)讓受訪者看完242張女性面孔後請她們按照一到八的等級評定吸引力程度，發現對前一張面孔的評測會影響對下一張的評定——以至於對每一張新面孔的審美都在變化。
The reason comes down to how the brain handles new information. “Your brain can’t process all the information that’s continuously flooding into your visual system from your eyes, so it creates shortcuts where it can,” says Jessica Taubert, lead author of the study at the University of Sydney, where she is a postdoctoral researcher. “Your brain relies on previous visual cues so it doesn’t have to constantly reanalyse that information.”
原因可以歸結為大腦處理新信息的方式。悉尼大學負責這項研究的第一作者兼博士後研究員陶伯特(Jessica Taubert)說：“大腦無法處理從眼睛不斷湧入到視覺系統的所有信息，因此有捷徑就走，會依賴之前的視覺線索，這樣就不必費勁地不斷重新分析這些視覺信息。”
In this case, the shortcut used is what scientists refer to as ‘serial dependence’: we expect the physical state of an object to remain stable from one moment to the next. For example, when you glance at a coffee mug and look away, you expect its identity to be the same when you look at it again.
這裡的捷徑就是科學家所說的“序列依賴性”——我們期望物體的物理狀態保持穩定。例如，你掃了一眼咖啡杯然後把目光移開，再看它時，你想著它還是那隻咖啡杯。
A similar concept applies in online dating. As millions of lovebirds scour digital profiles, their brains assume while they are fixated on a face that its identity will remain the same – attractive or not attractive. They quickly swipe to the next profile and are presented with what could be best described as an illusion. Their brains haven’t had time to reanalyse the information as a new face belonging to a new person, so they perceive the next face as they perceived the last.
類似原理也適用於網絡約會。數以百萬的求偶者在網上快速瀏覽著約會對象的照片，無論看到的面孔吸引與否，大腦都認為這張臉不會改變。人們迅速打開下一個人的照片，看到的更像是一種幻覺。大腦沒有那麼多時間重新分析信息，認出新面孔是不同的人，於是認為跟前一張臉是同一張。
“The fact that our brains quickly adapt to our visual environment is not new. What is new is the speed at which our environment can change,” says Teresa Pegors, a former assistant professor of psychology at Azusa Pacific University and co-author of the study.
美國阿茲塞太平洋大學前心理學助理教授佩戈爾斯(Teresa Pegors)也是該研究的共同作者，她說：“我們早就知道大腦能夠快速適應視覺環境，但如今環境改變的速度卻前所未有。”
“This can make beauty a constantly shifting target and is one piece, though certainly not the only or even most important piece, in the equation of why it is harder to be content with a single partner over the long haul.”
“這就會令審美不停改變，也是為何人們越來越難以長期對同一個伴侶感到滿意，但這只是一小部分原因，也不是最重要的。”
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