The Illusion of Transparency
The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.
The Truth: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.
You stand in front of your speech class with your outline centered on the lectern, your stomach performing gymnastics.
You sat through all the other speeches, tapping the floor, transferring nervous energy into the tiles through a restless foot, periodically wiping your hands on the top of your pants to wick away the sweat.
Each time the speaker summed up and the class applauded, you clapped along with everyone else, and as it subsided you realized how loud your heart was thumping when a fresh silence settled.
Finally, the instructor called your name, and your eyes cranked open. You felt as if you had eaten a spoonful of sawdust as you walked up to the blackboard planting each foot carefully so as not to stumble.
As you begin to speak the lines you’ve rehearsed, you search the faces of your classmates.
“Why is he smiling? What is she scribbling? Is that a frown?”
“Oh no,” you think, “they can see how nervous I am.”
I must look like an idiot. I’m bombing, aren’t I? This is horrible. Please let a meteor hit this classroom before I have to say another word.
“I’m sorry,” you say to the audience. “Let me start over.”
Now it’s even worse. What kind of moron apologizes in the middle of a speech?
Your voice quavers. Flop sweat gathers behind your neck. You become certain your skin must be glowing red and everyone in the room is holding back laughter.
Except, they aren’t.
They are just bored. Your anxiety is peaking, and it feels like waves of emotional energy must be radiating from your head like some sort of despair halo, but there is nothing to see on the outside other than your facial expressions. Keep those under control and you are home free.
“If you’re quiet at a party, people don’t know if it’s because you’re arrogant and you think you’re better than everyone else or because you’re shy and don’t know how to talk to people…but you know, because you know your thoughts and feelings. So things like anxiety, optimism and pessimism, your tendency to daydream, and your general level of happiness—what’s going on inside of you, rather than things you do—those are things other people have a hard time knowing.”
- Simine Vazire from a 2009 interview in Psychology Today conducted by Sam Gosling
To get information out of one head and into another, it has to be transmitted through some sort of communication. Faces, sounds, gestures, words like the ones you are reading now – we must depend on these clunky tools because no matter how strong an emotion or how powerful an idea, it never seems as intense or potent to the world outside your mind as it does to the one within.
This is the illusion of transparency.
You know what you are feeling, what you are thinking, and you tend to believe those thoughts and emotions are leaking out of your pores, visible to the world, perceivable to the outside.
You overestimate how obvious what you truly think must be and fail to recognize other people in your life are in their own bubbles, thinking the same thing about their inner worlds.
Source: tvtropes.org
When you try to imagine what other people are thinking, you have no choice but to start from inside your noggin. In there, with your perturbations pushing up against you, among your inescapable self, you think your thoughts and feelings must be evident.
Sure, when people are paying attention, they can read you to an extent, but you grossly overestimate how much so.
You can test the illusion of transparency using a method created by Elizabeth Newton.
Pick a song everyone knows, like your national anthem, and have someone else sit across from you. Now, tap out the song with your fingertips.
After a verse or two, ask the other person what you were tapping.
In your mind, you can hear every note, every instrument. In their mind, they can hear your fingers tapping.
(If you record a video performing this experiment yourself and post it on YouTube, I’ll add it to this post if you send me the link.)
Pause here and try it out. I’ll wait.
Ok. I’m going to assume you’ve been tapping. How did you do? Did they figure out what you were trying to play?
Probably not. How confident were you? Was it frustrating?
In Newton’s study, the tappers predicted the listeners would be able to guess the tune half of the time, but the listeners correctly guessed about 3 percent of the songs.
The rich, complex experience of being you is impossible to see. Your subjective experience is wholly unobservable to anyone but yourself.
Yet, much of the time, you assume this isn’t so, that what you think and feel must be apparent.
The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably lead to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and emails.
If you are like me, you often have to back up and restate your case, or answer questions about your tone, or reword everything and try sending it again.
We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too. Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant. It’s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.
- Eliezer Yudowsky from Lesswrong.com
On the Internet, people often include “/s” at the end of a statement to indicate sarcasm. It was so hard to communicate tone online we had to create a new punctuation mark.
