Research Companion (First Impressions and Human Dignity)
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THE WONDER ATLAS
Research Companion 0051
They Looked Different
Companion to Wonder Essay 0051
The Wonder Essay They Looked Different began with a simple adoption story and three unforgettable words.
This Research Companion walks a little further, exploring what psychology, philosophy, theology and lived experience may help us understand about perception, first impressions, welcome and human dignity.
Purpose (First Impressions and Human Dignity)
This Research Companion accompanies the Wonder Essay They Looked Different.
The essay began with a recorded conversation in which the psychologist Dr Nick Epley described the moment that he and his wife, Jan, decided to adopt two children from Ethiopia.
They had already seen photographs of the children.
Then they said yes.
Dr Epley remembered:
“They just looked better, you felt more love, they looked different.”
The photographs had not changed.
The children had not changed
So what had?
That question opened a wider exploration of:
perception;
attention;
first impressions;
relationship;
welcome;
belonging;
and human dignity.
This Companion follows those questions a little further.
It does not claim that love directly changes a specific visual mechanism.
Nor does it attempt to explain exactly what happened when Dr Epley looked again at those photographs.
Instead, it asks what psychology, philosophy, theology and lived experience may help us understand—and where uncertainty should remain.
The research serves the wonder.
It does not replace it.
Introduction
Seeing another person can feel immediate.
We notice a face.
An expression.
An accent.
A tattoo.
A role.
A difference.
And very quickly, a picture begins to form.
That picture may contain something true.
But it can still be far too small.
The Wonder Essay explored this through two human stories.
The first began with photographs of children who were about to become family.
The second began across a counter with a man I have called Jason.
When I first met Jason, his tattoos were among the first things I noticed.
Over time, conversation revealed more.
His manners.
His creativity.
His interest in the photographs from my walks.
His thoughtfulness.
Before leaving the area, Jason returned with chocolates for the staff, a card and a book about walking for me.
Inside the card, he wrote:
“Thank you for always smiling + making me feel welcome.”
The tattoos had not disappeared.
Jason had not suddenly become a different person.
The picture had become larger.
That left me carrying one simple possibility:
There may be more here than I can currently see.
This Companion follows that possibility through five questions:
What can change when someone “looks different”?
Why can first impressions be true and still incomplete?
Can attention help us see more?
What does welcome make possible?
Was the worth already there?
The aim is not to turn an ordinary human encounter into an academic problem.
It is to allow research to illuminate the encounter without explaining away its mystery.
So we begin where the Wonder Essay began.
Two people said yes.
The photographs remained the same.
And somehow:
They looked different.
Question One
What can change when someone “looks different”?
The question began with photographs.
The same children.
The same faces.
The same images.
Yet after Dr Nick Epley and his wife decided to adopt the children, he remembered:
“They just looked better, you felt more love, they looked different.”
What might that mean?
It is tempting to look for one simple explanation.
Did love literally change visual perception?
Did the decision alter what they noticed?
Had the photographs acquired a new emotional and relational meaning?
The honest answer is that Dr Epley’s words alone cannot tell us exactly what changed.
But research into perception and attention can help us understand why the experience itself is not as strange as it may first appear.
Seeing Is Not Recording
We often imagine seeing as though the eyes were cameras.
Light enters.
The brain records what is there.
We see the world.
Human perception is more active than that.
The brain is continually making sense of the information it receives.
Attention matters.
Context matters.
Past experience matters.
Emotion and significance can influence what becomes prominent in our experience.
Think of seeing the face of someone you love in a crowd.
To another person, it may be one face among hundreds.
To you, it stands out.
The face has not changed.
But it carries a significance that the other faces do not.
This does not mean that we simply invent whatever we want to see.
Reality still matters.
But our experience of reality is shaped by more than the eyes alone.
When Meaning Changes
The timing of Dr Epley’s story is especially interesting.
“As soon as Jan and I said yes…”
Before the decision, the photographs were of children they were considering adopting.
After saying yes, the relationship had changed.
These were children whose lives were about to become deeply connected with theirs.
