Post No.: 0664
Fluffystealthkitten says:
As everybody knows, carefully manicuring one’s own public image isn’t always about honestly conveying the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth with one-to-one fidelity but about emphasising and exaggerating what one wants being communicated to others while hiding and downplaying what one doesn’t. This applies to individuals and organisations, and on places like on social media, press releases and wherever there’s a social interaction.
There’s a private reality, then there’s a curated public image. For instance, some people who stigmatise and overtly denigrate sex workers in public are the exact same people who watch them in private(!) They’ll mock masturbation and call others ****ers but they’re ****ers too! Or most people will publicly state that eating their own bogies or not washing their hands after going to the lavatory is yucky, yet many of the exact same people will have a sneaky snack or forgo the faucet when no one’s there to judge them!
People and organisations like to show off and publicly shout about only their best or most moral sides and not their worst or immoral sides. Everyone naturally, subconsciously or even consciously, presents different personas for different people and in different contexts (e.g. perhaps one in front of their teachers and another in front of their friends). This behaviour can be so automatic that one is unaware of doing it.
Social media can connect people together, which is amazing, but what people tend to do, especially if they’re passive users, is end up comparing themselves to each other and feeling insecure (social comparisons). But of course they’re comparing to everyone else’s carefully curated and manipulated public images – people decide to take, edit and post whichever pictures they want to show, and not take or post whichever pictures they don’t (e.g. their glamorous holiday pictures versus something embarrassing, unless they think the latter will show their ‘fun side’).
Social media facilitates this careful and biased curation and takes it to another level – at face value, we cannot easily trust whether a picture hasn’t been edited, whether a brag isn’t exaggerated, or even whether the clothes people wear can be afforded by those who pose with them (under a terrible culture of ‘wear once then return for a refund’).
People generally want their perceived successes or strengths known to others but their failures or deficiencies concealed. Most people ultimately want others to think of them as mentally intelligent, physically fit, morally upstanding, and perhaps funny, sensitive, kind and loyal, for instance – the traits for perceived trustworthiness and attractiveness. Even though this is highly likely a one-sided story!
‘Self-handicapping’ and ‘sandbagging’ are tactics to serve one’s public image, as well as to protect one’s self-esteem. They give a handy excuse if one later fails (e.g. one didn’t pass the exam because one partied the night before and so didn’t revise, not because one is inherently incompetent at chemistry), and allow one to compete in an easier contest where one is more likely to win and thus look good, respectively.
People can also often look for ‘honourable excuses to fail’ (e.g. tripping over ‘accidentally on purpose’ and feigning an injury to get out of a gruelling exercise one wasn’t ever going to do well in, so that one can say, “I didn’t want to quit but the doctor forced me to stop.”)
Genuine modesty exists, but ‘false modesty’ when extolling future competitors is to reduce expectations so that beating them will seem more impressive and losing to them won’t seem so surprising i.e. the bar for success is lowered.
These tactics are all about serving or preserving one’s public image and reputation. The truth matters less than the impression that we can make or leave on others. And we want to look good.
Even when no one is watching or will never know, our self-concepts or self-adjudged identities are mere biased narratives, and there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correlation between what one believes in private about oneself and what’s the truth when one examines the evidence using objective measures. Most commonly, people over-estimate their own brilliance, hence why the vast majority of people think they’re above average in desirable traits like intelligence and being a good driver (although, in relatively rarer cases, people can think too less of themselves and suffer from impostor syndrome or severe depression). Falsities are easier to tell if we truly believe in them ourselves. And then this biased narrative receives self-reinforcing feedback via how we curate our own desirable public image.
People like to show ‘I was there’, ‘I knew about this first’ or ‘I did that too’ – only selectively the exciting events or things that might associate them with desirable traits, not their typical humdrum daily existence.
Some people overtly display all of their trophies and certificates (framed) in their homes for all to hopefully see, whilst others (with maybe more awards) don’t. A talented cook mightn’t bother photographing any brilliant dish they produce because it’s an everyday occurrence (and it’d seem ostentatious to her/his equally-talented peers), whilst a less-talented cook might decide to photograph and post for all to see that one brilliant dish they managed to produce one day because they’re so proud of it! So it can often be the case that what people decide to highlight about themselves are precisely the exceptional achievements to their typical performances, rather than their norm; just like a child might show off her/his gold stickers for successful consecutive days potty training!
Adolescent males in particular want to show that they’re braver, brawnier and better than others to stand out from the crowd when it comes to sexual selection. People’s public images are essentially ultimately about sex when it comes to trying to attract mates, and about trust when it comes to showing that they’re team players within their social groups.