Getting an idea out of one head and into another is difficult, and much can be lost in the information transfer. An insight which slams into you like an avalanche won’t have the same impact coming out of your mouth or fingertips.
In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky published their research on the illusion of transparency in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
They reasoned your subjective experience, or phenomenology, was so potent you would have a hard time seeing beyond it when you were in a heightened emotional state.
Their hypothesis was based on the spotlight effect – the belief everyone is looking right at you, judging your actions and appearance, when in reality you disappear into the background most of the time.
Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky figured the effect was so powerful it made you feel as if the imaginary spotlight could penetrate your gestures, words and expressions and reveal your private world as well.
They had Cornell students divide into groups. An audience would listen as individuals read questions from index cards and then answered them out loud. They either lied or told the truth based on what the card said to do on a label only they could see.
Source: Ms L
Audience members were told they would get prizes based on how many liars they detected.
Liars would say something like, “I have met David Letterman.”
They then had to guess how many people could tell they had lied while the audience tried to figure out who out of the five was fibbing.
The results? Half of the liars thought they had been caught, but only a quarter were – they strongly overestimated their transparency.
In subsequent experiments the variables were shuffled around and the lies presented in other ways; the results were nearly identical.
Studies all throughout the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your lies will be easy to detect, that you are more transparent than you are.
Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky moved on to another experiment.
They sat students down in front of a video camera and a row of 15 cups filled with red liquid. They asked to students to hide their expressions as they tasted the beverages because five of the drinks were going to be rat nasty.
They then had 10 people watch the tape and asked the students who did the tasting to estimate how many of the observers would be able to tell when they had imbibed something gross.
About a third of the observers could tell when people were disgusted, or at least they said they could and guessed well. The people doing the tasting predicted about half would be able to see through their attempts to hide revulsion. The illusion of transparency jacked up the powers of observation they imagined in their judges.
Pushing ahead, they tried another experiment based on the research of Miller and McFarland on the bystander effect (the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one person will leap into action).
“When confronted with a potential emergency, people typically play it cool, adopt a look of nonchalance, and monitor the reactions of others to determine if a crisis is really at hand. No one wants to overreact, after all, if it might not be a true emergency. However, because each individual holds back, looks nonchalant, and monitors the reactions of others, sometimes everyone concludes (perhaps erroneously) that the situation is not an emergency and hence does not require intervention.”
- Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky from their study of The Illusion of Transparency
Once again, their research showed when people were in a situation in which they felt concerned and alarmed, they assumed it was written all over their faces when it reality it wasn’t. In turn, they thought if other people were freaking out, they would be able to see it.
In 2003, Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich conducted a study to determine if they could short-circuit the illusion of transparency.
They had people give public speeches on the spot and then rate how nervous they thought they looked to their audience. Sure enough, they said they looked like a wreck, but the onlookers didn’t notice it.
Still, in this experiment some people got stuck in a feedback loop. They thought they appeared nervous, so they started to try and compensate, and then they thought the compensation was noticeable and tried to cover that up which they then felt was more obvious, and so on until they worked themselves up into a state where they were obviously freaking out.
They decided to run the experiment again, but this time they explained the illusion of transparency to some of the subjects, telling them they might feel like everyone could see them losing it, but they probably couldn’t.
This time, the feedback loop was broken. Those told about the illusion felt less stressed, gave better speeches and the audiences said they were more composed.
Our results thus lend credence to the notion that “the truth can set you free”: Knowing the truth about the illusion of transparency set participants free from the cycle of anxiety…
- Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich
When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail.
Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.
When you get near the person you have a crush on and feel the war drums in your gut, don’t freak out. You don’t look as nervous as you feel.
When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can’t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile.
When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she can’t hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.
If you are trying to communicate something complex, or you have vast knowledge of a subject someone else does not, realize it is going to be difficult to put yourself in their shoes. The explanation process may become thorny, but don’t take it out on them. Just because they can’t see inside your mind doesn’t mean they are not so smart.
You don’t suddenly become telepathic when angry, anxious or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.