The decision did not change the children’s value.
It changed the relationship.
The question was no longer only:
Who are these children?
It had begun to become:
Who are these children to us?
A person can remain exactly the same person while becoming:
a friend.
a neighbour.
a colleague.
a patient.
a son.
a daughter.
The relationship does not create their humanity.
But it can change the significance their life carries for us.
Their joy matters differently.
Their pain matters differently.
Their future becomes connected with ours.
Maybe something like that formed part of Dr Epley’s experience.
We cannot know for certain.
Love and Looking
Dr Epley did not only say:
“They looked different.”
He also said:
“You felt more love.”
In his memory of the moment, the change in feeling and the change in looking appeared together.
That is fascinating.
But it is also where we need to be careful.
The story does not prove that love directly altered a particular visual mechanism in the brain.
Nor can we identify precisely what changed.
Attention?
Emotion?
Evaluation?
Meaning?
Expectation?
The subjective experience of seeing?
Several of these at once?
The evidence does not allow us to say.
The most responsible conclusion is also the most interesting:
human seeing is not emotionally or relationally neutral.
We do not encounter the people who matter most to us as detached observers.
Their faces carry:
memory.
concern.
hope.
fear.
delight.
belonging.
love.
All of these can become part of what it means to see them.
What Stayed With Me
The research did not give me a single explanation for the words:
“They looked different.”
I am glad it did not.
The children in the photographs were the same children before and after the decision.
Their value had not increased.
But something in the relationship had changed.
And from that new place, Dr Epley experienced them differently.
That leaves me wondering whether some of the most important changes in how we see another person begin not with trying to look harder—
but with a change in where we stand in relation to them.
Question Two
Why can first impressions be true and still incomplete?
When I first met Jason, one of the first things I noticed was his tattoos.
That was not imagined.
It was not false.
It was something I genuinely saw.
The problem with a first impression is not always that it is wrong.
Sometimes the problem is that it is small.
We notice one part of a person and, without realising it, begin allowing that part to stand for the whole.
Why do we do that?
The Speed of First Impressions
Human beings can form impressions of other people remarkably quickly.
We notice:
expression.
age.
familiarity.
emotion.
features that seem unusual or distinctive.
Our minds begin making sense of what we see before we have learned very much about the person at all.
This ability is not necessarily a flaw.
We need to navigate a complicated social world.
Quick impressions can help us notice what may require attention.
But speed has a limitation.
A rapid impression is formed from limited information.
It may tell us something.
It cannot tell us everything.
The first thing I noticed about Jason was real.
But it was only the beginning of what there was to know.
When One Detail Becomes Too Large
Some features attract attention more strongly than others.
Once something stands out, it can begin to shape the rest of the picture we form.
The person may begin to disappear behind the feature.
This can happen with:
appearance.
clothing.
accent.
occupation.
diagnosis.
religion.
social background.
one difficult behaviour.
one mistake.
The feature may be real.
The category may even be useful in a particular context.
But a human being always contains more than a category can hold.
Jason did have tattoos.
He was also thoughtful.
Creative.
Polite.
Interested in the world.
Attentive enough to remember my love of hiking and choose a book about walking as a gift.
None of those things made the tattoos less real.
They simply made the picture larger.
Categories Help Us — and Limit Us
The human mind naturally uses categories.
Without them, the world would be difficult to navigate.
We recognise:
a doctor.
a child.
a stranger.
a colleague.
a customer.
a patient.
Categories help us organise information.
But categories also simplify.
The word patient may be useful in a hospital.
But no one is only a patient.
A religious identity may tell us something meaningful about a person.
But it cannot tell us the whole story of one particular human life.
A diagnosis may matter greatly.
But the person is not the diagnosis.
The problem is not that categories are always false.
It is that they are always incomplete.
The danger comes when we forget that.
A category can be a starting point for understanding.
It becomes a problem when we mistake it for the destination.
The Person Becomes Particular
Psychologists use the word stereotype to describe generalised beliefs or expectations about members of a group.
