You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
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You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
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Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#2If you haven't seen the Dove commercial, you should watch it while reading this article from The Last Psychiatrist:
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#3This is confusing to me, because most of the people I talk to who share their feelings about their looks seem to find themselves less attractive than my estimate. Maybe I'm just systematically overestimating people and they are in turn STILL overestimating themselves, but one has to wonder if this study is really finding what it thinks it's finding.
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#4If you haven't seen the Dove commercial, you should watch it while reading this article from The Last Psychiatrist: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/05/dove.html
Although the article is interesting, I think one of the comments is much more "to the point":
What gets me about this ad is that no one understands why the women basically described themselves as trolls and the women they were talking to as goddesses. They're being filmed. They know it, and they know it's being put up somewhere. They don't want to be seen as having an over-inflated ego - they know exactly how it's going to look to the watcher if they describe themselves as more beautiful than they are. They have to have had an idea of what the guy is doing, which means they're going to know there's going to be a sketch hanging next to their real face. Wouldn't you want to look nicer than the sketch?
As for the women they're describing. When a stranger asks you what you think of their hair, have you ever said, "I hate it"? Again, they know that someone is sketching. They describe the other woman in the prettiest terms they can.
This isn't a deep look into their feelings about their actual looks, it's an exercise in self-marketing and politesse.
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#5> Most people believe that they are above average, a statistical impossibility
It's perfectly possible for the majority to be above the mean. If most people believed to be above the median, that would be a statistical impossibility.
I think there is another reason for people to believe their results in some areas are better than those of others: because of their own world view. A teacher who focusses on controlling the classroom may see many colleagues be worse at that and decide they're not as good a teacher as him; his colleague who prefers to leave the studying behaviour of his students may think his controlling colleague is not as good a teacher as him because he doesn't leave students enough freedom. Whether this applies to beauty I don't know - I'd expect it to apply only to aspects that they chose to modify (i.e. someone with dyed hair will probably have dyed their hair in a colour they believe to be more attractive and then believe they're more attractive).
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#6This is confusing to me, because most of the people I talk to who share their feelings about their looks seem to find themselves less attractive than my estimate. Maybe I'm just systematically overestimating people and they are in turn STILL overestimating themselves, but one has to wonder if this study is really finding what it thinks it's finding.
People may be showing humility. Also, when you talk to them, you may be measuring something other than their mental self- representation -- maybe they are expressing where they think they are relative to society, whereas the experiment is measuring the delta between self-image and reality.
tl;dr -- You can think yourself ugly, yet still not as ugly as you actually are!
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#7The study could easily be showing simply that people are inclined to suspend disbelief when it benefits them in the scenario of choosing the picture that they want to be most like them... this isn't the same as saying that someone's self-image is somehow that idealized photo they're willing to suspend disbelief for.
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#8This effect also holds for one's own estimates that one's startup will not fail.
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#9With Google Plus' new photo enhancement features I fear people will become a bit further disconnected from reality. Neat tech for sure though
Re: You Are Less Beautiful Than You Think
#10> Most people believe that they are above average, a statistical impossibility It's perfectly possible for the majority to be above the mean. If most people believed to be above the median, that would be a statistical impossibility. I think there is another reason for people to believe their results in some areas are better than those of others: because of their own world view. A teacher who focusses on controlling t…
Your stats are true when outliers massively move a mean.. but that wouldn't be the case in a distribution like this one... I don't think. I mean it's more appropriate to imagine a normal distribution here with the mean equal to the median because the measurement is totally subjective anyway.