Virtue's Reflection

The reflection that you provide for others has a greater impact than you might know.

When a person looks inward, exploring his or her thoughts, feelings, motivations, or values, we call it self-reflection. What we compare our actions to when we self-reflect are our standards.

It turns out that a simple mirror can provide enough of a reflection to help us to live up to our standards.

This is what was discovered by researchers Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duvall back in the 1970s. They found that when people were in front of a mirror and told that they were being filmed, those people changed their behavior: They worked harder, gave more accurate answers to questions, were more consistent in their actions, and those actions were more consistent with their values.

About a decade later, Charles Carver and Michael Scheier looked at this in more depth. When people sat at a desk with a mirror – not a great big ostentations mirror but just a small part of the surroundings – they were more likely to follow their own values than someone else's orders, they would work harder and they would resist being bullied into changing their opinion on something.

What's more, when they were told to administer shocks to somebody they were more restrained in their actions. This is not unlike the important revelation of Stanley Milgram in his Obedience to Authority experiments, in which people who witnessed others refusing to comply with directions to severely shock somebody were dramatically less likely to comply themselves.

The self-reflection that was aided by the actual reflection of the mirror helped people to regulate themselves.

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