Some of these assumptions are conscious.
Others may operate more quietly.
This does not mean that every impression is a stereotype or that every judgement should be distrusted.
But it gives us a reason for humility.
We may be responding not only to the person in front of us, but also to expectations we have brought with us.
That is one reason getting to know a particular person can matter.
The category may remain.
But the individual begins to exceed it.
A person is no longer simply:
someone like that.
They become:
Jason.
A name changes something.
Not magically.
But it marks particularity.
There may be thousands or millions of people who share one characteristic with Jason.
There is only one Jason.
Leaving Room for More
This is where the research returned me to one of the simplest discoveries in the Wonder Essay:
There may be more here than I can currently see.
The sentence does not require me to deny what I have noticed.
It asks me to remember the limits of what I know.
Sometimes our first impressions will be corrected.
Sometimes they will be confirmed.
Sometimes they will become more complicated.
But when a relationship deepens, the person often becomes more particular.
We begin to learn:
what makes them laugh.
what they fear.
what they love.
what they have survived.
what they hope for.
what they notice about us.
Jason’s gift of the walking book became important to me for that reason.
I had been learning more about him.
But he had also been paying attention to me.
He had noticed the photographs.
Remembered the conversations.
Remembered what mattered to me.
The relationship was not simply one person observing another.
We had both become a little more known.
What Stayed With Me
Research into first impressions and categories did not teach me to distrust everything I notice.
It taught me to become more modest about what I think I know.
A first impression may contain something true.
But truth can still be partial.
One visible detail may be real without being the most important thing about a person.
A category may tell me something without telling me enough.
The person standing in front of me is always larger than the information currently available to me.
That leaves me with a sentence I want to carry:
Do not confuse what you have seen with all there is to see.
Jason did not become a different person as I got to know him.
The picture became larger.
Maybe one of the most important things we can bring to another human being is not the promise that we will understand them completely.
We never will.
It may simply be the humility to leave room for more.
Question Three
Can attention help us see more?
If first impressions are necessarily limited, what allows the picture to become larger?
One answer may be:
attention.
But attention is more than looking harder.
We can look directly at another person and still notice very little about them.
We can hear someone speaking while barely listening.
We can spend years around another person while allowing our assumptions about them to remain almost untouched.
So what does it mean to attend to another human being?
Attention Is Selective
At any moment, there is more happening around us than we can consciously process.
Attention helps select what receives priority.
This is necessary.
Without it, ordinary life would be overwhelming.
But it also means that what we notice is always incomplete.
We attend to some things and miss others.
That makes me think again about Jason.
At first, his tattoos were immediately visible.
They required no effort to notice.
His thoughtfulness was different.
That became visible over time.
So did his interest in the photographs from my walks.
So did the fact that he remembered what mattered to me.
So did the care behind the book he chose.
Those qualities were not necessarily hidden.
They simply could not all be known at first glance.
Some things about a person can be seen immediately.
Others require:
time.
conversation.
memory.
repeated encounters.
attention.
Looking Again
One of the difficulties with first impressions is that once a picture has formed, we may become less likely to question it.
We think we already know what we are looking at.
Attention can interrupt that certainty.
It can ask:
Is there more here than the picture I have already formed?
This does not mean forcing ourselves to replace every negative impression with a positive one.
Sometimes a first concern is justified.
Sometimes further attention confirms rather than overturns what we first noticed.
The aim is not optimism.
It is openness to reality.
That distinction led me towards the philosopher Iris Murdoch.
A Just and Loving Gaze
Murdoch was deeply interested in the relationship between attention and the moral life.
She described attention as:
“a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”
Those words stayed with me.
Just.
And:
loving.
The combination matters.
Love alone does not guarantee accurate perception.
We can idealise people we love.
We can overlook things we do not want to see.
But coldness does not guarantee truth either.
Fear can distort.
Resentment can distort.
Prejudice can distort.
A stereotype can cause us to notice only what confirms the picture we already hold.
Murdoch’s phrase refuses to choose between truth and love.
A just gaze wants to see the person fairly.
