How to tell if other people think you’re hot or not, according to science

One of the most pressing and mysterious questions for humans, the self-centered beings that we are, is what other people think about us. We expend a huge amount of time and mental energy wondering if our date finds us attractive, or if our co-workers noticed that stupid thing we said in the meeting last week. We agonise over our public speaking skills, our waistlines and our hair.

If you’re wondering how you’re perceived by others, research actually provides some clues. In a study first published in 2010 and discussed in a new book, Nicholas Epley, a behavioural scientist at the University of Chicago, and Tal Eyal, a psychologist at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University, reveal a fascinating technique to help get inside the minds of the people around you.

The crux of this technique is that people think about themselves in very different ways than they think about other people. They tend to scrutinise themselves at an incredibly close level of detail, much more closely than they examine the actions or appearance of others.

That’s in part because you have a huge amount of information about yourself – far more information than you have about other people. You know what your hair looked like yesterday, a month ago, and four years ago. You know whether you’ve put on weight recently, or if you look tired today. Compare how you evaluate yourself to how you evaluate a stranger: You might make judgments about their overall level of attractiveness, their outfit, their mannerisms, but not much else.

“We’re experts about ourselves, and others aren’t. That makes it hard for us to understand what we look like in the eyes of others,” Epley says.