I feel I am a decent looking guy and I manage to get some good pictures of myself here and there. But every time, some one tags me on a picture on Facebook, an avalanche of questions and doubts strikes me.
Am I really so ugly?
Why can’t my tagged pictures ever come good?
Oh god! I am ugly. I will never get a girl friend.
Before I could untag myself from all these pictures, my crush saw those pictures. What a tragedy, right? Well, not actually. She felt it was pretty decent and in fact it was a good picture.
Did she mean my pictures are not ugly but I am?
Ah! Let’s end this here and all. I am not alone in this. I am pretty sure you all can relate to this as well. We look quite OK when we see our image in the mirror but the camera captures a different story after all. Does that mean our mirrors lie?
Well, Science agrees to the fact that our mirror lies but reasons are not the same as what you think. It comes down to one thing-facial symmetry. We would all definitely agree to the fact that symmetric faces are highly attractive and sadly I miss on that part. But who cares, your face probably isn’t absolutely symmetrical either. Only a few people come close to this , and even the most attractive of models have crooked faces.
This is because of an effect called “mere-exposure.” which was formulated in 1968 by a psychologist named Robert Zajonc. So it basically says that people react more favorably to things they seen more often. Zajonc tested this with everything from shapes, to facial expressions, and even stupid non sense words. Since we see ourselves most frequently in the mirror, this is our preferred self-image. According to the mere-exposure effect, when your slight facial asymmetries are left unflipped by the camera, you see an unappealing and ugly version of yourself.
As soon as you started to believe that your mirror lies and you are not so ugly after all, there comes another study that took place in 2008 which shows people tend to think themselves as more attractive than they actually are.
In this experiment, researchers altered pictures of participants to make them look more and less attractive by melding them with a photo of an attractive — or unattractive — person of the same gender. Then, they mixed these versions of each person in with photos of strangers and asked the subjects to pick themselves out of the line up. People were quicker to pick the photo of themselves when it was more attractive — as if they were quicker to recognize a more attractive version of themselves.
There you go, you know now why you always like yourself in mirror or even your selfie but always hate those tagged pictures from last night party. Don’t worry about it. We are all ugly.
