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Audrey Aguilar, Javier Castro, Vanessa Funes, Evelyn Ramirez

Ms. Abuan

WRI 10

December 11, 2014

Testing Perception

Introduction:

Have you ever wondered if your perception of yourself matches the perception of how

people view you? In order to assess this question we have designed an experiment, which tests

how UC Merced students perceive themselves and how other UC Merced students perceive their

fellow peers. We define perception as the way you think about or understand someone. What we

hope to accomplish in this experiment is to assess whether UC Merced student’s perception of

himself or herself is similar or different to other UC Merced students. Assessing your perception

of yourself and of others is very important because it affects your own well-being and the

manner in which we form relationships. According to Dr. George Simon’s article “Self-Image:

How We See Ourselves and Why It Matters” we as humans are always seeing the flaws in others

and always assume that our perception of others is correct. Simon also states, “Others have their

flaws, we have ours. And, if we’re ever going to be truly and accurately able to address the flaws

in another we must first remove the distortions in our perceptions that cloud our own judgment”

(8). Thus, in relation to this claim our experiment has tested a variety of UC Merced students on

their perception of themselves and of others. We hoped to test how UC Merced students

responded to our experiment and see if there were any patterns or alignment of each student’s

responses.

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Purpose:

Our purpose for this experiment was to assess the perception of UC Merced students

about themselves and to test the perception that other UC Merced students have on their peers.

Our initial hypothesis was that most UC Merced students do not see themselves, as others

perceive them because we believed that most people when talking about themselves are more

likely to point out their imperfections. According to humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers one of

the main components of perception is self-image or how you see yourself. In Sigmund Koch’s

book titled Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the Social

Context Rogers states, “It is important to realize that self-image does not necessarily coincide

with reality” (89). This means that people might have a certain perception of themselves and they

may believe that they look a certain way when in reality they do not. In relation to Roger’s

theory three psychology professors have conducted more recent studies about modern society.

Their book entitled Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century states,

“A self-concept is a collection of beliefs about one's own nature, unique qualities, and typical

behavior. Your self-concept is your mental picture of yourself. It is a collection of self-

perceptions” (104).

These findings about human psychology have led us to believe that we as humans have a

false perception of ourselves and we are prone to exaggerate our flaws or weaknesses. In doing

this experiment we hoped to assess perception based on physical appearance. We chose to base

this experiment on physical appearance because our research of psychological concepts indicts

that perception is very much related to self- image. Thus, we decided that because physical

appearance is involved heavily on perception it was the most effective concept to assess. In order

to effectively conclude that individuals have different perception of themselves we have included

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two different groups of UC Merced students. The first group assessed themselves and the second

group assessed other students. We hoped to find how the perception of different UC Merced

student’s is either similar or different.

Conducting the Experiment In this experiment, we divided 52 UC Merced students into two groups, Group A and

Group B. Group A subjects were expected to describe themselves in front of a mirror answering

eight specific open ended questions about physical appearance. Group B subjects were then

expected to sit down, watch a recorded video from a subject in Group A, and answer specific

open ended questions about the student in the video. Note that the video was put on mute and we

made sure that the subject that the student in Group B described was a complete stranger to them

in order to prevent bias. Group A was the first group we conducted our perception test on.

Group A Interviews

We gathered 26 UC Merced students, 13 boys and 13 girls. We scheduled different times

for interviews over the course of three weeks. Our testing took place in the lounge of the housing

building named Tuolumne, there we set up the room with a closet mirror leaning against a couch

and set the camera at an angle to capture the subject being interviewed. Each subject took

approximately two minutes to answer all necessary questions for this experiment. Research

members took turns asking each question out loud to the subject, which was also recorded. After

each interview we wrote the subject’s name down and asked them if they would offer consent to

be in our official video for viewing on our final presentation. This process went on until all 26

interviews were fulfilled.

