How you see yourself

What's the image you present to the world? And do you see yourself the same way? This hour, TED speakers add new dimensions to the idea of self perception. Guests include portrait photographer David Suh, social psychologist Dolly Chugh, journalist Elise Hu and science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:24Speaker 01

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• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:29Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

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  I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way?

• 0:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Do you remember Picture Day at school? You'd step into an empty classroom, maybe a pastel backdrop set up with blazing bright lights.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  OK, next up.

• 1:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  And the photographer.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Stand here, please.

• 1:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  Who is in the middle of taking dozens, if not hundreds, of kids' photos.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  All right, shoulders back.

• 1:18Manoush Zomorodi?

  Starts posing you like a doll.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Reach your chin.

• 1:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  Turn your body.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Straighten your back.

• 1:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  Adjust your shoulder.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Head to the side.

• 1:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Now sit up straight.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  OK, now look at the camera.

• 1:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Before you know it, a moment which feels so incredibly forced, awkward and unnatural.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Smile.

• 1:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Is captured for all time. And then you go back to class, never wanting to have your photo taken ever again.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  To many people, getting their photos taken is a very traumatizing experience.

• 1:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is David Suh.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  When you bring up a camera to someone, like, a lot of people just shrivel. Like, their body just reacts immediately without them even commanding it.

• 2:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  David is the guy on the other side of the camera. He is a portrait photographer.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of people as young children who didn't want to be photographed and were put through that. I don't think many people realize that we hold that sort of grudge, whatever it is. I think a lot of people hold that in their bodies and it shows up in front of the camera. And when we internalize that, it's we, it shapes how we act. It shapes how we show up in the world.

• 2:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  David sees this all the time with clients. Confident, interesting people with incredible careers and hobbies don't know how to feel natural in front of the camera. And so David has made it his mission to reject a culture of awkward scripted poses.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Are you tired being stuck doing the same poses over and over?

• 2:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  And instead, found a way to help people feel more confident, more themselves.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, my name is David Saw. I'm a professional photographer and I'll show you how to go from that to this.

• 3:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  He has millions of followers on TikTok and Instagram where he dishes out practical and thoughtful advice. From how to pose in direct sunlight at the beach without getting washed out.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, are we the two friends here?

• 3:23Manoush Zomorodi?

  To how to take a photo of two friends who are of very different heights.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  When you see a stranger photographing something.

• 3:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  To how to take pictures in public without being that obnoxious person taking up the whole sidewalk.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Speaking of attention.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  So how do we take this want of looking good in photos and then meet ourselves where we're at with how we perceive ourselves? And now it's about moving our bodies and saying, how do we find comfort in our body? When we're so used to tearing it down and saying, oh, it looks terrible. It's not perfect.

• 4:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  How do we do that? How do we reconcile the image that we have of ourselves with the one that we show to the world? That's what today's episode is about. Self-perception. From why we want to think of ourselves as good people to definitions of beauty that have been exported from the plastic surgery capital of the world. How can we make peace with who we are on the outside and inside? For David Suh, a good portrait marries those two things, inside and out. But this kind of thinking was not obvious to David when he first went to college.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  At that time, I was doing a lot of college grad photos.

• 4:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  David had wanted to study dance, but that didn't work out. So instead, he majored in design at UC Davis. Taking photos was a great way to make some extra money.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  I was like, OK, I have a nice camera and I can take decent photos. And everyone's offering to do it for X amount of price. So let me just get myself some money to go to dinner a few times a week. In the beginning, I was very cookie cutter.

• 5:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  David says he Googled grad school photo poses for inspiration.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Right, like there's a sense of style to it. Maybe it's a girl graduating. She's got her hands on her hips and then she's got her arm up in the air. Maybe it's like throwing the cap or something like that. If anything, it was a big roadblock for me. I didn't want to think about poses. The only reason I was posing people was because I knew I had to. They weren't professional models. And I'm glad I came across my mentor, Sue Bryce, at that time, too, because Sue was the one who really taught me that we can't be put into boxes. And I think a lot of us feel comfortable when we are in a box and we look like other people and it's safe.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  But we, as photographers, can be in control. We can control the outcome of how photos come out for everyone and how people experience being in front of the camera.

