Psychology News
Researchers at the University of Barcelona, Spain, explored how people see you as more attractive than how you think you are. The study is published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI.
The Study
In order to understand how people see us as being more attractive than we are, the researchers recruited 23 participants, aged 18–38 years, from the campus of the University of Barcelona.
Three different virtual bodies (representing the participants’ internal body image, real body measures, and ideal body shape) were created and participants saw these virtual bodies from an embodied first-person perspective and from a third-person perspective.
They were asked to evaluate the appearance of these avatars and complete two psychological tests evaluating body satisfaction and eating disorders symptomatology.
The Findings
The results revealed that the internal representation that people create of their own bodies is highly inaccurate. In the words of the researchers, “when the same virtual body was perceived from a third-person perspective, it was evaluated as more attractive than when it was perceived in the first-person perspective.” Therefore, other people see you as more attractive than you think you are.
To Know More You May Refer To
Neyret, S., Bellido Rivas, A. I., Navarro, X., & Slater, M. (2020). Which body would you like to have? The impact of embodied perspective on body perception and body evaluation in immersive virtual reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2020.00031