You Don’t Look Like You Think You Do, Says Science
People are terrible at recognising what they really look like in photos, says a new study.
According to new research from scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, people are so bad at picking a good likeness of their own face, strangers actually make more accurate selections.
While a person looking ‘unrealistic’ in their Facebook profile picture may not present much of a problem, this could be a major issue when choosing a photo for official documents such as a passport.
Photo ID is the main method of identification in many situations, most notably at border control, so choosing a photo with a poor likeness is not a good move.
Published in the British Journal of Psychology, the study involved a group of 130 undergraduates downloading 10 photos of themselves from Facebook and ranking them from best to worst likeness. The students also took part on a short web cam, with two photos taken of each - one smiling and one neutral.
Sixteen participants, who did not know the students, watched the videos then ranked the Facebook photos for likeness compared to the people they’d seen in the videos. An additional 73 people were asked to take part in an online face matching test.
Results shows that the the self-selected images were matched seven per cent less accurately compared to those selected by others.
The leader of the study, Dr David White, said: “It seems counter-intuitive that strangers who saw the photo of someone’s face for less than a minute were more reliable at judging likeness. However, although we live with our own face day-to-day, it appears that knowledge of one’s own appearance comes at a cost. Existing memory representations interfere with our ability to choose images that are good representations or faithfully depict our current appearance.”
The study also noted that the photos that showed people smiling yielded better matching results, which contradicts the current guidelines forbidding smiling on passport photos. Dr White argues that ‘smiling’ photos could be a more accurate measure, commenting:
“Given that faces are generally pictured smiling, and these images are rated as being more like familiar faces, it may be beneficial to permit expression in passport photographs.”
A phenomenon known as the ‘mere-exposure effect’ may explain why strangers are better at identifying people’s own faces than they are.
This suggests that we grow to prefer something the more familiar we are with it - such as our own face, which we see in the mirror every day - and also explains why many people are uncomfortable hearing recordings of their own voice.
(Image credit: Sky News)