• 6:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  And so when he realized he was responsible, not just for taking composed pictures, but for making his clients feel comfortable, David threw out his list of poses.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  And, and then people started realizing, oh, yeah, like David doesn't just do cookie cutter poses. He's really thinking about each individual.

• 6:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  He started having fun with his clients, moving with them, dancing with them and kind of inventing new poses on the spot, whatever felt natural. And now he has his own ethos.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Posing is, it's a practice of being present in your body and communicating who you are through body language.

• 7:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today, when David starts working with a client, he asks them a few questions. How do you want to see yourself? How do you want to feel in these photos? How do you define feeling like yourself? Then they look into clothing options.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Let's look at fabrics. Let's look at structures and silhouettes. And let's also deconstruct what some of these clothing, the association that's tied to these clothing. I could really just redefine this and I could wear and don this suit. I could wear this beautiful dress. And, and through this exercise, at the end, they're realizing I am so much more than how I perceive myself.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  You're a great son.

• 7:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, they've got an outfit that they feel good in. There's hair, makeup. And then like what actually happens in the session?

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Let me have you.

• 7:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  How do you get them to loosen up, to feel comfortable?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  The process I take everyone through is first just.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Like a yoga class.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Getting really present in the moment.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  So a deep breath through our nose.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Getting really present in the moment. And there's many different ways to do that, right? There's breathing, just breathing and slowing down. Feeling the toes that you have that's contacting your shoe into the ground. If they're sitting, then I really help them feel like, what are you sitting on? And that just brings them back to the present moment and in their body. And I'm guiding her, her movements at that point, right? We've done our hair and makeup. She wants to explore in the way she wants to explore. And now I'm just trying to channel as much of the definition that she's given me.

• 8:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  David gets his clients to mirror him, his movements, his facial expressions. He wants them to feel relaxed and deeply.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  And I'm just moving my arm over here and I say, wave with me. That's awesome. And then the other side, wave with me.

• 9:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  You're dancing with them.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It's a dance. And not only am I physically mirroring them, I'm also emotionally mirroring them because I'm doing every step of the way with them.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Sometimes we might need some help there.

• 9:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  You just look like you're having such a good time. Can you tell the story about where you decided to get into a dress? Because your client was wearing a dress?

• 9:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  And, and sort of an epiphany that you had?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love making things easier for people and, and helping them sort of unlock something new. And it's really important to be, especially as a guy, for me to feel that. If I'm gonna be creating a safe space for a lot of my female clients, I wanna, I wanna make sure I'm not operating a place again from judgment. And it's being curious, being playful and saying, yeah, I'm gonna put on this dress and have fun.

• 10:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  You wanna, you wanna be as in the skin of the person you're talking to as possible, it seems like.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. My social media following too, the bigger, bigger demographic is, is women there as well. So I get a lot of questions of like, David, how do you pose for your pregnancy photos? How do you pose in a miniskirt? And I remember putting on my first miniskirt and I was like, oh my gosh, I feel so exposed.

• 10:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  And I realized, yeah, I definitely cannot suggest that pose I was about to do in my just baggy jeans.

• 10:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Right, right, right.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  So there's, there's like a practical, like technical sense to it of like, yeah, I need to really understand. Just like you said, like if you're in a tight dress, you just can't physically move your body in a certain way. And there are feelings to it that we just would never know unless we, we try to be physically in their shoes.

• 10:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  But David, do you think sometimes people have unrealistic expectations? They're gonna think, you know, if I just can prove to myself that I can look amazing in a photo, or I can show the world how hot I can be, that's gonna fix something, that's gonna, gonna solve something for me.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Well, of course. So that's why, that's why the, the reflection in the beginning is so important to say, this isn't for anybody else but you. And, you know, I can't control all of that. There, we do have our egos, right? And we also do, I want to make sure, I tell my clients, listen, there's many clients would say this is very therapeutic, but by no means am I a therapist. I'm not here to help you through just like different mental health issues, right? If that's the thing. So yes, it's acknowledging that as well.

