One way to begin considering the role of mirrors in social psychology is to acknowledge that private, domestic bathrooms are not the only sites where people use mirrors. The process of self-monitoring extends into more public spaces as well, including cars and public bathrooms. This suggests the necessity for image surveillance on a frequent basis, and that certain body identities fade and need to be touched up, or that body identities need to change to match changing social sites. Both of these conclusions are quite apparent in everyday practice; makeup and hair often need to be adjusted, and as one shifts between two separate social sites like the workplace and a bar, one is often apt to change his or her personal front.
The fact that different social sites have different cues for different images suggest that images themselves play a large part in social interaction. This is illustrated poignantly in Cash's (1990) assessment of social reinforcement based on physical aesthetic perceptions.
Cash refers to research from 1977 on pairs of college student participants, consisting of one male and one female each. The males were told they would speak on the telephone with a female, and were given a photograph of their partner that was stereotypically attractive or unattractive (these photographs did not correllate with the real women- they were randomly given to the men). The research found that the men who were given photographs from the attractive category were more encouraging and expected more social engagement from their partners (this was observed as a more positive and socially interested conversational approach). Perhaps more tellingly, the women on the other end of the telephones categorically conversed more confidently when their partners perceived them to be attractive. Cash utilizes this research as evidence that body perception mediates social interaction to a very large degree (Cash 57-58).
I would extend this principle to say that social performance is often judged based on the appropriateness of a given image at a particular moment. In a dance club there are certainly different standards for body image than at a casual dinner or a black-tie event. The fact that mirrors exist outside of private homes (like in public bathrooms or cars) suggests that there are nuances to physical self-representation that have varying consequences according to social context. Shifting consequences of different images thus necessitate continuous self-monitoring.
I want to stress that aesthetic alteration is not limited to stylizing and accessorizing. Physical posture also plays a huge role, and this role is intricately tied to emotional states. In times of confidence and happiness, people tend to expand their shoulders and chest in a symbolic opening to the world; in times of hate, it becomes firmer and introverted. Schilder, a clinical psychologist from the first half of the 20th century, makes this distinction when he observed that people "...expand and we contract...we rebuild [the body]" according to our inner feelings (Schilder 210).
The social context is a crucial determinant of appropriate posture and body language just the same as it is a determinant of the "appropriateness" of other bodily attributes like clothing or body type. At most workplaces, for example, employees cannot be overtly unstable. A salesperson must be friendly even if something unfortunate has happened in his or her personal life, and a businessperson must maintain composure at a conference meeting regardless of the affair that his or her spouse is having (melodrama, yes, but a possible and illustrative example nonetheless). Thus a mirror is a quick way to reassert control and mask any bodily signs of frustration, anger, or sadness during a time when those emotions must be hidden. This process, no matter how large or small in magnitude, is present throughout a person's life if he or she is an actor in any social space with established expectations for the personal front. Taking a look in the mirror is a very convenient way to manage projected emotional states and sylized identities.
Part of what makes the mirror's social function so fascinating in relation to Foucault's panoptic theory is that the historical time scale of both accounts are identical. Foucault notes that there is a shift in normative power during the same years that the mirror was becoming more widely used- specifically, a shift from the culture of the spectacle to the culture of discipline (Foucault 215-217). Power demonstrated by a spectacle would include a pulblic quartering of an assassin or the public beheading of revolutionaries in France. These are events which constituted a moment of solidarity, in which a large group witnessed a gruesome example of the king's power- and the repercussions for disobeying certain rules and norms. Obedience was a product of the desire to be included in the safety of the normative social group. In the culture of discipline, however, control derived from solidarity gives way to an opposite form of control derived from procuring "for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a great multitude" (Foucault 216). Isolation, rather than solidarity, constitutes the new form of social control. This is direcly correlated to the history of the mirror, which started as a spectacle in the homes of the rich and ended in a use whereby an individual disciplines his or her body in the "view of a great multitude."
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