On a Scale of 1–10, How Accurate is Your Self-Image?

Your self-image is probably more different to you than you realise. Or is it?

How accurately do you think the average person sees themselves? Have a guess, 1–10.

Our perception of anything isn’t an exact representation of what’s actually there. We always bring our background, expectations and hopes to it, and see an image we create internally, based on a mix of what we’re looking at and what we bring to it.

At a simple level, the way we see things depends on things like motivation or emotional states. If we walk past a donut when we’re stuffed it can look like an average or sub-par pastry, but walk past it when we haven’t eaten for nine hours and that icing will glisten brighter. It’ll look like the best donut on the planet.

At the more complex end, particularly suggestible people will see straight through someone if a hypnotist tells them they’re invisible. At that end of the scale, it’s easy to see how we make our own reality, and we have as much to do with how we see things as how things actually are.

So how does that apply when the thing we’re looking at is ourselves?

The Things That Change Our Perceptions the Most

Our perception is created and influenced internally. We’ll disregard hypnosis and focus on the things that can affect us all day every day without us even realising — meaning we believe what we see, even though we’re creating a whole part of it ourselves.

Motivation

We see things how we’re motivated to see them. Ever seen an average looking person suddenly look very attractive when something happens for you to be motivated to see them that way? Maybe you found out they liked you, or they have the same interests, or, if you’re that way inclined, drive a Ferrari. Then when you break up with them a year later and start to see what they really look like without your motivation-bent perception, you start to wonder what on earth you were doing.

That’s how motivation changes how we see things. If we’re motivated by hunger, that donut will look amazing. If we’re overfull of sugar, it’ll look sickening. It’s also why we see what we want to see.

Your emotional state

We tend to see things more if they mirror our own emotional states, and unconsciously filter out the rest. It’s why when we’re in a great mood everything looks wonderful and why bad things seem to always come in batches.

“It never rains but it pours.” – British proverb describing how bad things always seem to come at the same time.

Past experiences and expectations

Whatever you’ve seen before will affect your perception of what you see now. If the same word appears twice in a row in a sentence, you’ll probably not see the double word because you’re experienced in how sentences are supposed to work, and see them that way.

Past experiences lead to expectations, and expectations give us shortcuts. What we actually experience seeing is these shortcuts, not the actual things. If we’re looking at one thing, we’ll filter out the rest and not see things we don’t expect to see. For an excellent example of this, watch this video now and see if you can count the basketball passes of the players in white, then come back.

The above things form what psychology calls our ‘Perceptual Set’ (along with context). We form our perceptions based on what’s useful, not accurate.

Want an extreme example of how we perceive things as we perceive them rather than as they are? Remember the dress? Black and blue or white and gold? Not everyone can be right.

Need an example of how expectations can change our perception? Just watch this video and look at a word. You’ll hear what you’re looking at.

If perceptions can change that much with these simple things, imagine how far off they can be with something as complicated as our self-image.

How to Amplify Your Perception Inaccuracy: Apply it to Yourself

One of, if not the very most important thing to you, is you. You’re always there. You laugh and you hurt. Your positive traits get you what you want and your negative traits hold you back, with plenty of overlap there because humans are messy. How the world sees you affects what happens to you — whether you get the job, the date, get away with the assault or minor drug misdemeanour, and whether you pass your borderline driving test. How people perceive you is important.

It’s really, really important to be perceived well. Everything revolves around it. People give better jobs to more attractive people and will vote for politicians because they’re tall and have hair. We know we treat people differently based on how and who they are. As much as we try not to, and society puts systems in place to stop it happening, it still does. We’re still animals following illogical animal rules.

As such, we have a need to be perceived well, and so we’re motivated to see ourselves well. As we know, we see things based on how we’re motivated to see them, not how they actually are.

If we don’t see our real selves, what do we see?

If we return to our perceptual set, we can get some answers.

We’re hugely motivated to see ourselves as we like to see ourselves, whether that’s accurate or not. To suddenly see ourselves differently would rock our identity to its core and be hugely unsettling. Much of our mental health depends on the self-images we carefully cultivate for ourselves, based on what we want to be, mixed with how we are and what we’re worried about being.

Working in the entertainment industry, you find some fairly extreme examples of this, particularly in amateur and occasionally professional modelling. Some people set themselves up as models, convinced that they’re incredibly good looking, and then bask in the label of ‘model.’ The whole thing is set up to maintain their identity as someone who’s good looking, even though to the outsider, they look quite average. To take that away from them would rip out a part of their identity and be devastating to them, so their motivation to maintain that is huge. And because motivation is so influential on our perception, a beautiful face is what they see. This isn’t a case of them seeing their face accurately and judging it as beautiful, but more they’re motivated to see a genuinely beautiful face in the mirror and in photographs, so they do.