• 11:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  Are you a proponent or believer of the saying fake it till you make it?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  No, I've, I've come to really distance myself from that saying. Especially in the world of posing. I think it's a way to reflect how I think society defines posing, like fake it, right? Like sucking your stomach because you don't, you don't want to see that. Because I grew up thinking that the one definition of hot was like Chris Evans with his six pack abs coming out the ocean. And once we hit adulthood and the, the older we get, I feel like we start to

• 12:33Speaker 01

  create even more of a stubborn belief of who we think we are versus like, oh yeah, let's, let's try this, let's play with this. And a session with me is almost like breaking down your Lego castle that you super glued together and re, snapping your finger and saying, you know what? It's actually a sand castle now. Let's rebuild it again.

• 12:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  Awesome, awesome. You want to see the picture? That's David Sa, the king of poses.

• 13:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  You can see his full talk at ted.com and find his Instagram @davidsafood. On the show today, self-perception. I'm Manoush Zamirodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 13:30Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 13:50Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 14:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, our self-image, and why so many of us so desperately want to think of ourselves as good people. Let's say you're walking down the street and...

• 14:58Speaker 03

  You accidentally bump against someone on the sidewalk. You didn't mean to. You didn't realize they were going to tilt that way, and they call you a name and makes you feel horrible.

• 15:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is NYU business school professor and psychologist Dolly Chugh.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  And I'm like, wait, am I a jerk? I was looking at my phone. I really should have been looking up. I guess I'm kind of a jerk.

• 15:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  That exact situation has happened to me, and it was upsetting.

• 15:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  And Dolly says there's a good reason why.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Many of us have what psychologists call a central moral identity. We care about whether we're seen as a good person and whether we feel like good people. And the idea in that moment is that you weren't intending to do harm to someone, but you inadvertently did. Now your self-view is being threatened because there's something you've done that doesn't match how you see yourself showing up in the world.

• 15:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  How do different people define good? What are some of the different definitions that you've heard?

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, some people define being good as holding a door open. Other people might define being a good person as being someone who treats everyone the same, no differences based off of gender, perhaps. Other people might define good person as someone who does no harm to others, just manages themselves and doesn't cause any problems. Someone else might define being a good person as someone who goes above and beyond, who is making things better, not just doing no harm.

• 16:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  So when we wake up every morning, we each have this sort of self-image of who we are in the world. And generally, we're trying to stick to a moral code that we've set for ourselves?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Well, the way I would think about it is people do vary in how central their moral identity is to them. And so do people wake up, as you said, thinking, how am I going to be a good person? I think some people do, but I think most of us think about, how are we going to get the kids off to school? And how am I going to get to work on time? And is there traffic? And what's the weather? That said, our moral identity is often guiding how we react to what we call self-threat, to anything that makes us feel like we are not a good person. We may not all have the same definition, but within whatever our definition is, that moral identity is important to many of us.

• 17:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Dolly Chugh continues from the TED stage.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Now, if somebody challenges it, like they question us for a joke we tell, or maybe they say our workforce is homogeneous, or a slippery business expense, we go into red zone defensiveness. I mean, sometimes we call out all the ways in which we help people from marginalized groups, where we donate to charity, the hours we volunteer to nonprofits. We work to protect that good person identity. It's important to many of us. But what if I told you that our attachment to being good people is getting in the way of us being better people? What if I told you that our definition of good

• 18:23Speaker 03

  person is so narrow, it's scientifically impossible to meet?

• 18:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  So that is a big statement, that it is impossible to meet our own definition of what a good person is. And you've done studies on this. Walk us through your research. What have you found when it comes to trying to be the good person that we think we are?

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we looked at things like, why do we sometimes not even notice a decision we are about to make has ethical implications? Or why are we so able to overlook an ethical failure in ourselves that we would jump all over if it was in our roommate? Or if I do something sketchy earlier in the day, do I kind of compensate later in the day and do something particularly pro-social? But other times, I do something sketchy earlier in the day, and I get sketchier as the day goes on. So in other words, like, why do these spirals sometimes go downward and sometimes go upward? So there is lots of

• 19:30Speaker 03

  literature by a number of extraordinary scholars that have shown all of those effects. And we were able to map out a theory that elegantly made sense of all of it.

• 19:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  So the theory that you're talking about is what you call bounded ethicality. Explain.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  So bounded ethicality refers to the idea that sometimes we behave ethically and sometimes we don't. Sometimes that's intentional and sometimes it's not. And this model of bounded ethicality challenges ways of thinking where you're either a good person or you're not. Either you're a racist or you're not. Either you're unethical or you're not. That binary idea, it's quite seductive, but it's misleading and it's scientifically and psychologically inaccurate.

