Pareidolia: Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female

[Still Waters]

It's fun sometimes when your eyes play tricks on you, and you see a face that isn't really there, staring back at you from a power plug or a potato. This phenomenon is called face pareidolia, and it's something that humans, and even chimps, naturally do.

But it looks like facial features aren't the only thing that we see when we come across an illusory face. A new study has found that we also see age, emotion, and gender – and strangely enough the vast majority of these funny faces are perceived as male faces.

"The aim of our study was to understand whether examples of face pareidolia carry the kinds of social signals that faces normally transmit, such as expression and biological sex," says one of the researchers, University of Queensland psychology researcher Jessica Taubert.

"Our results showed a striking bias in gender perception, with many more illusory faces perceived as male than female."

https://www.sciencealert.com/turns-out-our-brains-perceive-the-faces-of-pareidolia-with-an-unfortunate-side-of-gender-bias

https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2021/12/do-you-see-faces-things

Quote

Illusory faces are more likely to be perceived as male than female

https://www.pnas.org/content/119/5/e2117413119

[Jon the frog]

Probably because we are uglier and fit better with messed up stuff.

But maybe they could be trans man ? 

[ThirdEyePetal]

Yes , i think so .. we can see an ugly man in a potatoe haha ,the rocks may be masculine but the hills are definitely feminine ..

[Guest chiron613]

According to some (I don't recall the source), pareidolia helps us identify potential threats.  It's better to see a face in the bush and have it turn out to be a false alarm, than to not see the face and get eaten.  Possibly the faces seen are masculine, because they would tend to be more dangerous.