By Vivian Pham, Staff Writer
Have you ever felt like a hot mess and being frustrated about yourself, but find yourself receiving compliments and praises from other people about how perfect your life appears to be? I’m sure a lot of people would agree with me that they have experienced that feeling at least once in their lifetime. More often than not we assume our life is miserable and other people seem to just have everything together. This familiar phenomenon is known as the “beautiful mess effect.”
What is the “beautiful mess effect”?
“Beautiful mess effect” was first mentioned in a published article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2018, studied and written by Dr. Anna Bruk and colleagues. Basically, the beautiful mess effect explained that there is an intriguing mismatch in the way we take a more negative view of our own vulnerability than we do of other people’s. It’s the contrast viewpoint between one’s negativity and a bystander’s positivity on the same issue.
When you do something wrong or fail to achieve something, you easily self-depreciate, thinking that you’re not good enough or even lose your self-confidence. However, a bystander, because they’re not affected by your failure, may not relate to your situation. Therefore, they may see the positivity or the “beauty” in your personality and assume you must be doing good. That’s the “beauty” factor in “the beautiful mess effect.”
For instance, you just lost your chance of getting into a reputed company. You may feel ashamed and awful about yourself, but your best friend might think you’re extremely brave and bold to even have the nerve to apply for that job.
A negative tendency towards personal matters
The “mess” that we create originates from the negative tendency we have towards our own personal matters. As an insider, you have a more detailed and subjective perspective towards the issue, and you tend to criticize the issue more thoroughly than a bystander.
For example, your friend might be so bothered and annoyed about how their clothes aren’t matched, how their makeup isn’t what they want, and how their hair is all messed up. When, in comparison, you just think there’s nothing wrong with their clothes, their makeup, or their hair. Or you feel so embarrassed when you say something you shouldn’t say to other people, but then you realize they don’t even notice your mistakes.
This is a normal psychological feeling that most of us have experienced before, and it can be explained through the Construal Level Theory. According to this theory, the more distant an object is from the individual, the more abstract it will be thought of, while the closer the object is, the more concretely it will be thought of. Hence, you’ll tend to give a more thorough criticism.
The bystander perspective
According to Dr. Anna Bruk’s study (as mentioned above), the majority of participants showed a tendency in having a pessimistic perspective towards their personal matters while having a more optimistic viewpoint upon other people’s matters. They assume that a bystander would not be able to relate to their situation, to how messed up their life is. But in fact, bystanders provide an objective perspective that you may never recognize.
Conclusion
When you’re drowning in your own mess, the first thing is to calm yourself down and put things into a broader picture. You’ll never know what you’ll discover when you extend your perspective. After finishing this article, just remember there’ll always be someone that can discover the “beauty” and “attraction” within your own “mess.”