Faces of Merseyside: Exploring Cognitive Bias through Facial Averages

Faces of Merseyside is a gallery/online exhibition of digitally processed facial averages produced from Merseyside image collections by Face Lab, a research group at Liverpool School of Art & Design. The project seeks to foreground the question of cognitive bias in relation to facial images that claim to represent particular communities, in the context of a resurgence of interest in physiognomic judgments and discrimination. By revisiting Francis Galton's nineteenth-century composite portraiture, as informed by current craniofacial research, Faces of Merseyside explores the claims advanced in relation to the representation of human diversity and how they both inform and challenge social stereotyping.