• 20:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  OK, so we may think we're a good person, but you're saying there is no such thing. It is a sliding scale. And throughout the day, we are making decisions, taking actions that affect that self-view, that push it up and down that scale.

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, sometimes that self-view is validated by others. You hold the door open. "Oh, you're so kind," someone might say as you go into the office. So now I'm like, ah, OK. I don't feel threatened, right? I feel bolstered.

• 20:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  King of the world.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm not looking like I need to protect that self-view. So now I'm in the office and, you know, I don't know that they really need this extra keyboard here. And I could really use one at home. It's just sitting here. Nobody's taking it. And the keyboard ends up in my bag heading home.

• 21:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  And, OK, let's go back to that scenario that we talked about earlier, that I bumped into someone on the sidewalk. I didn't mean to, but the person calls me a name. And I'm thinking, oof, maybe I am rude. Maybe I'm a bad person.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Yes, you're not feeling like a good person. And in this case, you're also being told by others that you're not a good person.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  And so now I'm going to spiral more towards something that will bring me back up to that positive self-view. You know, oh, when I get in, I, oh, the security guard looked like they'd had a tough night. I'm gonna go grab him a cup of coffee when I get my own.

• 21:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  To sort of make up for it.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and our brain is a gold medal gymnast when it comes to the gymnastics necessary to make our thoughts, our perceptions, our beliefs what we want them to be. We don't realize how much our self-view as a good person is affecting our behavior. That in fact, we're working so hard to protect that good person identity that we're not actually giving ourselves space to learn from our mistakes and actually be better people. So what I've been thinking about is what if we were to just forget about being good people? Just let it go? And instead, set a higher standard

• 22:46Speaker 03

  of being a good-ish person? A good-ish person absolutely still makes mistakes. As a good-ish person, in fact, I become better at noticing my own mistakes. I don't wait for people to point them out. I practice finding them. And as a result, sure, sometimes it can be embarrassing. It can be uncomfortable. We put ourselves in a vulnerable place. But through all that vulnerability, just like in everything else we've tried to ever get better at, we see progress. We see growth. We allow ourselves to get better. Being a good-ish person is someone who has a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  In other words, they view issues of morality as skills, as knowledge, as things that are work in progress and that I can get better at. Just like I can get better at pickleball, I can get better at being an ethical person with practice. On the other hand, good is fixed in time. It's static. It forces me in a corner because there's nowhere to go.

• 23:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  I actually, I've been watching, there's all these Saturday Night Live documentaries.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  Bowen Yang, the first Asian actor on the show, said, like, there was a moment where somebody wrote something that made him feel super uncomfortable, and he just went and talked to them, and they said, noted, it will not happen again. Thank you for telling me.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  I love that. I mean, one of my closest friends from grad school, he was introducing someone, another researcher at a seminar. And in his attempt to be funny and personal, he had put time into putting a lovely introduction together. But he also said something that inadvertently highlighted a stereotype around her gender and racial identity. And he didn't realize he had done that. But when I heard it, I immediately was, oh, my gosh, that is not how I would want her to be introduced in that setting. So I did what any self-respecting, virtue-signaling person would do, was I went back to my lab, and I just ranted. And finally,

• 25:00Speaker 03

  my office mate at the time said, you know, why don't you tell him? And I was like, I literally laughed in her face. I was, what? Like, no, I'm not going to go tell him what I just said. I don't even know him. She says, no, no, I do know him, and I think he'd want to know. I was like, OK, I will go walk by his office in case he happens to be there. And sure enough, I walked by his office, I kind of poked my head in, and I was like, wow, there was just something about that seminar earlier today, I don't know, it just made me uncomfortable. This is the moment where I expected him to be like, well, thanks for coming by, I got to get back to work. And instead, he said, hey, hey, just wait a minute, let me go grab another chair so you can sit down. And he ran down the hall,

• 25:44Speaker 03

  got a chair, and brought it into his tiny little cubicle office thing. And he said, please sit down, I really want to understand this. Can you tell me more about what you heard me say? He's now one of my closest friends. So that's a great example of what we've called being an ethical learner. They're goodish, they're trying to get better. If someone was Confronted in that moment, a fixed mindset or a good person response often starts with, "That's not what I meant," or "I'm sorry you heard it that way," or "What I really meant was, every statement I just made was some form of trying to protect oneself."

