Ever wonder why people sometimes hate looking at photos of themselves? The era of Facebook has brought this phenomenon into sudden relief: now when some random party photo of you is “tagged,” not only do you have to look at it, but everyone you know on Facebook can see it too, increasing your “that’s a bad picture of me” displeasure. But why does this happen in the first place? Because, it turns out, most people aren’t as attractive as they think they are. A recent study called “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Enhancement in Self-Recognition” bears this out. The authors begin by summarizing the established results of past papers and studies:
Such self-enhancement effects are not simply mindless attempts for people to “see” what they want to see but rather represent a more thoughtful — albeit biased — processing of self-relevant information. Ambiguous traits are defined in ways that enable favorable self-evaluations. Negative stereotypes about others are selectively activated and applied to make oneself look better. Flattering information is evaluated more critically and ultimately derogated. These and other deliberate reasoning strategies are the tools that frequently enable people to form a more desirable image of their traits and abilities than reality might allow.
The authors’ experiment was telling — they took photos of undergrad students with neutral expressions, then had them look at a range of 11 photographs a few weeks later and try to pick out their own face among them. The surprising result: most students couldn’t identify their own face. That’s because their pictures had been morphed to greater or lesser degrees with either very attractive or unattractive faces of the same gender, and the students were choosing the “more attractive” morphed versions of their own faces. It seems that’s what we see in our mind’s eye, and when that self-image doesn’t match up with a randomly tagged party picture version of ourselves on Facebook, we grumble and groan about “bad pictures.”
It’s interesting, though, that this study only used undergrads — people in their early 20s. I wonder if the results would’ve been any different with older people. Every once in a while I hear an older person complain about how young people are “too vain” these days; that between blogging their inmost thoughts about their cat and carefully curating their images and updates on Facebook and Twitter, young people have become more inward looking — the “me me me” generation. I’m not sure I agree with this, but it would be fascinating to see a wider age sampling done in this type of face-recognition study.
Link to study via Bering in Mind.
Comments (8)
Comment
- subscribe /
- give a gift /
- terms of service /
- about /
- contact us /
- write for us /
- ad info /
- subscriber services /
- press /
- privacy policy /
- rss /
© 2012 Mental Floss Inc. All Rights Reserved. Mental Floss is a registered trademark owned by Felix Dennis. mentalfloss.com is a trademark owned by Felix Dennis.
Disclaimer: All submissions made to mental_floss become the property of Mental Floss Inc and may be used without further permission by the submitter and without compensation to the submitter. If you do not agree to these terms, please do not submit anything to mental_floss.
That is very bad news for me since I already know that I am unattractive. If it is worse than I think, I am somewhere south of Quasimodo.
posted by n2y2 on 5-15-2009 at 12:23 pm
What about the phenomenon of people who ARE attractive, but take terrible pictures? I wish I could remember where I read it, but recently I read that many people who are considered attractive when encountered face-to-face take bad pictures because part of their attraction is the expressive nature of their face–which doesn’t always translate well into stills.
posted by Fruppi on 5-15-2009 at 12:37 pm
its not just self image but what I see in the mirror is way prettier than pictures.
posted by lewen on 5-15-2009 at 12:43 pm
There is a similar trend with self evaluations of intelligence. 80 some odd percent of people rate themselves as having “above average” intelligence.
posted by Zach on 5-15-2009 at 12:48 pm
I feel like I read in a highly qualified publication (say, Seventeen Magazine perhaps?) that women at least tend to be MORE critical of their appearance than randomly sampled test subjects, not less. And it’s this self-critical body-image distortion that leads to higher rates of eating disorders?
posted by Morrissya on 5-15-2009 at 12:50 pm
But aren’t there also built-in differences between what we see in the mirror and what we see in photos? I thought mirror images were “flipped” on the vertical axis. Would be interesting to see whether recognition would be enhanced if the photos were flipped too.
Also, as an artist I can state for certain that looking at something and looking at a picture of something just isn’t the same level of information. All sorts of misinterpretations can creep in if you just use photos for visual reference.
posted by VM on 5-15-2009 at 2:29 pm
There is a lot to discuss with this topic. Perhaps it is just personal as I don’t like to look at any pictures of me (or look in the mirror for the purposes of looking at myself instead of a part me). It seems there is an assumption that at times people must like to look at themselves if they think they are attractive.
This seems to elide over whether there is such a thing as a bad picture. Flash for example, can make lighter skinned people look ghastly, when under any normal light, they look fine.
There are also extenuating circumstances. How you look in the morning after partying hard may be a completely accurate depiction of what happened, but I also think it is unfair to then say therefore “this is what you look like”.
To the degree that this phenomenon exists, I also don’t think it is limited to oneself. I think it also extends to significant others, one’s own children and possibly people you admire.
I am ignoring, btw, artificial effects such as makeup as I have little personal experience or attraction towards.
posted by anomdebus on 5-15-2009 at 5:05 pm
There are definitely SOME bad pictures, but with regards to people thinking they look better than they do, I think that is a good thing. Self-confidence in itself is attractive.
Maybe true for faces, but I have never heard this said about how women feel about their bodies – almost all are critical – as someone else alluded to.
posted by oskyz on 5-17-2009 at 10:09 pm