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piqer for: Global finds Health and Sanity Doing Good
Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Social Observation: The Invisibility Cloak In Our Minds
At first glance, this appears to be a story right up the pop psychology street - a popular reference (in this case, Harry Potter), a little psycho mumbo-jumbo and a bit of sage advice thrown in.
But in this first-impression assumption of mine, I am displaying the very bias the article is discussing. All of us tend to have what the author calls "optimistic self-perception", which makes us certain that we are more honest, sharper and more compassionate than the next person. In recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Erica Boothby and her colleagues examine what they fancily call the "invisibility cloak illusion" - a psychological (incorrect) certitude that leads us to believe that we “observe others more than they observe us”.
The article describes three social experiments that were conducted as part of the research, the most interesting one (for me) being the one where participants of the same sex sat opposite each other for seven minutes believing that the experiment was about to begin. They were then taken to separate rooms and asked to write down what they believed the other person noticed about them. This was repeated with several participants, and the results showed a constant mismatch - the invisibility cloak illusion in action. Almost always, the observers tended to have observed far more than their fellow participant expected.
This, as the author points out, is rather disconcerting for those who suffer from painful self-consciousness - you don't really want to know people observe you more than you think they do!
Regardless of what self-conscious people feel, the findings are important because they might have implications on how we understand social interactions, though more research is needed. The initial findings suggest we underestimate the impact our actions have on others, especially in emergencies where it is worth remembering that others take as many cues from our reactions as we perhaps take from theirs.
