Pareidolia and Perception of Anger in Vehicle Styles: Survey Results

Authors: Alan S. Hoback

Abstract:

Most people see human faces in car front and back ends because of the process of pareidolia. 96 people were surveyed to see how many of them saw a face in the vehicle styling. Participants were aged 18 to 72 years. 94% of the participants saw faces in the front-end design of production models. All participants that recognized faces indicated that most styles showed some degree of an angry expression. It was found that women were more likely to see faces in inanimate objects. However, with respect to whether women were more likely to perceive anger in the vehicle design, the results need further clarification. Survey responses were correlated to the design features of vehicles to determine what cues the respondents were likely looking at when responding. Whether the features looked anthropomorphic was key to anger perception. Features such as the headlights which could represent eyes and the air intake that could represent a mouth had high correlations to trends in scores. Results are compared among models, makers, by groupings of body styles classifications for the top 12 brands sold in the US, and by year for the top 20 models sold in the US in 2016. All of the top models sold increased in perception of an angry expression over the last 20 years or since the model was introduced, but the relative change varied by body style grouping.

Keywords: Aggressive driving, face recognition, road rage, vehicle styling.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1340556

References:

[1] M. A. Pavlova, K. Scheffler, and A. N. Sokolov, "Face-n-Food: Gender differences in tuning to faces," PloS one, vol. 10, no. 7, e0130363, 2015.
[2] S. Kühn, T. R. Brick, B. C. Müller, and J. Gallinat, Is this car looking at you? How anthropomorphism predicts fusiform face area activation when seeing cars, PloS one, vol. 9, no. 12, e113885, 2014.
[3] M. Iacoboni, Mirroring people: The new science of how we connect with others. New York: Picador, 2009, pp. 4.
[4] S. M. Nesbit, J. C. Conger, and A. J. Conger, “A quantitative review of the relationship between anger and aggressive driving,” Aggression and Violent Behavior, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 156-176, 2007.
[5] Good Car Bad Car,” U.S. Auto Sales Brand Rankings-July 2016 YTD,” http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/08/usa-auto-brand-sales-results-july-2016-ytd/ Accessed August 2016, 2016.
[6] C. Bernasconi, and A. Hoback, “Public Perception of Walkability: Assessing perception dependency on scene attributes and respondents characteristics,” Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, Chicago, May 25-28, 2011.
[7] A. M. Proverbio, and J. Galli, "Women are better at seeing faces where there are none: an ERP study of face pareidolia," Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 9, pp. 1501-1512, 2016.
[8] Brizendine, Louann. The female brain, New York: Broadway Books, pp. 129, 2006.
[9] Y. I. Tian, T. Kanade, and J. F. Cohn, “Recognizing action units for facial expression analysis,” IEEE Transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 97-115, 2001.
[10] M. M. Bradley, L. Miccoli, M. A. Escrig, and P. J. Lang, “The pupil as a measure of emotional arousal and autonomic activation,” Psychophysiology, vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 602-7, 2008.
[11] P. Valdez, and A. Mehrabian, “Effects of color on emotions,” Journal of experimental psychology: General, vol. 123, no. 4, pp. 394-409, 1994.
[12] The Wall Street Journal, “Why Cars Got Angry—Seeing Demonic Grins, Glaring Eyes? Auto Makers Add Edge to Car ‘Faces’; Say Goodbye to Wide-Eyed Neon.” http://www.wsj.com/articles/ SB114195150869994250, Accessed 11 November 2016, 2006.