Why do I look different when I take a selfie in the mirror?

Self-portraits that deliberately dress up as ugly urge photographers to control their self-image. They oppose beautiful standards and accept their imperfect looks. But what happened to those selfies that looked ugly when posing seriously?

Don't blame your appearance. Blame it on your brain. Self-portraits sometimes seem strange, which is related to how we look at ourselves in the mirror, feel our attraction, and the technical details of taking pictures with the built-in camera of the mobile phone.

After shooting, whether the selfie is remake is a big factor. If you have played multiple selfie apps, you may notice that some (such as Snapchat) will record your appearance like a mirror; Others (such as GroupMe, a mass messaging application) will flip the photos horizontally and save them as others look at you-this version looks awkward.

Part of the reason is that our faces are asymmetrical. Your left and right faces may not look very different, but photographer Julian Walkenstein used his portrait photos to show that this is not the case. He copied the left and right faces separately, but when they were combined, they created two completely different faces of the same person. After the image in the mirror is turned over, it looks shocking, because what we see is that the face with very different sides has been readjusted. Your five senses are not arranged, bent or tilted as you are used to seeing. (The Radiolab podcast has a program about symmetry, which is illustrated by flipping a popular photo of abraham lincoln. Even looking at faces that we are very familiar with, not only our own, the degree of asymmetry is still surprising. )

Pamela rutledge, director of the Center for Media Psychology, said: "We always look at ourselves in the mirror-when we brush our teeth, shave and make up, we form a fixed impression of ourselves in the mirror. You are very familiar with it. Familiarity produces liking. That's your preference. "

This is not just an interesting observation, but a scientific explanation. According to the simple contact hypothesis, people prefer what they see and encounter most often. In terms of self-awareness, this means that people prefer their own mirror images to the real ones, that is, other people's ideas. 1997 The experiment conducted at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) supports the view that when experimenters show their real photos and mirror photos, subjects prefer their mirror photos, while their friends and lovers prefer their real photos. When asked to explain their preferences, the subjects pointed out the shooting angle, light, head position and other non-existent differences, because the photos came from the same negative. According to the inventor of the "real mirror", only 10% people prefer their real looks to mirror images. This kind of mirror adjusts some standard mirrors to an appropriate angle to reflect the real appearance of people. )

Nicholas eppley, a professor of behavioral science at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand Others' Thoughts, Beliefs, Feelings and Needs, said, "Interestingly, people don't really know what they look like. What you think of yourself is not who you really are.

Eppley's research shows that our own looks are much better than the real ones. In a study published in the Bulletin of Personality and Social Psychology in 2008, the researchers transformed the facial features of the subjects into a model similar to the traditional beauty and handsome guy (as for the ugly version, it is similar to the person with craniofacial syndrome), making it more or less beautiful than before 10%. When asked to recognize their faces from a row of molds, the subjects chose the beautiful version faster, and if the beauty increased by 20%, they were most likely to recognize them. However, when asked to identify researchers from a row of models, subjects did not tend to choose these relatively unfamiliar and better-looking versions.

Eppley said, "They are not crazy-you don't think you look like Brad Pitt. You are an expert in appearance, but that doesn't mean you are very good at identification. "

Our face is very close to the lens of a smartphone, but it doesn't make it easier to recognize. As Daniel Becke, a lecturer in psychology at York University, said in his blog, selfies exaggerate some facial features and are often attributed to lens distortion, but this is actually a geometric problem. The part of the face near the camera seems to be larger than that in the non-selfie photo, while the part of the non-selfie camera far away from the face makes the face flatter. (Different lenses will change the effect, such as wide-angle lenses, but Baker said the difference can be ignored. )