But a managed public image can again include a fair dose of misleading pretence. For instance, many people don’t put their money where their mouths are when it comes to actually choosing high-welfare animal or fair trade products, or don’t act as they say they do when it comes to recycling or other environmentally-conscious behaviours. Even when people wish to act in the desirable way, their behaviours don’t always match their attitudes.
People’s expressed priorities (e.g. ethically-sourced produce) may not match their actual priorities (e.g. paying the cheapest price), but telling the truth might make them seem bad to others. This is even when most others are probably thinking and doing the same and suspect that others are thinking and doing the same – but some things are better left tacit or presumed than explicitly known to be fact in public. Social life is full of politics!
Politics exists wherever more than one individual needs to co-exist communally, and this applies to other social animals like chimpanzees too. So people very often vocally say what they think they should say in order to protect their own reputations or image when asked questions in public (e.g. that food waste is bad even though they waste heaps of food themselves, or sexism is wrong even though they perpetuate certain ingrained sexist beliefs themselves).
Straightforward surveys or polls can therefore be unreliable because of unconscious self-reporting biases or conscious and intentional deceptions that hide a respondent’s potentially socially-unacceptable views. People can exhibit a major mismatch between their expressed attitudes and their actual behaviours, even if conveyed anonymously.
Rather than go wash their hands, many kids wipe their dirty hands on their clothes if they think their parents won’t notice. 3-year-old kids bareface lie a lot to try to get away with stuff! Adults lie too but are just more sophisticated about it. Looking and being clean aren’t identical outcomes – dogs can walk on **** outside then stand on the couch, and cats can eat raw meat then lick your face, for instance, but the germs cannot be seen with naked eyes. Tables and chairs (where your hands regularly touch, which can then touch your mouth) are more important to clean than the floor or inside the toilet. This isn’t to say that pets and all bacteria are bad. (I’m probably biased but cats are way cleaner than humans – meow.) The point is that we shouldn’t judge too much with our eyes, or even noses. Hygiene isn’t about going through the motions or judging by appearances – it’s about not getting needlessly sick. That’s the ultimate objective. Hygiene is about how much risk something really presents to someone’s health. So judge whoever seem to constantly pick up infections (unless they really cannot help them), not how anyone or their homes apparently superficially appear.
New clothes aren’t the same as clean clothes. You better wash all clothes that touch your skin before you first wear them after buying them; and old, tatty, scruffy and shabby clothes can be washed and therefore clean. Throwing clothes away when all they have is an unsightly permanent colour stain should be considered more disgusting concerning the environment than washing and wearing them again – but what will others think?
Likewise any food, unless it’s unethical, that doesn’t cause disease (e.g. diarrhoea) shouldn’t really be considered more disgusting than foods that contribute greatly to disease risk (e.g. tooth decay or obesity-related diseases). Opinions of ‘disgust’ are often made on things that aren’t anything to do with health, safety or a lack of morality, such as opinions on odd food combinations. I’ll have my own opinions but I wouldn’t judge others on the grounds of ‘disgust’ or ‘you must be a psycho’ – each to their own I’d say. Some prefer a wanko soba over a bukkake udon, and vice-versa. Disgust should relate to things like wasting edible food when others are still starving in this world. The ‘disgust’ of a foodstuff shouldn’t be an emotional decision but whether it statistically has a high chance of causing illness to an individual who consumes it.
Parents treating other children more kindly than their own is for the family’s public image. A first-generation immigrant might send lots of money to various people back in her/his home country to appear prosperous, generous and gain respect back there, but privately doesn’t ever buy her/his own children birthday presents.
At work, it’s often about looking like one is working and claiming as much credit for oneself as possible. Intuitively, ‘image or impression’ gets conflated with ‘truth’, so looking the part becomes the focus more than actually being the part if the former is easier to achieve than the latter and one can get away with the deception. This is a problem in many contexts. Faking, exaggeration and selective disclosure/concealment is an effort-saving strategy – because it’s about what people believe is true because people heuristically tend to believe what they see. And this can work particularly effectively in the modern world where one doesn’t really need to prove oneself in many physical ways (e.g. one’s true hunting or fighting prowess) i.e. if you can convince a potential mate that you ‘could’ do something, whether you can or can’t, will or won’t, then that can be enough. (Learn about signalling theory in Post No.: 0584.) And if it ultimately saves energy and achieves the same result then it’ll be a rational strategy.
Even fundraisers apparently need to vet which sponsors to accept in order to not be associated with a particular company’s or person’s undesirable reputation, even if this means relinquishing their donation i.e. public reputations seem to be more important than even money when one is desperate for money (but not too desperate).
Meow. So our image is important – it affects our reputation – and that’s why we’ll subconsciously and consciously curate it. Some will go quite far in their quest to appear better than they really are (e.g. players, politicians and corporations). So it’s one of those things – we try to fool others, but try to not get fooled by others, or even by ourselves, in return.
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