Am I that pretty? by Marielle Bardon

Think You're Good-Looking? Think Again

New evidence shows we believe we're more attractive than we are in reality
By Jesse Bering

February 18, 2009 in Mind & Brain

How good-looking are you? You might not be as good-looking as you think. These tests that Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch did have shown that most people think that they are more pretty than they are.

What they did was they took 27 college students and took a picture of each individual one. Then they put the pictures in a computer and morphed them. They morphed them ten times. Five of them made the picture look uglier and uglier and uglier, and the other five made them look prettier as they go. Then they invited each college student in two to four weeks after they had taken their picture, and brought them over to the computer. They did not say which pictures were prettier, uglier, or the same as the picture that they took. They asked the students to point at which one they thought was them. But once they did every single one, most chose the picture that was 20% prettier than they actually were.

"It is perhaps of little wonder, then, that people so rarely seem to like the photographs taken of themselves. The image captured by the camera lens just doesn't match up to the image captured in the mind's eye," said Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch. Almost everybody thinks that they are prettier than they actually are. I probably think that I am prettier than I actually am, too.