If you buy one book this year…well, I suppose you should get something you’ve had your eye on for a while. But, if you buy two or more books this year, might I recommend one of them be a celebration of self delusion? Give the gift of humility (to yourself or someone else you love). Watch the trailer.
Order now: Amazon - Barnes and Noble - iTunes - Books A Million
Links:
The Illusion of Transparency Study
The Illusion of Transparency and Language at Lesswrong.com
Mixed Signals from Psychology Today
Like this:
Trackbacks
- Can’t Read Your Mind | Will Baum, LCSW
- The Transparency Illusion « Cheap Talk
- The Illusion of Transparency – Sirharris.com
- Don’t Let Me Down (Friendship Series pt II) « PELLUCIDA – allowing passage of light
- Vikan á netinu – Arnþór Snær
- Wikipedia (and other) articles of interest « Econstudentlog
- Café da tarde - Semana de 23 de julho de 2010 | Vivendocidade
- The Illusion of Transparency « You Are Not So Smart : StressPage.com
- Lift « Otherwise, Lightning
- You’re Not That Smart « Findsen Law
- links for 2010-08-29
- Texas Dull Shooter « ricketyclick
- Contest entry #9 « You Are Not So Smart
- Can't Breathe!!
- Moving Beyond Expectations - Page 3
- A suicide note (not mine) :: a broken mold
- Obsidian’s folly, Inception and the subjectivity of human perception
- Never too busy for « verve.
- [转]别人没那么懂你 | Boss&Music 's blog
- Weekend Reading: Mid-Summer Edition - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- The Human Hall Of Mirrors: Who Are You From Someone Else’s Perspective? « Peter H Brown Clinical Psychologist
- Drinking and driving - Page 7
- De onnozele vraagjes topic - Pagina 195 - 9lives - Games Forum
- Change blindness « Later On
- 4 Proven Methods to Encourage Others to Step Up and Lead | Endurance Leader
- Mirror To Your Soul? « Gonzaga Center for Professional Development
- Smart Arse |
Excellent and informative article, as usual.
A couple of proofreading-type corrections:
“but only 3.5 could” – I’m guessing that should be 3% instead of 3.5?
“They has Cornell students” – “had” instead of “has”.
No need to post this in the comments section, obviously.
@Brand Hilton – Thanks. Typos corrected.
This is something poker players learn through experience. Every time you bluff and it works, despite the fact that your heart felt like it was hammering away at about 6000 bpm, you realize that nobody else at the table could actually hear it.
This article reminds me of an aphorism from the scientist/philosopher Heinz von Foerster which he called “The Hermeneutic Principle”: “The hearer, not the speaker determines the meaning of an utterance.” [http://www.cybsoc.org/heinz.htm] It’s a relatively simple idea which has great ramifications.
I’m sending this off to a chum who has to read the scripts for the television show ‘Lie to Me,’ where we both agree the conceit is quite suspect.
P.S. I cannot continue to read here if you are going to link to that great black hole time sink of the Internet (tv***.org). That is just evil.
@Corvus – I know, huh? I find myself reading there for hours.
Great read, thanks!
this article is very interesting, yet something bothers me… i have always been terrible at speeches, and that is not a silly idea i came up with, since people actually told me i was, and kept telling me years after years. my face turns red, i forget my point in the middle of a sentence…
as for the cycle thing, i used to be reproached to talk too fast (because of panic, which btw doesn’t help keep the speech consistent ^^), and tried to correct it… which drove me to be reproached to talk too slow… so i guess i get what you mean, except my experience tells me stg really different, as it took *years* for me to change the way i dealt with my anxiety, and i have never really felt consciously that i was trying to speak at a different pace to hide my anxiety.
in the end, i happened to realize that my problems came from the fact that i stopped breathing when i was nervous… realizing it sure didn’t solve evtg, but it helped a lot, so i guess i couldn’t agree more about the “truth can set you free” part.
@dominique garnett – The truth about the illusion of transparency helps people perform better, but it won’t eliminate the anxiety, especially among people like yourself who are extra-sensitive to public speaking. The fear of public speaking is often ranked higher than the fear of death in surveys, so there are many factors at play.
excellent points.
i completely identify with what you said.
i am not perceptive at all and tend to get confused about people all the time.
i also happen to be one of those people, who forgot the debate in middle of it at school after performing great at state level on the same topic. May be because no one knew me at state level and friends were staring right at me in the school.
also i love your blog.
i understand what you say and it makes sense most of the time, even if i do not agree.
