2014 Editors' Choice Awards: #2 - How I Met Your Mother's Cheerleader Effect

You gotta love when pop culture inspires scientific research. Motivated by one of my favorite TV shows, How I Met Your Mother , the authors of a recent paper published in Psychological Science¹ investigated Barney Stinson’s claim that people appear more attractive when surrounded by others in a group relative to when they are viewed by themselves. He calls this the “Cheerleader Effect,” inspired by the stereotype that cheerleader groups seem very attractive because of how they appear in groups/teams, even though individual cheerleaders are not more attractive than average.

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