A loving gaze resists reducing them to something smaller than they are.
That does not mean approving of everything.
It means trying to attend to the reality of the person rather than merely to the version of them we have constructed in our own mind.
The Observer May Need to Change
Murdoch explored this through a famous example involving a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
The mother-in-law initially interprets the younger woman negatively.
But instead of assuming that her first interpretation must be the final truth, she begins to examine her own way of seeing.
Could what she had interpreted one way be understood differently?
Could her own expectations have shaped the picture?
The important point is not that every negative judgement must be replaced with a flattering one.
It is that the observer may need to change in order to see the other person more justly.
That felt very close to the question behind They Looked Different.
Sometimes the person in front of us has not changed.
The work may be happening in the one who looks.
Attention Is Not Inspection
There is a danger here.
If we say that attention helps us see people more fully, it can sound as though another person is an object to be studied.
Look closely enough.
Gather enough information.
Work them out.
But human beings are not puzzles to solve.
We can know someone for decades and still be surprised by them.
Another person always retains a depth that we cannot completely possess or understand.
So attention to a person is different from inspecting an object.
It may involve:
listening.
asking.
remembering.
waiting.
allowing silence.
remaining curious.
letting another person tell their own story.
And being willing for our own picture to be corrected.
This is one reason the writing of Simone Weil also became an important conversation partner.
For Weil, attention involved a kind of receptivity.
Waiting.
Not grasping too quickly.
Not deciding in advance what must be found.
There is humility in that kind of attention.
It says:
I do not yet know everything that is here.
The Rose and the Person
While working on the Wonder Observation behind the essay, I found myself thinking about a flower.
You can look at a rose from a distance and think:
That is beautiful.
Then you move closer.
You notice the folds of the petals.
Subtle changes in colour.
Patterns and structures that were invisible from farther away.
The attention did not create the detail.
The detail was already there.
It simply became more visible.
The analogy only goes so far.
People are not flowers.
We do not understand another human being by staring at them more intensely.
But the image still helped me.
There are things we cannot see from a distance.
With another person, moving closer may mean:
hearing the story.
sharing time.
learning the name.
asking another question.
remembering what matters to them.
allowing them to surprise us.
The person does not become more complex because we pay attention.
We become more aware of the complexity that was already there.
What Stayed With Me
Attention cannot guarantee that we will understand another person correctly.
We remain limited.
We can still misread.
Project.
Idealise.
See what we want to see.
But attention can create room for correction.
It can interrupt the confidence of the first glance.
It can allow another person to become more particular.
More than:
a category.
a role.
a problem.
a first impression.
What stayed with me was the difference between:
looking at
and:
attending to.
I can look at someone and notice what is immediately visible.
Attention asks me to remain open to what may not yet be visible.
That may be why Murdoch’s phrase continues to stay with me:
“a just and loving gaze.”
Not a gaze that invents beauty.
Not a gaze that ignores truth.
A way of looking that remains willing to be corrected by the reality of the person.
And that leaves me with a question I am still carrying:
What might become visible if I stopped assuming that I had already seen enough?
Question Four
What does welcome make possible?
When I first remembered Jason’s card, I remembered the words incorrectly.
I thought he had written:
“Thank you for seeing me.”
Later, I found the original card.
That was not what he had written.
His actual words were:
“Thank you for always smiling + making me feel welcome.”
The correction mattered.
The real words were his words.
And the more I thought about them, the more I began to wonder whether they pointed towards something important.
What does welcome make possible?
The Small Signals of Welcome
Welcome is often expressed through surprisingly ordinary things.
A smile.
A greeting.
Remembering someone’s name.
Making eye contact.
Showing interest.
Allowing someone to feel that their arrival is not an inconvenience.
None of these actions is dramatic.
Most take only a few seconds.
Yet small social signals can carry meaning.
They can communicate:
I have noticed you.
You are not an interruption.
There is room for you here.
Human beings are deeply social.
We continually notice cues about whether we are accepted, ignored, included, rejected or treated as though we belong.
