Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
typodupeerror delete not in

+-   Study Confirms Cars Have Personalities on Monday December 01 2008, @07:27PM Ponca City, We love you

Submitted by Ponca City, We love you on Monday December 01 2008, @07:27PM
transportation
Ponca City, We love you writes "A study has confirmed that many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles and ascribe various personality traits to cars — a modern experience driven by our prehistoric psyches. "The study confirmed with some rigor what many people have already felt — that cars seem to have consistent personality traits associated with them, and that this is similar to the way people perceive facial expressions," said Dennis Slice, an associate professor of Scientific Computing at Florida State. Forty study participants assessed cars based on a system known as geometric morphometrics by viewing high-resolution, 3-D computer reconstructions and printed images of 38 actual 2004-06 car models and rating each model on 19 traits, including dominance, maturity, gender and friendliness, and if they liked the car. Cars scoring high in the so-called power traits had horizontally elongated hoods, pronounced lower car bodies relative to the windshields and more angular headlights that seemed to suggest a frown and in a finding that suggests there is a hidden road warrior in all of us, study participants said they liked power vehicles best — the most mature, masculine, arrogant and angry-looking ones. Researchers theorized that over evolutionary time, humans have developed a selective sensitivity to features in the human face that convey information on sex, age, emotions, and intentions. "The fact that we can so easily see faces in inanimate objects may tell us something about the evolutionary environment in which this capacity arose," Slice said. "Seeing too many faces, even in mountains or toast, has little or no penalty, but missing or misinterpreting the face of a predator or attacker could be fatal.""
submission

This discussion was created for logged-in users only, but now has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre! [It is magnificent, but it is not war] -- Pierre Bosquet, witnessing the charge of the Light Brigade