It’s strange to imagine, but before mirrors became commonplace, most people were unfamiliar with what their own faces looked like. Aside from perhaps the occasional glimpse of a river, the internal self-image of many of our ancestors would have been based solely on how others reacted to them, not what they actually looked like.
Physical mirrors have existed in one form or another for thousands of years, but as recently as the 1960s, anthropologist Edmund Carpenter encountered a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea known as the Biami, who (so that he knew) he had not seen them yet.
Using Polaroids, film cameras and tape recorders, Carpenter showed tribe members what they looked and sounded like. At least at first, everyone was completely freaked out by their photos. They covered their mouths, bowed their heads and turned away in “self-conscious terror.” But within moments, they were completely paralyzed and wanted to capture their own photos. (It seems like everyone loves selfies.)
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I think there is a wonderfully unifying thought here. Whoever you are and wherever you are, there will always be a gap between how you imagine you look and how you actually look; none of us will be able to experience ourselves outside of our own bodies. And I fear we might be too generous in how we imagine ourselves to be. Some psychologists have suggested that, in general, the image we have in our heads is too flattering.
In an experimentNicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch asked a group of people to sit in front of a computer and get into a row of faces as quickly as possible. The scientists then began modifying some of the images to make the participants appear more or less conventionally attractive. The results were fascinating: people were quicker to spot the fake, more attractive version of themselves than the real, unretouched images. Epley and Whitchurch concluded that people “evaluate their own traits more favorably than is objectively justified.”
Maybe that’s why we like selfies so much. When you have some control over lighting, angles, and framing, you can create a more flattering image that aligns much more closely with how you see yourself.
Or maybe there is another explanation. Because if I think about all the people I know and love, they rarely (if ever) look as beautiful in photos as I think they do in person. Flat images can never capture the full experience of sitting across from someone and watching light catch their eyes or bounce off their skin.
In fact, Epley and Whitchurch also discovered that this flattering self-deception didn’t just apply to ourselves. People also spotted favorably manipulated images of their friends and family faster than real photos.
So maybe that’s the takeaway here. Us think that we know how we look, thanks to mirrors and photos, but we will never know In fact know.