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Key points
- With the reunion of the cast of Friends, many people talked about how much the actors had aged.
- When people see the face of someone they know well after a long time, visual perception is colored by memories of how the person used to look.
- People's perceptual expectations about the Friends cast were based on seeing reruns. As such, they expected to see someone only slightly older.
It was supposed to be the TV event of the year: the cast of Friends reunited for the first time since the series finale in 2004. But the media and especially the social media could talk about only one thing: how much the actors and actresses have aged.
Occasionally this was done with a positive spin: Look, they aged like fine wine. Maybe Joey has grey hair and Rachel has glasses, but they still look great. But most often, this took the form of just how old they look. All the actors and actresses are in their 50s and most of them in their early 50s. And contrary to the commentary on social media, they definitely don't look older than that. But the reason for this media reaction, oddly, reveals an important aspect of the psychology of face perception.
To throw in a reference you would last expect in a piece about the Friends reunion, Marcel Proust wrote extensively in his grand novel In Search of Lost Time about how different it is to see a person we know well after a long time. The reason he gives for this is that each time we see a familiar face, our perceptual experience is the mixture of seeing the face as it is now and having mental imagery of how the face used to look. So when Marcel sees Gilberte after a long time, his experience is the mixture of seeing new Gilberte and having mental imagery of Gilberte the way she looked years ago.
As so many of Proust's ideas about perception, this also turned out to be empirically correct. Mental imagery colors perception at all levels of processing. When it comes to face perception, the mental imagery of the youthful pretty face of our loved ones from when we met them still colors our experience of their face even when we look at them decades later. So we see people we know well as younger than they may look to strangers.
Why Our Visual Expectations Fool Us When Watching Friends
How did this process backfire then in the case of the Friends reunion? What complicates things here is that the mechanism I described is very much time-sensitive. Our experience of familiar faces infused with the memory of how these faces used to look. And the more recently you have seen this face, the stronger this imaginary coloring will be.
The issue with the Friends reunion is that while the show ended 17 years ago, you most definitely saw reruns way more recently than that. Probably in the last couple of months or even weeks (given the global exposure of anyone anywhere to Friends reruns). So your visual system creates perceptual expectations on the basis of this recent encounter, and this perceptual expectation is for a slightly older face than what you saw in the reruns. Maybe just a year older — definitely someone in their 30s. And when you see the same face in their 50s, these perceptual expectations are violated, which makes the faces look much older than they are.
An analogy would be heat adaptation. Suppose you soak your hand in lukewarm water for a while. When you briefly remove your hand and you think you're putting it back into the same bucket, which is sneakily replaced by experimenters with another bucket with slightly warmer water, you will sense it as much warmer. You overestimate the temperature difference, and similarly, we overestimate the age difference when watching the Friends reunion.
So no, the stars of Friends did not age more quickly than your own friends. It is your visual expectations that fool you into thinking so.