• 26:26Speaker 03

  In a growth mindset, the response would be something like, "Wow, I didn't know that. Please tell me more."

• 26:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  There are some who might say, "Well, this has been taken too far."

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  That there's a generation of people who act as the morality police, that you can't have a meeting without there being a ton of people wanting to show off how good they are and how thoughtful they are about their fellow colleagues, when really, based on what you just taught us, a lot of it is about their own self-image.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I mean, there's some truth to that, right? I mean, what they're picking up on is sometimes this virtue signaling is less about being better, and it's more about feeling better. And it's less about looking at ourselves, and it's more about critiquing others. And I would also say that what that individual is shortchanging themselves on in that moment is one of the greatest joys of being a human being, which is learning. Learning is thrilling. It's uncomfortable. It's exciting. It's painful. It's pride-inducing. It is one of the things that is most gratifying.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  You know, the next time you encounter that situation, when you feel a little more in the know, that feels really good.

• 27:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was NYU business school professor and psychologist Dolly Chugh. Her most recent book is called A More Just Future. You can see her full talk at ted.com.

• 28:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  On the show today, how we see ourselves and why we so often want to change the way we look. Women have been pressured to keep up with evolving beauty standards for millennia. But we're going to focus on the past decade and where the latest ideas of what women should look like are coming from. South Korea.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Have y'all heard about that Korean skincare routine that everyone's been doing? It is so much better than everything in the US. I've been using Korean skincare for years. So the notion of having a skincare routine that is multi-step, that is really rooted in Korean culture, skincare culture.

• 28:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is journalist Elise Hu.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  The idea of having glass skin or dewy skin. This really cleanses my skin and makes it feel so good. Having such a beautiful canvas that you don't need to wear much makeup and you can kind of do the no makeup makeup look. My pores are like basically invisible. No acne. It's amazing. That ideal is also from Korean culture. So there's a lot that we're sort of used to and normalized to as just skincare these days that is tied to stuff that Korea's been doing for decades.

• 29:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  Through TikTok and other social media, Korean beauty trends have gone global. They've also created a massive industry.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, South Korea is exporting more cosmetics than they export smartphones. They're also huge on all the wands and the injectables that are getting used in med spas across the world.

• 29:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Every year, hundreds of thousands of people also travel to South Korea for cosmetic procedures.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  I'm flying 15 and a half hours to Seoul, South Korea for my surgery in Gwangnam. It costs me less to fly to Seoul, stay in a hotel and get all of my beauty treatments done.

• 30:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  than it does for just the treatments in the US. And now, South Korea has the world's highest concentration of cosmetic surgeons.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  So there's all sorts of cosmetic surgeries, like getting your jaw broken to be reshaped. You know, like a reduction of the cheekbones and the jawline to make it. I had a philtrum reduction, or also known as a lip lift.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  I had double eyelid surgery in Korea about three months ago.

• 30:26Speaker 06

  Or nose jobs, or breast augmentation. So I had under eye fat repositioning, which is when they take the under eye fat pad, and it is repositioned, so you don't look so tired.

• 30:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  Elise first experienced the world of K-beauty in 2015, when she moved to Seoul to report for NPR. After many years of living there, she ended up writing a book called Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, in which she makes one central point.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  That the future has kind of already arrived in Seoul, and what Korea presents is kind of a canary in the coal mine for where we're going to be in terms of appearance and how much appearances matter. Seoul is all about optimizing your face and your body.

