Scar Tissue
Winter of 2022, I landed in D.C. from a three-week vacation in India. I took the metro from Washington-Dulles and was alone in the compartment. Seizing this opportunity, I kicked up my feet on my suitcase and laid back to relish the 50-minute ride back home. Eyes half closed, I thought it was interesting that D.C. had started to feel more like home than the actual home where I grew up in India. As the train approached downtown, the compartment started to fill up, and in walked a tall African-American man who appeared to be homeless and under the influence. He walked up to me, eyeballed, and promptly pulled out his right hand with his middle finger stretched out, as if to pick a fight. I was perplexed – I looked around, and almost the entire compartment looked at this. While some were shocked, most seemed apathetic. After a few seconds of mumbling, the man waddled to the end of the compartment and settled down. The train gushed through a few more stations, and I was still in shock, trying to process what happened. The man returned to the front of the train, flipped me off again - me, only me, and got off at McPherson Square. This was odd and disturbing, but I didn’t think much of it until my friend and I saw a news article about a group of Asians being harassed on the NYC subway that same month. “You know, I got flipped off on the subway last month by a random man.” “He flipped you off because you’re brown?” my friend asked. “Well, what else could it be?”
// In the mid-1980s, Robert Kleck and Angelo Strenta at Dartmouth orchestrated an experiment to better understand the impacts of perception of physical anomalies in people. Twenty-four female subjects were gathered in a room with no mirrors. A group of theatrical makeup artists painted a large, ultra-realistic, healed scar on one side of their faces. Once the scars were ready, the subjects were given a mirror to take a good look at their new faces. Finally, the artists touched up the scars, moisturized them, and sent these subjects into another room for a 1:1 interview with one of two women who were unaware of the experiment’s purpose. They were to discuss a particular topic, and the conversation was videotaped and observed closely. After the discussion, the subjects were asked to rate on a 14-point scale different behavioral dimensions (e.g., eye contact, tenseness, liking, patronization, etc.) they experienced during the interview and note any additional comments they had. Unsurprisingly, the results indicated that the subjects experienced a high level of uncomfortable gaze, tenseness, and negative attention that they (the subjects) could directly attribute to the scar. Some even noted that they felt judged and patronized because of their physical deformity, and that negatively impacted their conversation.
There is, however, one more detail that I skipped over. While moisturizing and touching up the scar, the artists wiped away every trace of the scar without the subject’s knowledge. The subjects went into the interview thinking they had a physical deformity, but they didn’t.
Let us talk about what happened here.
Does this mean that it’s all in our heads? No. However, the experiment did prove that there is a gap between the perception that others have about us and our interpretation of said perception. To that extent, the gap is directly proportional to the degree of stigma we have towards our own ‘scar.’ We can close this gap by minimizing our own stigma that clouds judgment. Another riveting detail that the scientists noted was that the interactants who believed they had a scar were more likely to be focused specifically on the gaze behavior of their interactants, as if they were almost looking for something there.
When I think about my subway incident, there is no evidence to tie the man’s behavior to my ethnicity. My mind picked up on that partly because of the news article I read about Asian hate, and partly because of the stigma and talk about race I see around me every day, even when it’s in a positive connotation. It could have been anyone in that subway in my seat that day; I wonder if they would have linked the man’s behavior to their race? Maybe they would have just disregarded this? Maybe link it to the fact that the man was under the influence and out of his mind? But it was me, and because the color of my skin made me a ‘minority,’ that morning, I wore my ethnicity as an imaginary scar.
And I know what you’re thinking. What if the incident in the metro was in fact, directed at my race? After all, these incidents happen all the time, right? How could I know for sure that the scar was imaginary? Truth is, I don’t know. And unless I go back to McPherson Square and confront the gentleman, I can never know. But that’s really the beauty of it – that I didn’t know, and yet I linked it to my race, which seemed like the most plausible reason in post-factor rationalization.
Can you think of a time when you placed a scar on yourself? Could a label become a scar? In a world where we are invariably learning to live with more labels each day, labels of race, color, nationality, sexual orientation, gender, and body type, how does one know when the ‘scar’ is real and when it’s make-believe? And say the scar is real, how does one know that it’s the scar that’s bringing in the negative evaluation and not something else? The minute we start seeing ourselves as a ‘victim,’ we experience the world from the lens of a victim. Everything and everyone is out to get us. Society tells us something is wrong with us, and we internalize it. And here’s the tricky part – every DEI group, support group, and every policy out there meant to protect equal rights and enforce equality, though created with noble motives, also inevitably reinforces that we are all different and that we need to be protected from the oppressor. I’d be curious to know if that trains our mind to be constantly vigilant for oppressors, even in the absence of one. Or worse, maybe even manufacture one?
I suppose the way to combat expectancy perceptual bias in the context of others’ perception of us would be not to expect negative evaluation that can be linked to stigma, but that’s easier said than done. If your scar is your body weight, hitting the gym six days a week may not have an immediate effect on you physically. Still, it’ll give you the confidence to combat your insecurity and see yourself differently in others’ eyes. It allows you to wear your scar as body armor. And funnily enough, for most imaginary scars, the equivalent of going to the gym is just mental gymnastics: changing your perception towards what you think is an insecurity because certainly not everyone thinks that way. Easier than hitting the gym six times a week though, wouldn’t you agree?
Blog - Rishabh Poddar
// The experiment referenced is a summary of a summary; there may be discrepancies in the details from the original text. The experiment itself is linked here. Other aspects were tested in the experiment with several variations, which I found equally intriguing and which further solidified the validity of the experiment. I highly recommend reading this. More discussions around the topic from Psychology Today and The New York Times can be found here and here, respectively.
