WALKSCAPE
Crosswave EditionWhich Way Would You Draw an E on Your Forehead?
2026-01-15
A letter with two points of view
We grow up in the company of other people. A question that follows us into adulthood is how their presence changes what we notice and do.
Personality quizzes such as the MBTI are one way people talk about individual differences. A simpler question concerns a particular moment: when you look at the same situation, do you start with what you see or with what somebody else might see?
The forehead test
Take an instruction that seems simple enough. A researcher hands you a marker and asks you to do the following.
Draw the letter E on your forehead.
Researchers including Glen Hass have used the task because it produces two readily distinguishable orientations.
One person writes an E oriented from their own side. It comes out backward for somebody facing them.
Another writes an E that the person across from them can read. That means turning the letter around from the writer’s imagined point of view.
For the length of the task, the orientation shows which view the person used to make the letter. It does not put them in a lasting personality category.
Starting from your own side
In discussions of self-consciousness, private self-consciousness refers to attention to your own thoughts and feelings. That can help explain why researchers are interested in what a task makes you notice about yourself.
Thinking from your own position is useful. It keeps your feelings and intentions in view when someone else has a different idea of what you should do. On its own, the direction of a letter tells us nothing about whether a person is confident, stubborn or comfortable being alone.
A useful question in this direction is what I think or feel before I take anyone else’s reaction into account.
Picturing the person across from you
An E oriented for another reader is one sign of taking the other person’s perspective in this task. Psychologists also discuss public self-consciousness, or attention to how you appear to others. The two ideas overlap in everyday conversation, but the letter alone does not measure how much you worry about being judged.
Being able to picture how something will look to another person can make collaboration easier. Constantly wondering how others will judge you is a different experience. You can do one without feeling the other.
Sometimes all you are doing is putting yourself where the other person is standing long enough to make something clearer for them.
A Korean television demonstration
EBS tried the task with people on the street in the Korean documentary The Two Faces of Human Nature.
In the demonstration, the program reported that roughly 70 percent wrote the letter for the other person and roughly 30 percent oriented it from their own side.
It is tempting to read that split as a comment on Korean social norms. A street demonstration cannot establish that the sample represents Korea or that culture caused the result.
What would happen with another group?
Repeating the task with a different set of people could give another result. The wording, who is standing in front of them and what they are attending to in the moment could all matter.
The precise split is less interesting than the thought the instruction leaves behind.
How often do you imagine the way somebody else will see what you do? How often do you notice yourself doing it?
Even in a task that lasts seconds, another person’s point of view can become part of the way we act.
A choice of viewpoint
We need to move between our own view and the view of the person across from us. Which one is helpful depends on what we are trying to do.
Before you write the letter, you can picture it from your side, from the other person’s side, or both. What is interesting is noticing which view came first.