• 31:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Elise Hu on the TED stage.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  If you want your skull reshaped, any part of your body lifted or enhanced, have at it. It's the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Nearly half of all Korean women have already undergone some kind of plastic surgery. By the time they're in their 20s, no other place comes close. Having a slimmer jawline is so desirable that a Seoul plastic surgery clinic once displayed the human bones of jaws it had shaved down in a glass vase in its lobby. This has since been removed. But this kind of body augmentation work isn't just accepted, it is expected, because in Seoul, looks matter so much for your professional and personal advancement. Headshots are required on resumes. Hiring

• 32:00Speaker 06

  bosses made character judgments based on your face. You were often bullied if you were bald or big. Trying to look better is framed as a route to economic security and a matter of personal responsibility. But Korea just shows us a more concentrated and extreme example of the pretty privilege that exists everywhere. Look at fat phobia in the United States, helping drive off-the-charts, off-label use of Ozempic, not for diabetes, but for weight loss. It makes sense when we are so rewarded for thinness and stigmatized for fatness. And all I'm saying is, we should reckon with this. Because the more narrow our idea of beauty is, the wider the pool of ugly becomes.

• 32:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, more with Elise Hu on how ideas of beauty are becoming subhuman thanks to AI, and how all this has affected the way she parents her three daughters. On the show today, our self-image. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:11Speaker 05

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• 33:31Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 34:15Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 34:26Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, our self-image. And we were just talking to Elise Hu, the author of Flawless, which tracks the history of South Korea's domination of the global beauty industry.

• 34:44Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, Elise, you focus on South Korea, but, I mean, many cultures are obsessed with looks. I am half Iranian, and I'm just thinking of all the Persian women I've known who have gotten nose jobs. What is so different about South Korea? Is there a new level of pressure or societal expectation there?

• 35:06Speaker 03

  We have to remember that South Korea is an extremely homogeneous society. 97% of the people in Korea are Korean. They're ethnically Korean, which is so different than the US. And what I came to understand after my time living there was that a Korean woman who gets cosmetic surgery in order to fit in, she's not looking good or acceptable just for herself. She-- this is a way of showing respect to others in her community or in her family. Because so many young girls who are getting plastic surgery, that double eyelid surgery that is so common, they're getting it at the behest of their mothers or their grandmothers. Their family members are insisting that they do this in order to fit in.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  And as the rest of the world becomes as visual and as appearance-focused as Korea was 10 years ago, that having good looks is framed as a matter of personal responsibility. That this was kind of like, oh, if you can fix this about yourself, then why wouldn't you do it? Of course you would do it.

• 36:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  You were there exactly 10 years ago, and now here we are, a decade later. And are you seeing echoes of that in your own life here in the United States? You have three daughters who live in Los Angeles. What are you seeing that strikes you as echoing your time in Korea?

• 36:30Speaker 03

  So I'm really glad that I spent so much time thinking about this because it is helpful in parenting. Now I have a tween, I have a 12-year-old, I have a nine-year-old, and nine-year-olds are getting really into-- Skincare these days, you have the Sephora tweens. And then my youngest, who was born there, is now seven. And so I see it every day, you know, I see that. I have my oldest has said to me sometimes like, oh, you know, my face looks bad. I don't want to go to school today, you know, and we all had that too. Our versions of that, I think in middle school and high school. And so what Korea showed me was just how much damage that appearance bias can do.

• 37:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  Hmm. You're saying it's a, it's a cultural societal expectation. And so I wondered, did you ever ask a Korean woman like, what do you think? Do you want to do this or is that kind of moot?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  A lot of Korean women that I interviewed, and I interviewed hundreds from the ages of seven to, I think, seventy three. And a lot of them said they wanted to look different, right? They actually had a desire to not wear skirts to school every day or not start wearing makeup as young as they started to wear makeup. But it was so frowned upon by their individual families, by their parents, you know, who we're all taught to respect and have reverence for, that they really felt as though there wasn't a choice, right? Like so many of our decisions, whether it's to get Botox or whether to dye our hair, it's like situated as a choice.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  But is it a matter of personal choice when everybody else in the group is choosing to dye their hair or to get fillers in their face? And my point is that all of us become collateral damage when we internalize ideas that like thinness is health, fat people can't be happy, or that you're less lovable if you don't participate in this particular beauty culture.

• 38:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, and I guess one aspect we haven't talked about is just how vast this beauty culture has become because of social media and, and the digital world that is very much shaping how people think that they should look in real life.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Well, one thing that we didn't talk about too is kind of AI, right? And how much our filters these days are AI generated. And what I think that we need to really watch out for and remember is that the internet tends towards sameness and a certain kind of smoothness or flatness.

• 39:11Speaker 06

  And I worry that our differences get flattened out. And then it's only more and more marginalizing for people who can't fit in.

