Sunday, May 15, 2016
Self-Perception Through Sketches
Last week, forensic sketch artist Gil Zamora visited my youth group to talk about self-confidence and how people see themselves. Some of you may have seen this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrHoDJinMQI) sponsored by Dove, in which he draws several women by their own descriptions and then by another person's description. In all of the sketches, the sketch drawn by the person describing themselves always highlights their physical flaws that they see in themselves. The sketch drawn from another person describing them always shows them as much warmer and beautiful person. This raises questions like: Why are we so critical of ourselves? and What causes us to see ourselves as so much worse than another person would see? How does media play a role in this? If it is a negative one how can it be diminished? In my personal opinion, I think that this is because we have to live with ourselves our whole lives and we are always finding little imperfections about ourselves. Also, I think it could be a little bit of an audience effect. We generally say that we aren't that great around other people in fear of being judged or just because they are around and it is the popular thing to do. It could also be learned helplessness. A few of the people in the video talked about physical traits that they had and they would say "my mother always told me I had (insert negative trait)" or "my sister always told me I had (negative trait)". Because they heard it so much, it just became a normal response to agree with what these people had to say. What do you guys think? Why are we so critical of ourselves? What is the role of the media here? Any relevant terms you can apply to this situation? Any other thoughts?
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Interesting post. I think that people may be placing themselves in a negative light in order to keep from appearing arrogant about their appearances; they are trying to be modest. In general, we seem to notice our own flaws more than we do for others. Like you mentioned, I also think that the media in general also plays a crucial role in this phenomenon. The media always tells people ways that they can hide and/or erase their flaws, which likely causes people to be more conscious and critical of their flaws.
ReplyDeleteVery cool post! I totally agree with the fact that people's opinions can affect your self-perception. When people say negative traits or thoughts about you, they are contributing to your personal self-attacks. I also think that the Forer Effect plays a big role on this issue. People tend to interpret general statements as being accurate for them personally. They internalize some negative thoughts directly towards them and, in result of that, they start being more self-critical.
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