Have We Met Before? Or Not?
🧠Psych - 147/200
Hello Reader,
The subject line might catch you off guard but today’s topic is about Doppelgängers and Perception.
(Sorry if that’s not what you expected!)
What is it?
In 2015, Niamh Geaney, a 28-year-old Irish woman, was approached by a TV production company to participate in an unusual competition: a race to find her twin stranger, a stranger who looks exactly like her.
Within two weeks of scouring social networks and every other available outlet, she’d found a dead ringer, Karen Branigan, from Dublin. Then she found another match, Luisa Guizzardi, from Genoa.
And then another, Irene Adams, from Sligo. Identical quadruplets by appearance, in reality they were unrelated.
Why do I need to know?
Psychologists have studied an effect of racial segregation, which makes people who look different from those who surround us harder to distinguish.
Or consider the case of identical twins, who are typically indistinguishable to everyone but a small handful of friends and family who have acquired the ability to tell the twins apart through experience.
To outsiders – even those with twins of their own – they look as similar as two people ever could. But to their parents, who have plenty of exposure and all the motivation in the world to reliably distinguish between the twins, they are unique.
References & Studies: -
https://www.all-about-psychology.com/doppelgangers-and-perception.html
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