Said Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science, quoted in "How to Get a Party Buzz Even When You’re Not Drinking/These tips for sober socializing may not have you dancing on tables, but they’ll help you have plenty of fun" (NYT).
Thinking about yourself while looking in a mirror is a pretty distorted form of thinking about yourself. And I'm not even sure what "they" means in "they wanted to study." Is it the "people" or the social psychologists? When I first read that, I thought the subjects — the "people" — were receiving therapy and being taught that they look worse when they're thinking about themselves. So quit focusing on yourself and you will do better in social settings. But then I saw "social" before "psychologists" and realized this isn't individual therapy. The "people" were subjects of a study, and they were looking in the mirror... why? To ensure that they were thinking about themselves? Or was it to produce "negative moods"? Doesn't seem like a well-designed study!
Anyway, do you go to parties and think about what other people are thinking about you? Are there any mirrors around? Are you able to dance without drinking?
ADDED: I'm having a very interesting discussion with Grok about mirrors. At this point, it's pretty much written a complete book for me. I'll just show you the cover:
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21 comments:
"Are there any mirrors around? "
At the right kind of parties, yes.
Are you able to drink without dancing?
Forget mirrors if you want to feel bad about yourself. Just keep looking at your smartphone.
Social psychologists = People with big (utopian) ideas but no way to study them.
This speciality routinely suffers "crises" because those who join the field are shocked to discover that they cannot control or predict the 200+ factors involved with social interaction. They conduct projects with ultra-powerful statistical methods that allow one to say anything with data, and then reach opposing conclusions (e.g., factor analysis with rotation). Social psychology university professors routinely bicker among themselves/call others names per alternate explanations of data -- most 'research' resembles a novel's narrative more than science.
Keep science focused on a handful of controllable factors or watch it go sideways.
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/was-crisis-social-psychology-really-bad-have-things-improved-part-one-researchers
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-023-00003-2
https://nobaproject.com/modules/the-replication-crisis-in-psychology
Take your social hints from Groundhog Day. Learn ice carving.
Parties? What parties?
Channeling Stuart Smally!
@Chest Rockwell
Thanks. That was great!
"Are there any mirrors around? Are you able to dance without drinking?"
In the late '70s, my first job was as a busboy. The owner had a Christmas party in a private room at a big nightclub. I got pretty drunk (prob just turned 15) and was having a blast dancing. One of the walls was a mirror and when I saw myself dancing it was mortifying.
I'm in my 70's and parties of all types are slowly becoming fewer are farther between. Thankfully..
The wisdom of age is that you realize that people are almost never actually thinking about you.
I hate to break it to you, Althouse, but mirrors as portals to other worlds has been done, back in 1872, by a mathematician named Charles Dodgson. The treatise was titled Through the Looking Glass and he published it under the pen name Lewis Carroll.
The mirror is a common theme in fiction and used reflexively as metaphor and also as a portal theme. The latter is of course in the Lewis Carroll title. The KJV Bible has Paul writing perhaps the best known example of the former when he compares human perception to "looking in a glass darkly" and then contrasting it with how much we will understand when we are in God's presence.
There's a short fiction on the New Yorker podcast that's in my bedtime story rotation, Steven Milhouser's "Miracle Polish." It's an outstanding exploration of the mirror theme in short story form.
As an introvert I have to say, if you don't think about what others are thinking about you while you're at the party, you will definitely do so when you wake up at 4am. And you won't like it.
Mirror in the bathroom, please talk free
The door is locked, just you and me
Can I take you to a restaurant that's got glass tables?
You can watch yourself while you are eating
Michael Moore sitting in front of a mirror thinking about his health.
"Doesn't seem like a well-designed study!" Which study? Not clear from article or post. Social psychology has bias and replication problem but Epley seems like a pretty serious guy.
While I haven't done much research on it, I've always been intrigued by what the ancients thought was going on in the mirror. Since they didn't know how sight works, how did they explain reflections?
It seems inevitable that at least some people thought it was another world--that things carried on outside the margins of the mirror, independent of this world.
I haven't about The English Beat in many years.
Taught middle schoolers at the church for years. Always had to tell them “quit wondering/worrying about what other people are think about you… they’re Not.”
Truth is, kids are all just thinking about themselves damn near all the time. Even wondering what others think about them is thinking about themselves.
I had that self-consciousness when I first went to high school dances. I discovered that having some kind of alcohol before hand eliminated the problem. (Of course that lead to other problems later on, but as the great Homer observed, "Beer, the cause of and the solution to, all our problems.")
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