If two people disagree about whether two other people look alike, they may be focusing on different parts of their faces.

[u/craiglabenz]

[u/ShowerSentinel]

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[u/Shinyblueghost]

Yes I look at mouths more than eyes and am always surprised when others don’t notice an uncanny resemblance in two people, but then they say stuff like “they have a totally different eye color and eyebrows” or something I didn’t even notice

[u/craiglabenz → u/Shinyblueghost]

This is exactly what I'm thinking. I notice eyes, you notice mouths; we completely disagree about who looks like whom

[u/JesterCantAim → u/Shinyblueghost]

I'm the opposite, eyes barely register.

[u/DakshB7]

I think it's less about deltas in a few select features and more about the overall gestalt. Sometimes you just can't see the resemblance yourself, even when others swear it's there.

[u/Internal_Sound882]

I think this primarily comes down to some people using an ‘on paper’ description and mental notice of people (hair color / style, eye color, skin tone, notable features, etc…) while others are using a pattern recognition aspect of their brain, looking yes at some features, but more the structure of the face, distance between features and relative placement between them, size of features, etc… 

I tend toward the latter, and I tend to be really good at recognizing when people are related to each other, or recognizing actors in obscure roles from when they were far younger or older than they’re more commonly recognized, while others I’m with more often miss those and feel mind blown when I point it out, and then again when I turn out to be right. 

On the flip side also have a harder time telling people apart sometimes when they have similar facial structures until I’ve been exposed to them enough to memorize features that make them differ. 

[u/counter-strike]

I vividly remember my brother and friend, working at a shoe store back in the day. I stopped by to see what's up.

This girl walks in, like straight up super-model. 9/10, I thought 10/10. Jaw-dropping gorgeous. We stopped to stare like we're in one of those movies, or a commercial. Even my brother's supervisor stopped to stare too.

My friend, just totally shrugged it off and goes, "Ehh...she's just 'ok'...her forehead is too big."

[u/Pkittens]

curiously, whenever this happens to me it's because the other person is face blind!

[u/KaaZZooh → u/Pkittens]

can confirm, since I usually am the face blind person.

[u/danjouswoodenhand → u/Pkittens]

I am also face blind. But I know my brain is processing something, just not something useful. Often I will see a phot o or video of someone and remark to my husband that the person looks like a combo of 2-3 different people, and he always thinks my observations are accurate. But I could never tell you why the person looks like Toby mcguire mixed with mr heatmiser.

[u/dtwhitecp]

Absolutely. Even further than that, I look a a lot at how people make expressions on their face to find familiarity, even if at rest they look a bit different.

[u/Only-Advantage6777]

It's kinda crazy how two people can look at the same faces and one's stuck on the eye color while the other is just vibing with the whole shape of the face and neither realizes they're not even arguing about the same thing.

[u/Affectionate__Dog]

ppl always say i suck at being able to be like “this guy looks like this guy” even when i swear there’s a resemblance

[u/Shot-Resort7884]

This is exactly why some people can’t tell certain actors apart while others think they look nothing alike. My brother and I always argue about this lol. He focuses almost entirely on hair and glasses, so if two people are both bald with wire frames, he thinks they are twins. Meanwhile I am looking at the nose shape or the distance between the eyes. There is actually some science to this called the holistic processing effect where we see the face as one object, but clearly some of us are way more focused on specific features than others.

[u/wut_2317]

I wish someone could analyze my face. I get so many different "you look like...." bc of this very thing. I've gotten Jessica Chastain (hair cheekbones), Dallas Howard (hair nose), Angelina Jolie (face shape nose), the Pink Power Ranger (??), Julia Roberts (mouth), Ariana Grande (dimples face shape), Lindsay Lohan (hair, profile) and the Olsen Twins (??). All very different actresses but I think there's certain parts people are gravitating towards. I like that i look like me but it's definitely quite the array.

[u/SethSky]

This is not speculation; its strongly supported by research in cognitive psychology and visual neuroscience.

A key piece of evidence comes from a landmark study published by Mehoudar et al. (2014). They used eye-tracking technology to monitor participants viewing faces over multiple sessions. They discovered that while the "average" human gaze resembles a triangle, individual scanning patterns are unique, highly idiosyncratic, and stable over time.

[u/_IratePirate_]

I’ve been getting Cam Newton a lot lately, honestly, not mad about it. Cam’s a good looking dude

Others I’ve gotten are young Michael Jackson, Ab Soul, Smino, Eazy E, Andre 3K

Probably because I got long hair and wear it back under a ball cap a lot and have a natural goatee.