A warm interaction does not automatically create a relationship.
A smile cannot solve every problem.
And welcome should never be reduced to a technique for making people like us.
But ordinary gestures can influence the atmosphere of an encounter.
They can create a little more room for human connection.
Sometimes that room may be enough for another part of the person to become known.
Belonging
Psychologists have long recognised the importance of belonging in human life.
Human beings generally need meaningful social connection.
We want to know that we matter to others.
That we are accepted somewhere.
That there are relationships and communities in which we have a place.
A single welcoming interaction cannot meet the whole human need for belonging.
But it can participate in it.
This may be especially important in places where people already feel exposed, judged or uncertain about how they will be received.
A pharmacy can be one of those places.
People do not always arrive at their best.
They may be:
unwell.
anxious.
embarrassed.
frustrated.
in pain.
living with an illness or treatment they did not choose.
Some may already expect to be judged.
In that setting, welcome can be more than good customer service.
It can help preserve the humanity of the encounter.
The person is not only:
the next prescription.
the next problem.
the next consultation.
They are someone who has entered the room.
Welcome Creates Room
Jason’s words made me think of welcome as a kind of space.
Not physical space alone.
Relational space.
When someone feels unwelcome, they may become guarded.
They may say less.
Leave sooner.
Expect rejection.
When someone feels welcomed, something else may become possible.
Conversation.
Trust.
Humour.
Curiosity.
The sharing of a story.
None of these is guaranteed.
Welcome cannot force another person to open up.
Nor should it.
But it can create conditions in which a person does not have to spend the entire encounter wondering whether they are wanted there.
That seems significant.
Jason and I did not sit down one day and decide to build a relationship.
It grew through repeated ordinary encounters.
Conversations.
Photographs.
Shared interests.
Remembered details.
A book.
A card.
A box of chocolates for the staff.
Looking back, I wonder whether welcome created some of the room in which those things became possible.
Attention Can Become Mutual
There is another side to Jason’s story that I nearly missed.
I had been thinking about how I came to know more of him.
But the book reminded me that he had also come to know something of me.
He knew I loved hiking.
He had seen the photographs.
He had remembered.
Then he chose a gift connected to something that mattered to me.
The seeing had not been one-way.
Neither had the attention.
We were both noticing.
Both remembering.
Both becoming a little more known.
That may be one of the quiet gifts of relationship.
We are not only observers of other people.
We are also people who can be known.
Welcome Does Not Require Sameness
Welcome does not require us to be the same.
We do not need to share the same:
background.
appearance.
beliefs.
experiences.
or way of life.
To welcome someone is not to say:
You are exactly like me.
Nor is it to say:
I agree with everything about you.
It can simply say:
You are a person, and there is room for you to be treated as one here.
That distinction matters.
If welcome depends entirely upon similarity, we may only be recognising ourselves in other people.
The deeper challenge is to make room for the person who remains genuinely other.
Different from us.
Not fully understood.
Not easily placed within our own experience.
Welcome does not remove those differences.
It creates a way of meeting across them.
The Limits of Welcome
Welcome also has limits.
Being welcoming does not mean abandoning boundaries.
It does not mean tolerating abusive behaviour.
It does not mean that every relationship should become close.
It does not require us to trust everyone equally.
Wisdom still matters.
Safety matters.
Professional boundaries matter.
The aim is not indiscriminate intimacy.
It is human dignity.
Even where closeness is neither possible nor appropriate, another person can still be treated without contempt.
They can still be spoken to respectfully.
Their presence can still be acknowledged.
Welcome can have boundaries and remain welcome.
What Stayed With Me
I once thought the most important sentence in Jason’s card was one he had never written:
“Thank you for seeing me.”
The real sentence was:
“Thank you for always smiling + making me feel welcome.”
I am glad reality corrected my memory.
Because welcome may be one of the ways seeing becomes possible.
Not because a smile reveals everything about another person.
Not because kindness guarantees understanding.
But because welcome creates room.
Room for another conversation.
Another detail.
Another part of the story.
Room for the other person to become more than the first few things we noticed.