• 39:22Speaker 06

  Digital culture is now reshaping our actual faces and bodies. We learn it so young. An estimated 80% of 13-year-old girls in America have already used filters or some kind of editing to alter their appearance online. And these days, the filters are hyper-realistic because they tend to be AI-generated. They come with a suite of characteristics, teaching us how to look. Things like arched eyebrows, or higher cheekbones, or plump lips. What then happens is we see the gap between the way we look in the mirror and the way we look in these filters. And the digital world begins to dictate real-world beauty standards. Because if we are chasing digital beauty, well, then the limit does not exist.

• 40:04Speaker 06

  AI's idea of attractiveness is only increasingly inhuman and cyborgian. I worry that our bodies become projects to be worked on forever. And if we don't slow down this body augmentation arms race that I saw in Seoul, then the enhancements that were available there only get farther and farther out of reach, and not just for women.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  I don't want my daughters coming up in a world in which their looks are the most important things about them. It is incredibly marginalizing to everybody who can't fit in, and exhausting for everyone who can. Because you're constantly having to make or pay for interventions in order to keep up.

• 40:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  So where do you stand now? You wrote the book. You were hopeful that we would question these things. People question them, and yet the train rolls on.

• 40:57Speaker 06

  So a way to care for one another is to remember that we are all so different. Our bodies show up in such different ways. And we are not less lovable because we are different from one another. In fact, it makes us really collectively strong. And what beauty can...

• 41:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do to us is make us think, oh, there's only one way to look and it's this particular way. And we really have to fight back against that. And so I do a lot of my interviews without makeup on. I want to make sure that that's out there because I don't want to be like glam squatted all the time. Right. I want people to know that like, there's all kinds of ways to look and to appear and like that I still have worth and value and like what I say has worth and value. That's not linked to my appearance.

• 41:52Manoush Zomorodi?

  The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Like, the more we sit with not dying the hair, not getting the botox, the more comfortable it becomes. So we need to lean into our humanity. The things about us that aren't smooth, you know, and aren't necessarily aesthetically pleasing. Because if we go in this direction of just like smoothness and sameness, it's really quite a boring future.

• 42:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was journalist Elise Hu. She's the host of the TED Talks Daily Podcast and her book is called Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K. Beauty Capital. You can see her full talk at ted.com. We want to wrap up the show with a neuroscientific perspective on our self-image. We might say to someone, you really know who you are, or I always know where I stand with you. It's a compliment. But there are certain mental health conditions that can truly change someone's sense of self and be very disorienting for them and their loved ones, as science

• 43:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  writer Anil Ananthaswamy explained on the TED stage in 2022.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  About a decade ago, I met someone who had experienced a few episodes of schizophrenia.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  They had felt that their sense of self, of what it feels like to be them, changing somewhat. The boundaries of their body began to feel a bit nebulous. Even their psychological self felt a bit porous at times. They were experiencing what could be called an altered sense of self. Over the years, I met many such brave and insightful people who shared what it's like to live with their altered selves. And by altered, I mean different, not deficient, while acknowledging that coping with altered selves can be a struggle at times.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  So, speaking with them and with theologians, philosophers, neuroscientists, I came to understand that this self that each one of us takes oneself to be is not as real as it seems. Take, for instance, the question, "Who am I?" The most likely answer you'll get or give to such a question will be in the form of a story. We tell others and indeed ourselves stories about who we are. We take our stories to be sacrosanct. We are our stories. But a condition that most of us, sadly, will be familiar with,

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Alzheimer's disease, tells us something quite different. In order for our stories to form, to grow, something that just happens to us has to first enter short-term memory and then get incorporated into what's called long-term episodic memory. But what if the experience doesn't even enter short-term memory? In the beginning, Alzheimer's impairs the formation of short-term memory. It impairs the growth of the narrative. It's as if our stories begin stalling upon the onset of the disease. Eventually, Alzheimer's eats away at older, long-term memories. So if you were to meet someone with mid-stage Alzheimer's,