@shraddha – Thanks a bunch. As long as discourse is stimulated, I am happy.
DUDE….you’re losing it.
Good article, maybe I can apply the principles to my own life.
Also another typo; “Our results this lend credence” – does instead of this?
@Micheal Meadon and Christian – Thanks for pointing out those slips. They’ve been repaired.
Excellent article.
A little thing: “Half of the liars thought they had been caught, but only a quarter were – they overestimated their transparency by 25 percent.” That’s not quite right because: (1) 50% is 100% larger that 25% and (2) a better interpretation in the first place is that 25% of the liars overestimated their transparency (we’re not talking about an effect size, after all).
Hi, thanks for a fascinating and informative post.
However, I find myself disagreeing with your opening statement.
“The Misconception: Most of the time people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.”
I don’t dispute the examples you’ve given, but surely in many situations we pretty much rely on the opposite, or social life would be a nightmare. For example, most of us probably have a friend whose partner we dislike. If we thought everybody could tell what we’re thinking, we’d never spend any time with them as a couple.
I agree that in some situations – when we’re nervous, or feeling guilty, or when we fancy
someone – we *can* feel that people can see through us, but I think a lot of the time we assume no-one knows what we are thinking.
In fact (and yes, this is only anecdotal), I’ve often seen people *think* they are doing a good job of hiding their feelings, when actually they are obvious to those around them. I guess it’s probably quite complicated and that people both under and over estimate their transparency, depending on a whole host of variables.
@Sophia – Excellent point. The original wording was better. I will go back to it.
@dominique: I think it’s an effect most people have experienced, so it’s a good illustration, but some people just have high anxiety levels when speaking in public to begin with. No feedback loop necessary to make your hands shake and voice ramp up.
Personally as a speaker I prepare well (go through all the slides, think what I’m going to say, say it out loud to an empty room) which helps me get through the first couple of minutes. I always feel myself get anxious, but “keep calm and carry on” really is the best advice in this situation. And it’s exactly what I’ve learned to do.
I now realise that while I thought that other people noticed that I was nervous in the beginning of a presentation, I might actually look a lot more confident than I thought.
P.S.: keepcalmandcarryon.org is owned by a cybersquatter. You sure this is the right source for the picture?
You’ve written Lesswrong.org twice in the article but should be Lesswrong.com (your link is correct though).
Or is that just a nice touch of irony? ;)
@Clint – Thanks. I’ll repair that. Yes, I am not so smart.
Brilliant post, makes Chomskian-like media analysis available to all.
I’m glad i’ve stumbled into your website.
Your writing style is clear and the articles are very informative. I have just read a bunch of them and can’t wait for the next!
Keep up the good work! greetings from Brazil
“They then had 10 people watch the tape and asked the students who did the tasting to estimate how many of the observers would be able to tell when they had imbibed something gross.
On average, they guessed about half of the observers would see their revulsion, but only 3.5 percent could.”
3.5% requires at least 200 observers, no?
I was searching for reasons for this strange behavior. I have an intuition.
May be the mirror neurons present in our brain have something to do with it.
Those neurons help us to mirror the circumstances of another being. And thus
we can guess the state of mind of that person.
Since we also know that others also possess such faculty of guessing a person’s
state of mind, we tend to believe that they know us as we know ourselves.
Just a guess. Could be wrong as well.
@Dinesh Dharme – Interesting. I thought about including mirror neurons in the article, but it muddled the point.
This is a very informative article and clears many doubts I have been having.
Thanks a lot and keep posting more such articles
@jyothi – Thanks!
Great article! I’d kind of been aware of this idea for a long time as I remember I was about 6 or 7 when my friend tried the tapping test and I couldn’t understand why he was so frustrated and condescending about me not being able to guess it .
