Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition

People's inferences about their own traits and abilities are often enhancing. A series of experiments suggests that this enhancement extends to more automatic and perceptual judgments as well, such that people recognize their own faces as being more physically attractive than they actually are. In each experiment, participants' faces were made more or less attractive using a morphing procedure. Participants were more likely to recognize an attractively enhanced version of their own face out of a lineup as their own, and they identified an attractively enhanced version of their face more quickly in a lineup of distracter faces. This enhancement bias occurred for both one's own face and a friend's face but not for a relative stranger's face. Such enhancement was correlated with implicit measures of self-worth but not with explicit measures, consistent with this variety of enhancement being a relatively automatic rather than deliberative process.

[1]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Enhanced co-orientation in the perception of friends: a social relations analysis. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  G. Rhodes.  The evolutionary psychology of facial beauty. , 2006, Annual review of psychology.

[3]  Roy F. Baumeister,et al.  The self in social psychology. , 1999 .

[4]  M. Rosenberg.  Society and the adolescent self-image , 1966 .

[5]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  Reconceptualizing individual differences in self-enhancement bias: an interpersonal approach. , 2004, Psychological review.

[6]  N. Kanwisher,et al.  PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Research Article Visual Recognition As Soon as You Know It Is There, You Know What It Is , 2022 .

[7]  Curtis D. Hardin,et al.  Unconscious Unease and Self-Handicapping: Behavioral Consequences of Individual Differences in Implicit and Explicit Self-Esteem , 1999 .

[8]  B. Monin.  The warm glow heuristic: when liking leads to familiarity. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[9]  Chihiro Kobayashi,et al.  Self-Esteem and Self-Enhancement in Japan and America , 2003 .

[10]  R. Gramzow,et al.  Exaggerating Current and Past Performance: Motivated Self-Enhancement Versus Reconstructive Memory , 2006, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[11]  Pancultural self-enhancement. , 2003 .

[12]  Jonathon D. Brown,et al.  Evaluations of Self and Others: Self-Enhancement Biases in Social Judgments , 1986 .

[13]  James K. Beggan.  On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect. , 1992 .

[14]  A. van Knippenberg,et al.  What's in a name: implicit self-esteem and the automatic self. , 2001, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[15]  J. G. Holmes,et al.  The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships. , 1996 .

[16]  Fabienne Darling-Wolf,et al.  HOLIER THAN THOU , 2008 .

[17]  David Dunning,et al.  Egocentric Definitions of Traits and Abilities in Social Judgment , 1992 .

[18]  T. F. Cash,et al.  The nature and extent of body-image disturbances in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa: a meta-analysis. , 1997, The International journal of eating disorders.

[19]  N. Epley,et al.  Feeling "holier than thou": are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction? , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Marshall Lev Dermer,et al.  Reversed Facial Images and the Mere-Exposure Hypothesis , 1977 .

[21]  A. Dijksterhuis,et al.  I like myself but I don't know why: enhancing implicit self-esteem by subliminal evaluative conditioning. , 2004, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[22]  A. Little,et al.  Evidence against perceptual bias views for symmetry preferences in human faces , 2003, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences.

[23]  D. Packer,et al.  Increasing Implicit Self-Esteem Through Classical Conditioning , 2004, Psychological science.

[24]  S. Koole,et al.  Self-Affection without Self-Reflection: Origins, Models, and Consequences of Implicit Self-Esteem , 2007 .

[25]  P. Ditto,et al.  Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Nonpreferred Conclusions , 1992 .

[26]  D. R. Lehman,et al.  Is there a universal need for positive self-regard? , 1999, Psychological review.

[27]  J. Lydon,et al.  Bias and Accuracy in Close Relationships: An Integrative Review , 2004, Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

[28]  M. Banaji,et al.  Apparent Universality of Positive Implicit Self-Esteem , 2007, Psychological science.

[29]  B. Pelham,et al.  Name letter preferences are not merely mere exposure: Implicit egotism as self-regulation. , 2002 .

[30]  D. Proffitt,et al.  Visual-motor recalibration in geographical slant perception. , 1999, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[31]  B. Teachman,et al.  Perceptual and cognitive biases in individuals with body dysmorphic disorder symptoms , 2008, Cognition & emotion.

[32]  John R. Chambers,et al.  Biases in social comparative judgments: the role of nonmotivated factors in above-average and comparative-optimism effects. , 2004, Psychological bulletin.

[33]  Leif D. Nelson,et al.  Moniker Maladies , 2007, Psychological science.

[34]  Richard L. Moreland,et al.  Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity, similarity, and attraction , 1982 .

[35]  D. J. Lee.  Society and the Adolescent Self-Image , 1969 .

[36]  S. Thorpe,et al.  Speed of processing in the human visual system , 1996, Nature.

[37]  J. M. Nuttin.  Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness: The name letter effect , 1985 .

[38]  B. Pelham,et al.  Two Roads to Positive Regard: Implicit and Explicit Self-Evaluation and Culture , 1999 .

[39]  Emily Balcetis,et al.  See what you want to see: motivational influences on visual perception. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[40]  S. Kitayama,et al.  Implicit Self-Esteem in Japan: Name Letters and Birthday Numbers , 1997 .

[41]  William A. Cunningham,et al.  Implicit Attitude Measures: Consistency, Stability, and Convergent Validity , 2001, Psychological science.

[42]  James A. Scepansky,et al.  Spontaneous Skepticism: The Interplay of Motivation and Expectation in Responses to Favorable and Unfavorable Medical Diagnoses , 2003, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[43]  James A. Scepansky,et al.  Motivated sensitivity to preference-inconsistent information. , 1998 .

[44]  J. L. Powell,et al.  Body Esteem: An Exception to Self‐Enhancing Illusions?1 , 2001 .

[45]  Z. Kunda,et al.  Motivated reasoning with stereotypes: Activation, application, and inhibition. , 1999 .

[46]  C. Sedikides,et al.  Pancultural Self-Enhancement , 2002 .

[47]  B. Pelham,et al.  Implicit Egotism , 2005, Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences.

[48]  B. Pelham,et al.  Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit egotism and major life decisions. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[49]  David Dunning,et al.  The Mixed Blessings of Self-Knowledge in Behavioral Prediction: Enhanced Discrimination but Exacerbated Bias , 2006, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[50]  D. Dunning.  A newer look: Motivated social cognition and the schematic representation of social concepts. , 1999 .