• 45:24Speaker 02

  they will likely be able to tell you stories about who they are. But... If you know their real stories, you'll be able to tell that they sometimes scramble up their narrative, that they sometimes mix up the sequence of episodes from their lives. It's as if they are recalling their own stories in ways that are not quite accurate. It's important at this stage to realize that there is still a person experiencing that scrambled narrative. Sadly, Alzheimer's goes on to destroy one's narrative and so much more. And yet, Alzheimer's tells us that these stories that we take ourselves to be, what philosophers call the narrative self, these are spun by the brain and body. They are constructions.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  And when the construction goes wrong, we perceive our own stories in ways that are not quite real.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  From the narrative self, let's talk about our body.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Let's take a very basic aspect of our bodily self. This feeling we all have that we are owners of our body and body parts. If I were to ask you, does your hand belong to you? You're going to say, of course it does. What a foolish question. But not everyone would agree.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Early on in my research,

• 46:45Speaker 02

  a neuropsychologist alerted me to a condition called xenomelia, or foreign limb syndrome. You may have heard of something called phantom limb syndrome, in which people who have had an amputation feel the presence of that limb sometimes. Xenomelia is somewhat of an opposite condition, where people feel like some part of their body, usually the extremities of their hands or legs, don't belong to them. So this neuropsychologist talked of phantom limb syndrome as animation without incarnation. So the limb is gone. It's not incarnate anymore, but it's animated in your mind. And he talked of xenomilia as incarnation without animation.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  So the limb is present, healthy even, incarnate, and yet in your own mind, it feels like it doesn't belong to you. People with xenomilia will sometimes take extreme measures to get rid of, to amputate their foreign-seeming body parts. From the perspective of the self, though, xenomilia is telling us something very profound. It's telling us that something as basic as the sense of ownership of our own body parts is a construction. Let's take another aspect of our bodily self. It's called the sense of agency. So when I do something like pick up a cup, I have this implicit feeling that I am the agent of that action, that I have willed that action into existence.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  That feeling is the sense of agency. But someone with schizophrenia may not have that feeling, always. Someone with schizophrenia might do something and not feel like they are the agent of that action. Let me take one more example to drive home this point. Let's talk of what it feels to be a body here and now. Not the feeling of being a story, but the feeling of being a body in the present moment. Psychologists estimate that about 5% of the general population will, at some point in their lives, have an out-of-body experience. Let's assume all of us right now are having an in-body experience. But if you think, like I do,

• 48:57Speaker 02

  that out-of-body experiences are the outcome of brain processes that are misfiring, then it stands to reason that the experience of being in-body, of being embodied, is itself a construction, and that too can come apart. So what are these experiences of altered selves telling us? They are telling us that just about everything we take to be real about ourselves, real in the sense that we think we are always experiencing undeniable truths about our bodies, well, that's just not the case. So when theologians and philosophers tell us that the self is an illusion, this is partly what they mean. So knowing all this, recognizing the constructed

• 49:41Speaker 02

  The nature of it all, maybe we can hold on less tightly to our stories. Maybe we can learn to let go. But that's easier said than done because the thing that is doing the letting go is also the thing that has to be let go of. Maybe we can just marvel at the efforts of people over millennia, from the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree to the modern philosopher and neuroscientist, who have asked themselves the question, "Who am I?" But most of all, I think we owe a debt to those amongst us who bravely bear witness to our altered selves, whether we do so voluntarily, like monks and nuns do when they meditate,

• 50:25Speaker 02

  or whether it's brought upon us by biology and circumstance. There is something remarkably robust about the processes that give rise to the totality of our sense of self. But there's something frighteningly fragile about them, too. They can crack. And any one of us at any time in our lives may have to confront such cracks. And that knowledge, I believe, should make us empathetic towards those of us dealing with altered selves. But I also believe that altered selves should not be seen as the outcome of deficits or as the outcome of a lack of attributes considered normal.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  They are different ways of being. And it's the willingness of some of us to confront the self's constructed nature that is helping make sense of the self for all of us. Thank you.

• 51:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was science writer Anil Ananthaswamy. His book is called "The Man Who Wasn't There: Tales From the Edge of the Self." You can find his full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to the show today. This episode was produced by Katie Monteleone, Harsha Nahada, James Delahoussaye, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Kai McNamee and Matthew Cloutier. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Jimmy Keeley, Tiffany Vera Castro, Patrick Murray, and Neil Rouch. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 52:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:15Speaker 05

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.