Your Perception of Me Is a Reflection of You, My Reaction to You Is an Awareness of Me

In 1950 the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa released Rashomon, a film in which four people give four irreconcilable accounts of the same crime. Each witness is sincere. Each, in telling the story, appears to flatter himself or to protect a cherished idea of who he is. The film became so famous that the Rashomon effect is now a term in psychology for the way different observers report the same event differently. The topic generalises the point. How you see me, it says, reveals you, and how I react to you reveals me.

The first half of the claim has a long psychological pedigree. Sigmund Freud described projection as the attribution to others of feelings and impulses that one cannot acknowledge in oneself. A jealous man sees infidelity in every glance, and a dishonest one assumes that everyone cheats. Carl Jung went further and suggested that what irritates us most in others often points to something in ourselves that we have not accepted. Hermann Rorschach's inkblots, devised in 1921, rest on the idea that when a person is shown an ambiguous shape, what he sees is determined by his own mind.

Ordinary perception works the same way. The brain does not record the world but constructs it, using expectations. Thorndike observed in 1920 the halo effect, whereby a person judged attractive or pleasant is also judged to be more intelligent and honest. Solomon Asch showed in 1946 that when people were told that a stranger was warm and not cold, their whole impression of him changed, though all other traits were the same. We perceive a person through the first impression and the mood we are in, and through our past experience of people like him.

Social life amplifies this. Charles Horton Cooley described in 1902 the looking glass self, in which we form our idea of ourselves by imagining how others see us. If this is so, then the opinion of me held by others is not just a judgment of me but also an input into me, and as their perceptions vary, so does the self that I imagine. Rosenthal and Jacobson reported in 1968 that teachers who were told that certain pupils were about to bloom intellectually treated them differently, and those pupils later gained more. The teacher's perception of the child, a reflection of the teacher's belief, helped to create the child it saw.

The teacher's perception of the child, a reflection of the teacher's belief, helped to create the child it saw.

The second half of the claim is more interesting. My reaction to you, the topic says, is an awareness of me. When someone infuriates me, the anger tells me something about my pride, my history or my fear. When a stranger inspires trust, the sense of ease reveals what I need. Philosophers in the Indian tradition took this inward turn. The Upanishadic teaching that one should see the self in all beings, and all beings in the self, implies that our responses to the world are lessons in who we are. A reaction becomes a source of data about the reactor.

This view has practical uses. A manager who finds one colleague irritating may ask what exactly in himself is being struck, whether it is envy, impatience or an old fear of being overlooked. A parent who is distressed by a child's weakness may find that it recalls his own. Therapists use the technique of noticing countertransference, the feelings a client stirs in the therapist, as information about the client and about the therapist. People who practise this reflection tend to be less reactive, since they treat a strong feeling as a question and not as a verdict.

Great fiction plays on the idea. In Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet's first judgment of Mr Darcy is shaped by her wounded vanity and by the lies of Wickham, and the story is the history of her discovering how much of her opinion was prejudice of her own. Her change of mind is also a change in her understanding of herself, which is the double movement that the topic describes. The reader enjoys the novel because he recognises both errors, hers about Darcy and his own about someone in his life.

Yet the statement can be pushed too far. It would be absurd to say that our perceptions of others are mere projections. Other people are really some way, and our views of them can be right or wrong. If I perceive that a man is dangerous because he is carrying a knife and shouting, the perception reflects the situation and not just my anxiety. David Funder's research on the accuracy of personality judgments has found that strangers and acquaintances agree surprisingly often, and that their judgments predict behaviour. If perception were only reflection, there would be no way of learning that we were mistaken.

There is also an ethical problem if the maxim is used as a shield. A person who is accused of cruelty may say that the accuser is projecting. A bully may tell his victim that her pain is her own affair. Used in this way, the principle becomes a means of dismissing what others say about us and of denying responsibility for our conduct. The same applies in reverse, when we explain our dislike of someone entirely by reference to ourselves and fail to consider whether he has in fact wronged us. Self awareness is meant to enlarge our responsibility and not to cancel it.

The balanced position is that perception is a joint product. It combines something about the object with something about the observer, and wisdom lies in separating the two. We must ask what is there and what I am adding. The question is hard because the instrument that we use to examine our biases is the same one that is biased, and an honest answer rarely comes without the help of another person who will tell us what they see. This makes the maxim self referential, since your view of my reflection may be the only way I can find out how much of it is mine.