Of course, we shouldn’t be judging people’s looks anyway. But it’s relevant because 1) this is a piece about self-image, and 2) we’re still animals living under animal laws and our minds will still get drawn to doing these things. That’s why we have to actively fight it.

It goes the other way. I have a very beautiful friend from the acting world. For years, she saw herself as very unattractive and thought people were either joking or just being kind when they told her she was beautiful. Again, she wasn’t seeing her face accurately and judging it poorly. She was seeing a less than attractive face in the mirror, and not the same face that everyone else was seeing. What would motivate her to see things that way round? Perhaps low self-esteem or a fear of success — self-sabotage is very real. Whatever her reason, I’m happy to report that she’s much more psychologically healthy now and even does some modelling shoots.

“Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.” ― Naya Rivera

Science has found that really very few people can rate themselves accurately in terms of attractiveness. According to the study, the results are simple and consistent — very attractive people see themselves as less attractive than they are, and unattractive people see themselves as more attractive than they are. So the only people who guess pretty well are the average-looking ones.

But attractiveness isn’t the only part of our self-image that we see without accuracy.

How Well Do We See Our Personality?

How old do you feel? The thing about the age we feel is all of our previous experience is always of us as a younger version. It’s impossible to have experience in being older than yourself. So because our past experiences are entirely of us being younger, that affects how we see ourselves. People over 40, according to one study, feel around 20% younger than their age.

Some people feel young because they were young the whole time they were growing up — obviously — and the feeling never goes. Sometimes when we experience trauma at a young age, parts of us stop developing and we may feel very young while experiencing certain things. There’s a branch of therapy called Transactional Analysis which is partly about how we revert to a childlike personality under certain conditions. It’s fascinating. These things don’t change overnight, so it’s very possible for a 60-year-old to suddenly feel very young when something happens like a run-in with authority.

“When you see yourself as creative, your world expands.” ― David Taylor-Klaus

There’s also the idea of rose-tinted glasses. Some people only see the good in themselves because that’s what they’re motivated to see to maintain their sense of self, or simply see more good things because they’re happy.

Then there’s the issue of the negativity bias, where we’re prone to picking out and zooming in on all the bad things.

OK stupid, here’s the Dunning-Kruger effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is long-established in psychology and says that the people who are least competent at something over-inflate their abilities the most. In short, they’re too stupid to even know they’re wrong, and that makes them the most confident. They’re not as clever as they think they are.

At the other end of the scale, the most knowledgeable and intelligent people are clever enough to see their flaws and knowledge gaps, and so are least confident. That has pretty big implications for self-image. Except for one thing: the effect may not be real.

Recent mathematical modelling of the effect has shown that the conclusions drawn by Dunning and Kruger weren’t actually what was going on, and in fact, most people generally overestimate their abilities by just a little, regardless of ability.

Maybe Dunning and Kruger weren’t as clever as they thought they were.

So Our Self-Images Must Be Wildly Off. How Bad Are They?

Having seen all that, wanna revise your guess on the 1–10?

Weirdly, despite all of the above – despite our interfering perceptual sets, our rose-tinted glasses, inflated opinions and many biases, it turns out our self-images turn out to be… Drum roll… Pretty damn good!

A study from the University of Toronto found just this, stating that people’s self-images are pretty much in line with their peers' views of them. The reason is that the above problems are overridden by an advantage gained from being clued in to an accurate idea of what others think of us.

Obviously, there are people who don’t fit this — we’ve all met the guy who seems to think he’s fantastic with no justification, and the amazing person who’s always overly critical of themselves, or like my model friend who thought she was ugly — but these people are the unusual ones, not the norm. We’ve got a pretty good idea. The exception to this came in a slight enhancement of the Intellect category — which is what would be expected if we listen to Dunning-Kruger’s recent critics.

So, how accurate is our self-image?

• We’re terrible at judging our own attractiveness unless we’re pretty average.
• After 40, we’re about 20% off with how old we feel compared to how we actually are.
• Rose-tinted glasses and the negativity bias mean that people’s perceptions of themselves are skewed in different ways.
• We see everything through filters and biases, including ourselves.
• The guys at Toronto who studied this found that despite everything, our need to be accurate trumps everything, and we’re actually pretty accurate.

Where does that leave us? There will be delusional people, and some will be almost spot on, but that’s only because everyone is different and every scale has a few people at the extreme ends.

What was your guess out of ten for how accurate our self-image is? For most of us, we’ve got a pretty good idea of how we really are. The study even used the phrase “high accuracy” — so if you said around an 8 out of 10, you’d be pretty close.

Despite getting so much of our perception on ourselves wrong, we end up with a final picture that’s pretty much right. Aren’t humans great?

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