No matter how many times you look in the mirror or take selfies, it turns out you ‘don’t really know what’ you actually look like.
You may’ve been stuck with the same – albeit now slightly more wrinkly and tired-looking – face for all your years lived on the planet, but how well do you really know your own profile?
The confusion
Do you ever look at yourself in the mirror and then see yourself in a selfie and then on an Android compared to an iPhone and question why you look so different in each image?
Well, thankfully, you’re not alone.
One Twitter user wrote: “Idk what it’s called but does anyone feel they don’t know what they look like truly ?? like pictures u take urself and pictures people take of u or looking in the mirror are all different forms of u and it’s just …… infuriating and confusing and makes u wanna cry.”
Another added: “I literally don’t even recognize myself anymore. I look in the mirror and I swear that isn’t me, or at least not who I thought I have been for the past couple of months, like all I can see is a totally different person.”
And a third commented: “This sounds BONKERS but I literally have no idea what I look like??? and I’m not even talking about makeup I deada** feel like I have a completely different face in every camera/phone/mirror/lighting.”
And there’s actually an explanation for why you don’t really seem to know your own face.
Do you feel like you really know your own face? (Getty Stock Images/ Catherine Falls Commercial)
The explanation
Professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want, Nicholas Epley told The Atlantic: “The interesting thing is that people don’t really know what they look like.The image you have of yourself in your mind is not quite the same as what actually exists.”
A study led by Epley and Erin Whitchurch, published in Sage Journals in 2008 – titled Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition – saw participants complete a series of experiments to test how well they know their own face.
And unfortunately the image you have of yourself in your own mind is probably ‘more physically attractive than’ you ‘actually are’.
Do you ever look at a selfie you’ve taken and question why it doesn’t look like you? (Getty Stock Images/ Elvira Kashpova)
In each experiment, participants’ faces were made ‘more of less attractive using a morphing procedure’ which went up or down by 10 percent increments – attractiveness valued on factors such as symmetry.
Participant were then asked to identify their own face out of the line up and results showed they selected the more conventionally attractive versions of their faces ‘more quickly’.
They also tended to pick the faces which had been made 20 percent more attractive than their own – which Epley notes isn’t ‘wildly off’ and doesn’t mean you ‘think you look like Brad Pitt‘.
And that didn’t just stop with how participants viewed their own faces either.
“This enhancement bias occurred for both one’s own face and a friend’s face but not for a relative stranger’s face,” the study explains.
Participants identifying of the enhanced images of themselves was ultimately ‘correlated with implicit measures of self-worth but not with explicit measures, consistent with this variety of enhancement being a relatively automatic rather than deliberative process’.
Epley ultimately resolved: “You’re an expert at your own face, but that doesn’t mean you’re perfect at recognizing it.”