Group B Interviews

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The second part of the experiment included Group B’s interviews. Group B consisted of

26 UC Merced students with no specific boy to girl ratio. Each subject was first shown an image

of a Group A subject, and then asked, “Do you know this person?” if they answered yes, we

would select a different image until there was one student that they did not know, in order to

properly asses the perception of the individual without any bias included. We would then mute

the video so they would not hear the subject’s answers and only base their judgment on the

subject’s appearance and body language. Subjects in Group B were then asked six specific

questions to base upon the subject they were viewing in the video. Following the same process in

Group A, researchers took turns reading the questions out loud while recording, and later asked

the subject in Group B if they would offer consent to be part of the official video for final

presentation. This process went on until all 26 interviews were fulfilled.

Comparing Results

After gathering the sufficient data needed, researchers sat down and watched each

recorded interview to write down each answer from both Group A and Group B subjects. On

paper we separated two columns including the name of the subject in Group A in one column

and the name of the subject who viewed Group A’s interview in the second column. We

compared results with only six out of the eight questions from Groups A’s interview because we

encountered an experimental error and found that two out of the eight questions were irrelevant

to comparing answers to Group B’s questions. After writing down each answer, we judged each

answer to be similar or different.

Timeline and Obstacles

This experiment took approximately three weeks to complete. Time was one of our

biggest obstacles because our research group all had different schedules. We also had to open

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specific times that the majority of test subjects would be able to come in and record. We

sometimes had delays and wasted interview times because some group subjects would cancel

causing us to find replacements as quickly as possible. Gathering the right amount of test

subjects also was a big obstacle we faced. We initially stated that we were just going to have 32

interviews in total, but later on realized that it would be more reasonable to have more people

interviewed to become more credible as researchers and conclude approximate data to compare.

The Results:

For the results we decided to organize the data by comparing the answers that subjects

from Group A and subjects from Group B said. The questions that we compared were what was

their favorite physical feature about themselves and about the subject from Group A. Another

question that we compared was the way that both groups described a person’s body. We also

compared how Group B subjects believed that the people describing themselves thought they got

complimented on the most. Other questions that we compared were the way both groups thought

people viewed them and how they felt overall about their appearance. We color-coded the

questions as seen on Figure A. Color coding the questions made it easier to compare the answers

that both groups gave. This became really interesting because we ended up attaining unexpected

results. We thought that people were only going to say negative things about themselves but

instead we received data that was completely different to our hypothesis. We initially predicted

that people would point out their flaws. Instead our responses consisted of people saying a lot of

positive comments about themselves. Something that we noticed was that when Group B

subjects had to describe Group A subjects they were very careful with their words.

We can see that in Figure F an individual from Group B was thinking about how to

answer the questions that we were asking him. It was obvious that they did not want to make

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any false assumptions since subjects from Group A were complete strangers and they did not

know anything about them. An example of this is seen on Figure G because a subject is

watching a video and answering the questions that we were asking her. Another thing that we

noticed was that subjects from Group A took longer to answer questions. The subjects from

Group A stared at themselves in the mirror until they came up with an answer. To answer all of

the questions that we asked subjects from Group A took around two to three minutes. On the

other hand, subjects from Group B took around a minute to answer all of the questions that we

asked them. If the subjects from both groups did not feel like they could answer the questions

that we asked them they answered with an “I do not know” response and asked if they could skip

the question. This observation proved that our hypothesis was true to a certain extent. When it

comes to describing ourselves it takes a much longer time because we tend to think negatively

about ourselves. These were all things that we noticed while interviewing the subjects from each

group.

