Most of us are incredibly familiar with the sight of our own faces. But that doesn’t stop us from making errors.
If you become close friends with someone, you might well find it harder to tell apart their face from your own. The researchers behind this study suspect that this is because close friends become partially absorbed into our self-concept.
A clever study published earlier this year also found that our perceptions of our own personalities affect how we see our face in our mind’s eye.
The team behind the face and personality research… asked 39 young female students to produce a body shape self-portrait. They were terrible at it. In fact, there was a “negligible” relationship between the two main measures that the team analysed: perceived and actual hip width.
In this study, levels of self-esteem were linked with these misperceptions — the lower a person’s self-esteem, the more likely they were to exaggerate their own hip size, and the slimmer they considered a “typical” woman to be.
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Not only are we vulnerable to misperceptions in just about every aspect of what we look like, our mental grip on our bodily self is pretty tenuous, too.