And room for us to become more known too.
Maybe that is one of the quiet powers of welcome.
It does not claim to know the whole person.
It simply refuses to close the door too soon.
Question Five
Was the worth already there?
The longer I carried the question behind They Looked Different, the more I found myself returning to one of the oldest beliefs in the Christian story.
The opening chapter of Genesis says that human beings are made:
“in the image of God.”
The traditional theological term is:
Imago Dei.
Image of God.
It is a familiar phrase to many Christians.
But the Wonder Essay made me think again about what it might mean for the way we actually look at another person.
The Image of God
Christians have spent centuries exploring exactly what it means to say that human beings are made in the image of God.
Does it refer to human reason?
Moral capacity?
Relationship?
Responsibility?
Our vocation to represent God within creation?
There has never been only one interpretation.
But across these different understandings, one conviction has remained deeply influential:
human life possesses a distinctive dignity.
That dignity is not limited to:
the powerful.
the intelligent.
the healthy.
the successful.
the useful.
the people we admire.
the people who resemble us.
The biblical claim is much more radical.
Human beings bear the image of God.
Dignity comes before achievement.
Before status.
Before usefulness.
And before my recognition.
Recognition Is Not Creation
This distinction became especially important to me.
When I came to know more of Jason, I did not make him more valuable.
When I discovered his thoughtfulness and generosity, I did not add worth to his life.
The worth was already there.
My understanding changed.
Not his value.
The same is true of the children in Dr Epley’s story.
The decision to adopt them did not make them more human.
It did not increase their inherent worth.
Their lives mattered before anyone said yes.
What changed was the relationship.
They became particular in a new way.
Not simply:
children.
But children whose lives were becoming intertwined with the lives of a particular family.
That distinction protects something important.
If another person becomes valuable only when I discover something admirable about them, then their value still depends upon me.
My approval.
My understanding.
My ability to recognise what is interesting or beautiful about them.
The Imago Dei makes a different claim.
The value comes first.
I may recognise it.
I may fail to recognise it.
But I do not create it.
Dignity Before Discovery
Stories about seeing beneath the surface can sometimes carry an unintended message.
We tell the story of the person who looked intimidating but turned out to be kind.
The person we misunderstood who turned out to be interesting.
The stranger who surprised us with generosity.
Those stories matter.
But they can leave another question behind.
What if I never discover the beautiful hidden quality?
What if the person remains difficult?
What if we disagree profoundly?
What if I never hear their story?
What if there is no moving moment in which my first impression is overturned?
Does their dignity remain?
The Christian answer is:
yes.
Their worth does not depend upon providing me with a redemptive story.
That may be one of the most demanding implications of the Imago Dei.
I do not need to discover an impressive quality before treating another person with dignity.
The Person Beneath the Category
We need categories.
They help us navigate the world.
But the Imago Dei resists allowing any category to become the whole person.
A person may be:
a patient.
a prisoner.
a refugee.
a pharmacist.
a Muslim.
a Christian.
an atheist.
a child.
a parent.
a person living with addiction.
a person who has caused harm.
Each description may tell us something real.
None can contain the whole mystery of a human life.
From a Christian perspective, there is always another description beneath them all:
a human being made in the image of God.
That does not remove the other descriptions.
It places them within a larger one.
The category may tell me something about the person.
The Imago Dei reminds me that the person always exceeds the category.
Seeing Does Not Mean Approving
This does not mean every action is good.
It does not erase responsibility.
It does not require us to call harmful behaviour harmless.
Dignity is not the same as approval.
The doctrine of the image of God is not a denial of moral judgement.
It is a claim that even when judgement is necessary, the person being judged remains human.
That distinction matters.
To recognise dignity is not to abandon wisdom.
It is not to abandon boundaries.
It is not to pretend that harm has not occurred.
It is to refuse the idea that another human being must earn the right to be treated as human.
What Stayed With Me
The deepest theological discovery in this journey was also one of the simplest.
The worth was already there.
The children did not become more valuable when two people said yes.
