Oddly Wired
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perception

Your opinion of quality depends on what you saw first.

The contrast effect suggests that your perception of a stimulus is heightened or diminished by the stimulus that preceded it.

Research shows that participants rate individuals as less physically attractive after viewing photographs of highly attractive models. Your internal scale for beauty or quality is constantly recalibrated by your recent visual history.

You never judge anything in a vacuum; you judge it against what just happened.

Where this comes from

Study
Kenrick & Gutierres, 1980
What the check found
The cited study, Kenrick & Gutierres (1980), is a seminal work in social psychology that empirically established the contrast effect in judgments of physical attractiveness.
Confidence
Well replicated

Related

One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.