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Mirror Manipulations Mirrors are probably the most common manipulation of self-awareness. The mirror manipulation has many advantages: it's highly reliable, inexpensive, easy to incorporate into an experiment, and it rarely arouses suspicion. Many researchers consider this the "gold standard" of self-awareness manipulations. It has been extensively validated---to my knowledge, it has worked in at least a dozen countries during the last three decades. This is one of many clever manipulations developed by Duval and Wicklund during the early days of self-awareness research. The mirror is usually propped against the wall on the participant's desk. In the high self-awareness condition, participants face the mirror's reflective side. In the low self-awareness condition, participants face the mirror's non-reflective back side. The experimenter usually justifies the mirror by apologizing for the things in the room, noting that he or she is borrowing the room from another experimenter and was asked not to move anything. For what it's worth, our lab at UNCG uses 24" by 36" unframed mirrors, available for $20 at any large home-improvement store. Small mirrors (such as 9" by 12" framed mirrors) are cheaper but they often fail. One-way mirrors are not recommended---feeling observed adds confounding variables. The first use of this manipulation:
Validation research:
A few recent papers that used the mirror manipulation:
P. Silvia,
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