A fascinating study has shown that we're unable to read insights into ourselves from watching a video of our own body language. It's as if we have an egocentric blind spot. Outside observers, by contrast, can watch the same video and make revealing insights into our personality.
The premise of the new study is the tip-of-the-iceberg idea that what we know about ourselves is fairly limited, with many of our impulses, traits and beliefs residing below the level of conscious access. The researchers wondered whether people would be able to form a truer picture of themselves when presented with a video of their own body language.
In an initial study, Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues first had dozens of undergrad students rate how much of an extrovert they are, using both explicit and implicit measures. The explicit measure simply required the students to say whether they agreed that they were talkative, shy and so on. The implicit measure used was the Implicit Association Test. Briefly, this reveals how much people associate ideas in their mind, by seeing whether they are quicker or slower to respond when two ideas are allocated the same response key on a keyboard.
Next, the participants recorded a one minute television commercial for a beauty product (they'd been told the study was about personality and advertising). The participants then watched back the video of themselves, having been given guidance on non-verbal cues that can reveal how extraverted or introverted a person is. Based on their observation of the video, they were then asked to rate their own personality again, using the explicit measure.
The key question was whether seeing their non-verbal behaviour on video would allow the participants to rate their personality in a way that was consistent with their earlier scores on the implicit test.
Long story short - they weren't able to. The participants' extraversion scores on the implicit test showed no association with their subsequent explicit ratings of themselves, and there was no evidence either that they'd used their non-verbal behaviours (such as amount of eye contact with the camera) to inform their self-ratings.
In striking contrast, outside observers who watched the videos made ratings of the participants' personalities that did correlate with those same participants' implicit personality scores, and it was clear that it was the participants' non-verbal behaviours that mediated this correlation (that is, the observers had used the participants' non-verbal behaviours to inform their judgements about the participants' personalities).
Two further experiments showed that this general pattern of findings held even when participants were given a financial incentive to rate their own personality accurately, as if from an outside observer's perspective, and also when the task involved anxiety personality ratings following the delivery of a short speech.
What was going on? Why can't we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance - the need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to inform their ratings of their "state" anxiety (their anxiety "in the moment") even while leaving their scores for their "trait" anxiety unchanged.
"When applied to the question of how people may gain knowledge about their unconscious self, the present set of studies demonstrates that self-perceivers do not appear to pay as much attention to and make as much use of available behavioural information as neutral observers," the researchers said.
I thought this was pretty neat. It's always interesting to discover the blind spots we have with respect to ourselves and other little tricks our brains play on us. I wonder why we have this particular deficiency?
*cue Starglider saying computers are superior*
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The subjects have a lifetime of experience with their own personalities, while the outside observers have only that one video. Ignoring why their own evaluation of their personalities differs so much from all of the outside measures prior to the study, it makes perfect sense that they would weight the videos far less than strangers.
I think that knowing you are watching yourself might play an important part on the issue, as your mental self-image will probably override any new information that you might deduce. It's be interesting to repeat the experiment with the volunteers wearing some sort of disguise and having their voices altered in post or something (or even using motion capture and a CGI character so as to preserve body language but prevent recognition), and see what happens.
Oddly enough, I've had some anecdotal experience with this issue lately, as I've been experimenting with my new webcam, and discovering what my body language looks like. Apparently, I'm very twichy, wich contrasts drastically with the idea I have of being a calm type of guy. In fact, I'm having a lot of trouble reconciling how I look from the outside with my previous self-image, although, of course, I'm not delving into deeper meanings of body language.
Funny thing is that this article has made me wonder: Do bad actors realize they are bad actors?
Darth Holbytlan wrote:The subjects have a lifetime of experience with their own personalities, while the outside observers have only that one video. Ignoring why their own evaluation of their personalities differs so much from all of the outside measures prior to the study, it makes perfect sense that they would weight the videos far less than strangers.
Indeed, I don't find it terribly surprising. I think it would be interesting if these researchers went another step with this, and found a way to show a the person's body language to them in a way that they wouldn't know that it was them (some sort of computer model, or, hell, even just cutting off the head in the frame) and compare the personality rating they give to that versus one they give themselves.
EDIT: Oskuro beat me to the punch when I was typing. So, yeah, what he said ...
Surlethe wrote:I thought this was pretty neat. It's always interesting to discover the blind spots we have with respect to ourselves and other little tricks our brains play on us. I wonder why we have this particular deficiency?
*cue Starglider saying computers are superior*
It almost certainly relates to the human tendency to modify our own memories to make ourselves look better. It is very difficult for a person to objectively evaluate one's self because everyone wants to be the good guy and wants to the hero in their life story.
So, it'd make sense that we'd have difficulty reading our own body language accurately: we'd overlay our ideas about ourselves over the body language and force the body language to fit into our ideas.
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Surlethe wrote:I thought this was pretty neat. It's always interesting to discover the blind spots we have with respect to ourselves and other little tricks our brains play on us. I wonder why we have this particular deficiency?
*cue Starglider saying computers are superior*
It almost certainly relates to the human tendency to modify our own memories to make ourselves look better. It is very difficult for a person to objectively evaluate one's self because everyone wants to be the good guy and wants to the hero in their life story.
So, it'd make sense that we'd have difficulty reading our own body language accurately: we'd overlay our ideas about ourselves over the body language and force the body language to fit into our ideas.
Something that might be related is a study a read a few years ago that compared reactions to annoying behavior from strangers compared to loved ones. They found out that the neural clusters signifying "annoyance", that fired when someone did something we don't like, did not fire at all when the very same acts was done by a loved one.
And since most people presumably think quite fondly about themselves I think this can directly relate to how hard it is to draw objective conclusions about our own behavior. We doesn't just ignore stuff we doesn't like, we doesn't even notice it to begin with.
This is interesting, but I suspect it's just due to a lack of experience with yourself from the outside. A good way to play about with this would be to get some twin studies done; twins have no problem reading one another's body language under normal conditions, I wonder if they could read themselves, and whether it'd make a difference if they were told it were their sibling?
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Personal anecdote:
Having seen myself act in some class projects, I can say that I certainly LOOK slower than I feel. That is, I seem slightly more sluggish even when I'm attempting to do something with a modicum of haste.
In addition, my voice sounds entirely more deep and sonorous when I hear a recording of it. It's possible that seeing and hearing these differences could lead to a kind of clash of ideas about such things like Akhlut and Oskuro said.
Besides, much of our body language is unconscious like the famous head-tilt and the licking of lips when hungry.
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