Daniel Willingham--Science & Education
Hypothesis non fingo
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8 out of 10, Dove soap

4/18/2013

 
What would you say if a major corporation took out a full-page ad in the New York Times to advertise a message that you thought was important and mainly agreed with, only to find that the text of the message was rife with misspellings, grammatical errors, and misused words?

That's the feeling that I get from the new video all over my Facebook feed (and with over 7 million views in 4 days) titled "Dove Real Beauty Sketches." If you haven't seen it, here you go. (I summarize it below.)
In brief, a woman describes herself to a forensic sketch artist, who cannot see her. He draws her portrait based only on her description, and then draws her again based on the description of a stranger who just met her. The woman then sees both portraits and recognizes that she has been rather hard on herself in her self description. (The process is shown for several women.)

The associated website calls this "a social experiment." But it's a terrible example of experimentation.

We are invited to draw the conclusion that women see themselves as less attractive than others do. I don't know the self-perception literature well, but I'm pretty sure this conclusion is right. But this experiment is a terrible way to illustrate that.

  • The artist should be blind to condition. He knows when he's basing the drawing on the description of the subject vs. the stranger, and so could unconsciously bias the result
  • The descriptions are not based on perception, they are based on memory. If you want to claim that it's about how women see themselves, not how they remember themselves, then each person should do their best to describe the woman based on the same photograph
  • A the end the sketch artist tells each woman the source of each sketch. What would have happened if he had asked her to say which looks more like her, and to say which she thought was based on her description? If women's perception is really distorted, then the woman should see sketch based on her description as being more like her. An alternative hypothesis is that women more or less know what they look like, but talk about themselves in negative terms.
  • The foregoing point raises another issue: social conformity. If the result is not due to perception but to people conforming to social norms, the difference in the sketches might be due to the women's reluctance to seem vain in their self-descriptions, and to the stranger feeling that he or she ought to describe the woman nicely.
How important are these criticisms to the overall message of the video? Not very. The point of the video is that women shouldn't be so hard on themselves in judging their looks. It's a good message.

That's why I draw the analogy to grammar, punctuation, and spelling in a written message. If Dove had published a print ad full of grammatical and spelling errors, I expect someone would have called them out on it.

Dove presents this as an experiment, but it's a terrible experiment. It would not have been hard to do a video making the same point with a better experiment. Any graduate student of social psychology could have improved this ten-fold.

I would have given the video 9/10 (subtracting one point for scientific sloppiness) if not for the statement made here in the video:
I should be more grateful of my natural beauty. It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for, how we treat our children, it impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.
Well, I'd prefer a different message. Rather than "It couldn't be more critical to your happiness" and "be grateful for your natural beauty" I'd prefer a message amounting to "what you look like matters less than you think."

But I can't expect everything from a company selling beauty products. 8 out of 10, Dove.
David Wees link
4/18/2013 09:29:11 am

I'm harder marker than you, but I certainly saw the same flaws. A video whose supposed purpose is to help women feel better about what they look like should emphasis so strongly the message that being beautiful is so critical to success.

Victor K
4/18/2013 10:14:20 am

I've heard of studies showing that looks matter more than they ought to (resumes with pictures vs. without, that type of thing), but I don't know of studies which show that looks are less important than people think. Could you give references to some results in that direction?

Matthew Levey
4/18/2013 02:37:42 pm

Dan,

Malcolm X is reported to have said "Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair, and you'll be a thousand times better off."

Seems more than apposite here.

ML

Jane Joseph
4/18/2013 03:54:55 pm

Point well taken about blinding the artist to the condition of subject versus stranger. He certainly could be biased toward a more negative sketch of the subject's description than of the stranger's, but only if he knew that was the hypothesis. He may or may not have known this (but could probably figure it out). Nevertheless, my graduate training at UVA taught me it would be best to blind the artist :)

I don't think the social conformity point is relevant, though. The message of the "experiment" seems to be more about a "critical" versus "non-critical" observer rather than about whether the stranger provides an accurate description. So even if the strangers are lying through their teeth about the subject, they are probably highlighting the positive features whereas subjects highlight negative features. I think that is really the point: that the face looks very different if features are painted in a positve light than if they are painted in a negative light.

This experiment is definitely not ready for study section, but Dove probably doesn't need the funding anyway!

Jane Joseph
4/18/2013 03:57:12 pm

Also, I just noticed a spelling error in my post!!!!!! Does that completely invalidate my statements? :)


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