How to Tell If Other People Think You’re Hot
How to Tell If Other People Think You’re Hot
April 4, 2016
The Washington Post — If you’re wondering how you’re perceived by others, research provides some clues. In a study first published in 2010, Dr. Tal Eyal, of BGU’s Department of Psychology, and Dr. Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago (UC), reveal a fascinating technique to help get inside the minds of the people around you.
The crux of this technique is that people think about themselves in very different ways than they think about other people. They tend to scrutinize themselves at an incredibly close level of detail — much more closely than they examine the actions or appearance of others.
That’s in part because you have a huge amount of information about yourself, far more than you have about other people.
As a result, the key to figuring out what other people think about you is distancing yourself from the extensive information that you have about yourself — in essence, seeing yourself through a stranger’s eyes.
That’s a very hard thing for people to do, Dr. Epley says. But in the study, he and Dr. Eyal accomplish this by using a mental technique that has to do with time.
The BGU and UC researchers carried out a series of experiments to test whether the passage of time could help people have a more accurate idea of what other people thought of them.
In one experiment, the researchers had University of Chicago students pose for a photograph, and then try to predict how another student would rate their attractiveness based on that photograph, on a scale of one to nine. Some of the students were told that their photograph would be rated later that day, while some were told that it would be rated several months later. The researchers then had other study participants rate the photographs, and compared the scores.
The study found that students who were told that their photograph would be rated several months later were much more accurate at predicting how other people would rate their attractiveness.
Read more on The Washington Post website >>
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