It’s strange to imagine, but before mirrors became commonplace, most people would not be well acquainted with what their own faces would look like. Apart from maybe the occasional glimpse in a river, the internal self-image of many of our ancestors would have been based only on how others reacted to them, not on what they actually looked like.
Physical mirrors have been in existence in one form or another for thousands of years, but as recently as the 1960s, the anthropologist Edmund Carpenter came across a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea, known as the Biami, who (as far as he could tell) had not yet seen them.
Using Polaroids, film cameras and tape recorders, Carpenter showed the tribesmen what they looked and sounded like. At least initially, they were all completely freaked out by their photos. They covered their mouths, ducked their heads and turned away in a “terror of self-awareness”. But within moments, they became completely transfixed and wanted to capture their own photos. (Everyone, it seems, loves a selfie.)
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I think there is a beautifully unifying thought here. Whoever and wherever you are, there will always be a gap between how you imagine you look, and what you actually look like – none of us will ever get to experience ourselves outside of our own bodies. And I’m afraid we might be a bit too generous in how we imagine ourselves to be. Some psychologists have suggested that how we exist in our heads is generally quite an overly flattering picture.
In one experiment, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch asked a group of people to sit at a computer and spot themselves in a lineup of faces as quickly as possible. Then the scientists started doctoring some of the images to make the participants look more or less conventionally attractive. The results were fascinating – people were quicker at spotting the fake, better looking version of themselves than they were at finding the real un-doctored pictures. Epley and Whitchurch concluded that people “evaluate their own traits more favourably than is objectively warranted”.
Maybe this is why we like selfies so much. When you have some control over the lighting, the angles, the framing, you can create a more flattering image that aligns much closer to how you see yourself.
Or maybe there’s another explanation. Because if I think about everyone I know and love, they rarely (if ever) look as beautiful in photos as I think they do in the flesh. Flat images can never quite capture the full experience of sitting across from someone and watching the light catch their eyes or bounce off their skin.
In fact, Epley and Whitchurch also found that this flattering self-deception didn’t just apply to ourselves. People also spotted the favourably doctored images of their friends and family faster than the real photos.
So maybe that’s the conclusion here. We think that we know what we look like, because of mirrors and photos, but we’ll never really know.