I have recently become aware of an illusion I project which is almost the complete opposite to the one of transparency. Sometimes I seem to display emotions and feeling in what I am saying which I am not feeling at that moment, for example sometimes when I am trying to explain something to people, they get the impression I am annoyed or impatient with them when I’m not at all. Has this idea ever been covered in some kind of research? or is it just me haha
@louis – Not sure. Giving a false impression can sometimes have more to do with the other person’s expectations than your own behavior.
The tapping out songs experiment made me laugh. My four year old son loves to challenge my wife and I to guess what song he is performing. The problem is he often says: “Guess what song I’m chewing” or “Guess what song I’m drinking” while sipping from a straw. I think that’s a great example of how we believe our subjective experience is being broadcast to everyone around us as loudly as we experience it.
I wonder why it is that the average adult grows to understand that a “chewed” song probably won’t be recognized by anyone else but that same adult might truly believe that everyone in a room can see how nervous they are while giving a speech. What is it about fear and anxiety that makes people so irrational?
Great read, thanks!
The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.
That’s not a misconception in general, perhaps an overstatement when it comes to thinking but it works very well when it comes to emotions especially when people involved know each other.
The article should not mix ideas with emotions as they are very different in that regard, it’s obvious most ideas cannot be communicated by body language alone. OTOH most strong emotions – nervousness, fear, panic, anger, embarrassment, enjoyment, etc are easily communicated even when the person involved doesn’t want to communicate them (one can learn to contain them but it takes a lot of conscious effort)
Emotions and the associated body language long served as the only means of communication before humans invented speech so they purposefully evolved to be comprehensible to the group – the group survival depended on it.
@19.9 – Great comment. The point here is more about how we overestimate how much is communicated.
This is excellent. As someone who speaks a lot in public, it took me years to understand this phenomenon…mostly from being able to talk with folks who had heard my speaking afterwards…and realizing how little of my external fear they picked up on.
It also reminds me of my favorite Oscar Wilde quote:
“We wouldn’t worry so much what people think of us if we realized how seldom they do.”
Great article…I myself used to suffer tremendously from stage-fright. I improved with a speaking class, but transferred my anxiety into a loss of focus and just rambled when speaking to large groups. A number of years later after several speaking opportunities in a leadership role I grew more comfortable with improved focus. Changing my way of thinking as the article suggests could quite possibly make stage-fright a non-issue for me in the future.
Keep posting stuff like this i really like it
Does this have a corollary, that what you think other people have communicated to you, or how well you think you can read people, is actually not so much?
It was a great article. However, I don’t know why, but I always knew that my expressions were a lot calmer than I actually was at any given time.
@Karthik, That made me laugh inappropriately loudly. :)
@buster28. your wierd
This article exaggerates the effect of this principle. Heres a study that shows the limits of it. People who hear a speech read in a normal and slightly happier tone can’t conciously tell the tonal difference. Yet people who are read it in a happier tone, report feeling happier afterwards. There are similar studies that emphasize the importance of body language. You are being observed and judged by the people around you, but its often on a subconscious level. Heres a thought experiment: A nervous person and a confident person go up and talk to a member of the opposite sex. It is likely that the member of the opposite sex will not think “Oh he was nervous” about the nervous one, but it is also likely that he/she will like the confident one more without knowing why.
“This time, the feedback loop was broken. Those told about the illusion felt less stressed, gave better speeches and the audiences said they were more composed.”
So, telling people the audience couldn’t tell they were nervous caused the audience to find them less nervous.
In other words… you lied to them? If the audience didn’t notice the nervousness then how could they notice they were more composed?
I truly liked this post. I already had many times to speak in front of many people and the scenario you depicted was so true. And no matter how much I do it, I am still nervous before. While I speak I am not as nervous any more.
Thanks for posting this cool entry, I’ll keep on reading.
I’d just like to point out that I think this is less true for people who you know extremely closely. A mother or spouse or anybody you’ve spent a significant amount of time with are more likely to be able to read you and vice-versa.
Great post, I can relate to this
Good work, carry on!!!