After we compared all of the answers from both groups we realized that there were three

types of categories for the responses. The first category is where all of the answers were the

same. In this category subjects from Group B answered similar if not the same exact answer as

subjects from Group A. We saw this result occur a couple of times. This is shown in Figure B

because both David and Julia had a lot of the same answers. This was one of the most interesting

things we found because David said that he disliked his height but Julia said that is one of the

things that she really liked about him. The second category is where some answers were similar

but the other half of the answers were different. We also had some interviews that fell into this

category. This is shown on Figure C because most of the answers were similar except for one

answer. This was also seen on Figure D Marissa and Giovanni answered the questions very

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similarly. The last category that we attained was where none of the answers matched to what the

subjects from Group A had said. We had a couple of these interviews because subjects from

Group B said completely different answers than what subjects from Group A said. This is seen

on Figure E because Laura and Israel answered completely different answers. Overall we

realized that people’s perception of themselves does not always include only negative remarks.

There were even some responses where subjects from Group A said that they like everything

about themselves and have no problem with the way that they look.

Conclusion

We do not hope in doing any further research for this project because the only concept we

wanted to understand was how someone may perceive himself or herself versus the discrepancy

of a person who does not know them. Finding out that the students in UC Merced do see

themselves in a positive way does counter-balance our hypothesis, but those were the problems

that we faced throughout the experiment. The constant fluctuations made us second-guess our

proposal, but it finally led us to choose a proposal that made sense and that overall had an affect

and purpose.

Understanding a variety of UC Merced student’s perception can be a very difficult task to

do and analyzing or judging a person they do not know adds to the difficulty of what we went

through as a group. Students in UC Merced are critical about the way they see themselves while

other students who see them, physically speaking, are very positive about the way their fellow

peers look. We asked the subjects from Group A and Group B specific questions which, many of

the students had a difficult time answering them because some of the questions were very

thought provoking and personal as well. This experiment allowed us to view many different

ways of how people think and perceive themselves. What we discovered from this experiment

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was that many students here in UC Merced do not care how other people view them in general.

This shows us how strong-minded students in UC Merced are and what strong-minded means to

us is having a determined and independent mind or way of thinking. Most of the answers the

students gave us were oscillating because of the fact that they have their own way of perceiving

others physically.

As the students answered the questions, we also developed the idea that they do not mind

being video recorded, as long as the experiment had good intentions, they were willing to

participate. We made the subjects feel comfortable, which made them open up emotionally to us

as we asked them the questions. Everyone from both Group A and Group B understood what was

being asked and they answered as honestly or as comfortably as they could. Others did not know

how to answer some questions because they have never been in a situation like the experiment

we asked them to participate in.

From our experiment, we can conclude that we were not entirely correct in our

hypothesis because the responses from Group A and Group B were closely aligned with slight

differences. Most UC Merced students did not see themselves, as others perceive them. Our

hypothesis was partially incorrect because Group A’s answers were mostly similar to Group B’s

answers with slight differences depending on the question. We think this happened because of

the type of questions that were asked. The questions that were only based on quick judgment of

physical appearance had similar answers in both groups, while the more deep, and personal

questions mostly based on emotion had different answers. We believe this happened because we

are the only ones who truly know ourselves and how the environment, and past experiences has

shaped our self-image, while other people who view you only see the physical appearance,

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making it only possible to assume, categorize, and judge your mere appearance and body

language.

The overall experience of this experiment was mind opening because the results were

unexpected. Whoever reads our proposal can expect a change in opinion and may want to rethink

about how they perceive themselves because our mentality comes from within ourselves. What

the proposal may bring to UC Merced is a more independent way of thinking to all the students.

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Appendix

Figure A

Figure B

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Figure C

Figure D

Figure E

Figure F

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Figure G

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Works Cited

Koch, Sigmund. Psychology: A Study of a Science. Vol. 3: Formulations of the Person and the

Social Context. New York: McGraw Hill, 1959. Print.

Simon, George. "Self-Image: How We See Ourselves and Why It Matters." Psychology

Philosophy and Real Life RSS. CounsellingResource.com, 28 July 2014. Web. 4 Dec.

2014.

Weiten, Wayne, Dunn, S. Dana, and Hammer, Y. Elizabeth Psychology Applied to Modern

Life: Adjustments in the 21st Century. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2012. Print.