Rose-Colored Glasses: Seeing the World Better Than it Really Is

Anyone who has debated the merits of religion with religious believers has encountered the phenomenon of believers only accepting the good parts of their faith tradition and denying the unsavory parts. They either deny that the negative aspects are really so bad after all or deny that they are part of the "real" religion. It's frustrating when people treat complex religious traditions as so one-dimensional, but this may be part of a broader phenomenon: evidence indicates that people see themselves in much the same manner.

In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive.

They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

Source: The New York Times

Although it seems plausible that people are engaging in some sort of mental "averaging" of what they've seen, it doesn't seem plausible that a person's average looks over time are so much better than what they are at any given time. At least some of this must involve an idealized self-image in which the various flaws, imperfections, and so forth have dropped away. I wonder how this meshes with the tendency shown by so many to think of themselves as looking worse than they really do?

Regardless, the fact that people have such a strong inclination to do this with their own faces suggests that we shouldn't be surprised if people do something very similar to belief systems, ideologies, or movements which are fundamental to their identities. It would be interesting if someone could design an experiment to measure the degree to which people emphasize the good qualities and de-emphasize any bad qualities for belief systems, ranging from those that are critical to how a person defines themselves to those which are more tangential in a person's life. What might we find?