Originally Posted by
Spencer Greenberg
Here’s a social characteristic that divides us (roughly) into two groups that I think few people are aware of: how often, during a typical face to face conversation, do you pay attention to or visualize what your facial expressions must look like to the other person?
I first became aware of this distinction during a conversation with friends, where we stumbled on the realization that we are very different from each other in this way. I am almost never aware of my face, whereas one of my friends is aware of it most of the time when other people are around.
We ran a little study on this quality, and it turns out it is remarkably bimodal, reflecting two rather distinct groups of people! And these two groups still persist even if you only consider young or old, male or female, high education or low education, high income or low income.
The bimodal nature of this quite surprised me because most complex traits I’ve seen in humans are unimodal (i.e. with a single peak representing the most common value of that trait, with fewer and fewer people the further you get from that peak as would, for example, be the case for any trait following a bell curve distribution).
To learn more about this trait, I recruited 200 people in the U.S. via our Positly.com study recruitment platform. I found that 45% said “Yes” and 55% said “No” to the question “In face to face conversation, do you find yourself visualizing, noticing or paying attention to what your facial expressions must look like to the other person?” A nearly even split!
To get a more nuanced perspective, I also asked people to say what percent of the time (in a typical face to face conversation) they find themself visualizing, noticing or paying attention to what their facial expressions must look like to the other person.
As you can see in the graphic below (which shows the frequency of different answers to the question), people commonly people report being aware of what their face looks like during typical conversation 0-30% of the time (with 0% being the most commonly reported value of all). But there is a second quite large contingent that report having this facial awareness 60-95% of the time! Hence, it forms two fairly distinct groups, the “facially self-unaware” (like me) and the “facially self-aware” (like my friend).
It makes me wonder: how many other major differences in people’s mental behaviors are there that we are totally unaware of? It’s really common for us to just assume other people work the way we do. For instance, people with synesthesia (who experiencing a mixing of the senses, such as perceiving a color associated with each word) often go many years before realizing they are different than other people. They don’t think to mention that the word tiger is green to them, just as we may never think to mention that we do (or don’t) have awareness of what our own face is like during conversation!