The illusion of transparency was a great article. I think the whole concept of people realizing after these studies of what other people are really thinking while they are speaking is unbelievable. It has great pointers about what to do while on stage and speaking. The people in the audience aren’t really as judgmental as it seems inside your head. They also know exactly what people should do when you think all hope is gone, and its to just think and come back to reality and know that they aren’t making fun they are simply just listening to what you have to say. I always used to have the usual symptoms of public speaking but after some practice and plenty of actual speeches, I have come to be a bit more comfortable than what I used to be like. My experiences dealt with the whole sweaty palms, shaking, sweating, and of course the cursed word of “umm”. I think the only treatment for the anxiety and stomach turns lie within the individual though. The true and only way you can get over something is by learning and teaching yourself how to get over whatever is getting you so nervous. After you get this down your success will be great and you will be satisfied with the outcome. This article though on the other hand is such an awesome issue that phases almost everyone in the world one or more times in their lives. But to read this article will greatly improve your confidence on how to deal with the symptoms of public speaking, I only wish I could have seen this before.
I think this whole article can be summed up by two words: Don’t Panic.
On average, they guessed about half of the observers would see their revulsion, but only 3.5 percent could.
Where are you getting these numbers from? I have the paper [1] in front of me and I’m looking at the results section for study 2a. One third of the drinks were foul, so if the observers had no information to go on 33.3% would press the “foul” button. As it was, 35.6% did, but tasters thought it would be 49.1%. Have you done some cunning correction for the base identification rate, or did you mistake the 3.56 in the text for a percentage?
[1] T Gilovich, K Savitsky, VH Medvec, 1998. “The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. No URL in case it triggers a spam filter but it’s linked from the Wikipedia article on the illusion of transparency.
This is just a great article and a brilliant site. Keep up the good work.
Fascinating!
As an improv perfomer this article was especially interesting to me.
Definitely gonna check out those references too :D
I actually use this in my writing classes. I have a person do the tapping, and then guess what percentage of the class will know what the song is.
The point for writing is this: The readers also don’t have the melody in their heads. We need to let them know what’s going on right at the start so they don’t feel lost.
Paul Crowley emailed me about an error in this article concerning the difference between what people expected and the actual results of the disgusting beverage study. It has since been repaired. Thanks.
Nice article ! I think I found a video that explains well your point with the finger tapping :
It relates to the illusion of transparency.
Hope you’ll find it useful ;)
@Karthik (Waaaaay above…) or it requires 28 observers (1/28 = 3.5%) but I don’t think 28 people is a large enough of a sample size within such an experiment.
David, I stumbled upon this blog some time ago and have been reading with some regularity. Fascinating stuff and valuable info, too. A heartfelt thanks.
Realizing this is a very old thread, I still have to relate an experience. At the end of basic training, we were forced to stand in our barracks for an inspection. We stood at attention for a very, very long time, as the commander worked his way up one side of the bay on his way to us. Due to the configuration of the barracks, each person was directly across the aisle from one other person, staring more or less. My buddy and I were so aligned. Since the inspector was on the other side of the room, we had a little freedom of movement. I gave him a gesture with my head, meaning “look at my feet”. He understood. I began to tap my right foot, for maybe 30 or 45 seconds. Then my buddy mouthed these words – “The Addams Family” – and he was right! I was tapping out the Addams Family theme. (Of course it probably helps that this theme is built around finger snaps.)
I’ve done some stand up comedy and everyone always said ‘you’re the only one who knows you’re scared’. however I’ve occasionally experienced times when people have known exactly what i was thinking when i thought i showed no reaction at all. for example a time when a waitress did something minor to annoy me (got the drink order wrong or some small thing) and i felt a brief moment of annoyance that i thought i didn’t express at all b/c i always try to be as courteous as possible to wait staff and i understand mistakes happen but my companion commented on how obviously annoyed i was. This has happened enough times that i’ve come to accept that my face really is unusually expressive, but i’ve often wondered if in fact i’m just remember a few isolated times and ignoring all the times no one noticed
.
How does this apply to marijuana users who think everyone can tell they are stoned when photographed? I have a feeling they think they are far more easily detectable than they are, both in person, and in photography.
One of my favourite posts. Great information and I’m looking forward to remembering this the next time I have to speak in front of large groups.