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Why Do We See Faces Everywhere?
Even as an adult, when I lie on the grass and stare at the clouds, it does not take long before I start seeing things that are not really there. A face appears, then an animal, perhaps the outline of a person. Once I have seen it, it becomes surprisingly difficult to see the cloud as anything else.
It happens all the time. A watermark left by a drink in a Manchester bar looks remarkably like a smiley face. The grain in our dining table contains what appears to be an orangutan staring back at me. My son’s shaver bears an unsettling resemblance of a demented cat.
Of course, the marks, shapes and shadows are real. The faces are something we’re finding ourselves.
Finding faces in the noise
This phenomenon, if you’re interested, is known as pareidolia, our tendency to find familiar forms in random visual information. Seeing animals and objects in clouds is one example, but faces seem to appear particularly often.
There is a good reason for that. Faces are among the most important things we learn to recognise. They tell us who someone is, where their attention is directed and something about what they might be thinking or feeling. As social creatures, we are exceptionally sensitive to the basic arrangement of a face. Two eye shapes with something that might be a mouth beneath them, can be enough.
This sensitivity appears very early in life. Even young babies show a preference for certain face-like arrangements. Our visual systems are primed to notice something that might be a face before we have had time to examine it carefully.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for this system to favour speed over perfect accuracy. Survival in the distant past depended on quickly recognising predators and reading facial expressions.
The result is a detection system with a rather generous threshold. It sometimes responds to plug sockets, car headlights, clouds and household appliances because they contain enough of the right visual ingredients.
This is more than simply deciding that an object looks a little like a face. Research into face pareidolia (1) suggests that face-like objects can activate some of the same visual mechanisms we use to process real faces and interpret where someone is looking. We know that the shaver is not alive, but we cannot entirely stop ourselves seeing an expression and perhaps even a personality in it.
We do not simply record what is there
Pareidolia is an entertaining visual quirk, but it also reveals something more fundamental about our perception. We do not absorb an entirely objective picture of the world around us. Our brains interpret the information available, using familiar patterns, context and previous experience to reach the most likely conclusion.
Most of the time, this is extremely useful. The world contains far too much information for us to examine every object from first principles. We need to recognise things quickly, often from incomplete evidence and without giving them our full attention.
The watermark does not actually contain a smiley face, but my response has not come from nowhere. The shapes in the mark have activated something already familiar to me. My brain has used what it knows to complete the picture.
Pareidolia is an exaggerated version of something our minds are doing constantly. We make sense of what we see using what we already know and what we expect to find.
What does this have to do with brands?
We do not encounter a brand, pack or product with a blank mind. Long before we have tried the product, its presentation has begun creating expectations.
Colour, shape, typography, imagery and materials all provide clues about what something is and what it might offer. They may suggest that a product will be sweet or sharp, gentle or powerful, everyday or premium. Familiar brand cues can activate a much wider set of memories and associations, often before we have consciously thought about them.
Experimental research has found that changes to packaging colour and shape can influence expectations (2) about qualities such as taste, sweetness and healthiness. Branding can also establish expectations about quality that affect how the subsequent product experience is judged, although the quality of the product itself naturally still matters.
I know that seeing a face in a table is not the same as choosing a brand but it does show that what we perceive is influenced by more than the physical object in front of us. The mind brings its own patterns, associations and expectations to the encounter.
It also means that brand meaning cannot simply be placed inside a design. A research brief might intend a pack to communicate quality, premium or modernity, but consumers still have to interpret the cues. What was intended and what is actually perceived may be very different.
That is why asking whether someone likes a design only tells us part of the story. We also need to understand what they notice, the associations it activates, the expectations it creates and whether those expectations support the intended experience. Many of these responses happen rapidly and may be difficult for people to explain directly.
My dining table is not hiding an orangutan, and my son’s shaver is probably not plotting anything. But both are useful reminders that meaning does not sit neatly inside the things we see. We help to create it.
Brand owners cannot control every interpretation people make. They can, however, understand which cues are most likely to shape those interpretations. Because consumers do not simply see what brands put in front of them. They see what those cues lead them to expect.
In case you’re interested, the cover picture is of my son’s shaver. Both of the wood grain images are from my dining room table. The watermark was taken at the bar at the Midland Hotel in Manchester and the grey circle with the big nose is my porch light.
References
- Palmer, C. J. & Clifford, C. W. G. (2020). Face pareidolia recruits mechanisms for detecting human social attention. Psychological Science, 31(8), 1001–1012.
- Marques da Rosa, V., Spence, C. & Miletto Tonetto, L. (2019). Influences of visual attributes of food packaging on consumer preference and associations with taste and healthiness. International Journal of Consumer Studies, 43(2), 210–217.
