Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

2 Comments

  1. Iain Coleman
    December 2, 2014 @ 10:18 am

    It turns out that assessments of beauty are remarkably consistent both within and between cultures. When groups of people are given photographs of faces and asked to rate them according to attractiveness, there is a high level of agreement. This has been found in multiple studies, and it applies however experimenters vary the gender, race or culture of the people doing the rating or the people in the photographs. White American undergraduate students judge beauty in the same way as Tsimane people of the Bolivian rain forest who have had virtually no contact with Western culture.

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  2. Jack Graham
    December 2, 2014 @ 1:59 pm

    There may be underlying constants, but we have to remember the context of these tests, outside of actual social relations. And there is a variability in the very notion of attractiveness. There's a difference between the abstract notion of Beauty and what we actually find attractive (in whatever sense) in actual social life. There's the socially-conditioned ideals that are built on top – one being, for instance, the classical ideal. And there are all sorts of variations from culture to culture and place to place which are on top of and around the basics. We can spot abstract constants but they sit within a whole nest of variables like skin colour, etc, which are socially fluctuating, etc.

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