When it comes to automobiles, GM used to stand for General Motors; but soon the acronym may be better known for geometric morphometrics, a system of study recently used to measure pareidolia.

What the heck is pareidolia, you ask? Hope you're sitting down:

...we have [a propensity] to actually see faces or human characteristics in everything from cars to clouds, a phenomenon called pareidolia. But now researchers hope to better understand what goes on in the brain when people see faces in objects versus humans faces, as well as help automakers design more appealing cars.

...Study participants assessed cars based on a system known as geometric morphometrics (GM), which allowed the men and women to rate certain traits on a sliding scale (such as "infancy" to "adulthood"). The traits represented maturity, sex, attitudes, emotions, and personality — all things that people infer from human faces at a single glance.

After rating car traits, participants then answered the question of whether they saw a human face, animal face or no face at all on the cars. They drew facial features such as eyes, nose and mouth on the car images whenever they did see faces.

Lastly, the study participants answered whether they liked a car or not... People overwhelmingly preferred cars that rated highest on "power" traits." High "power" cars like the BMW 5 Series tended to be lower or wider, and have slit-like or angled headlights with a wider air intake.

The participants also largely agreed on which cars had which traits, such as arrogant, afraid and agreeable. A few traits such as disgusted, extroverted and sad caused more disagreement.

Looks like Pixar was onto something.

via live science

thanks alice!