Jason did not become more valuable when I came to know him.
Another person does not become more worthy of dignity when I discover something about them that I admire.
Recognition matters.
Attention matters.
Relationship matters.
Welcome matters.
They may help me see more.
But they do not create the value they reveal.
For me, that is where the Imago Dei meets the question at the heart of They Looked Different.
Learning to see another person more fully is not the act of giving them worth.
It is the humbler work of recognising that I may have been standing in the presence of worth all along.
Still Carrying
The research helped me understand more.
It did not explain everything.
I still do not know exactly what changed when Dr Nick Epley and his wife said yes and the children in the photographs:
“looked different.”
Was it attention?
Emotion?
Meaning?
Relationship?
Belonging?
A change in the subjective experience of perception?
Several of these at once?
The story does not allow us to know.
And I think it is important not to claim more than the story or the research can support.
But the question has continued to grow.
I am still wondering about the relationship between commitment and love.
We often imagine that love comes first and commitment follows.
But can commitment sometimes create conditions in which love deepens?
Can saying:
I will care for you
change what we begin to notice?
Can responsibility alter significance?
Can belonging change the experience of seeing?
I am still wondering about first impressions too.
How often are they wrong?
How often are they partly right but far too small?
What causes one visible feature to become so large that the rest of the person disappears behind it?
And what helps us resist turning an unfinished picture into a final one?
I am still carrying Iris Murdoch’s phrase:
“a just and loving gaze.”
How do we hold those two words together?
How do we remain loving without becoming naive?
How do we remain truthful without becoming cold?
Love does not always make perception more accurate.
We can idealise people.
We can overlook what we do not want to see.
Our loyalties can distort as well as clarify.
So if loving attention can help us see more, what helps love remain just?
I am still wondering about welcome.
Jason’s words were simple:
“Thank you for always smiling + making me feel welcome.”
How many moments of human connection begin with something that small?
A smile.
A name remembered.
A genuine question.
A person sensing that their arrival is not an inconvenience.
And how many stories remain unknown because the conditions for telling them never appear?
Most of all, I am still wondering about the relationship between seeing and loving.
Does love help us see?
Does seeing more help us love?
Do the two sometimes grow together?
I do not yet know.
The research has given me language.
Attention.
Perception.
Meaning.
Belonging.
Particularity.
The Imago Dei.
But I keep returning to the same ordinary mystery.
A photograph can remain unchanged.
A person can remain the same person.
And something in the one who looks can change.
Maybe that is one reason learning to see requires humility.
We never arrive at another human being empty-handed.
We bring our expectations.
Our experiences.
Our fears.
Our categories.
Our hopes.
Our love.
And sometimes, if we remain attentive long enough, reality asks us to enlarge the picture.
So I am still carrying the question that has followed me through this entire journey:
Can loving attention help us see what was already there?
I do not think I have finished wondering.
Keep Wondering
Thank you for exploring a little further.
If these pages have awakened new questions, do not feel any pressure to answer them all.
Carry them for a while.
Notice what they help you see.
Pay attention to the people you meet.
Remain curious about the stories you do not yet know.
Allow first impressions to remain first impressions rather than becoming final ones too quickly.
Listen.
Ask.
Welcome.
Leave room to be surprised.
And when you find yourself certain that you already understand the person in front of you, carry one small possibility:
There may be more here than I can currently see.
Research can help us understand perception.
Psychology can help us think about first impressions.
Philosophy can teach us to examine the quality of our attention.
Theology can ask where human dignity comes from.
But eventually, every question returns us to ordinary life.
A face.
A name.
A conversation.
A person standing in front of us.
The next discovery may not be waiting in another book.
It may be waiting in someone you have already seen—
but have not yet fully noticed.
Keep wondering.
Keep looking.
And leave room to look again.
Continue Exploring
For readers who would like to follow some of the questions in this Companion further, the following are useful places to begin.
The Conversation That Began the Wonder
Huberman Lab — Dr Nicholas Epley How to Overcome Social Anxiety | Dr. Nick Epley
This recorded conversation between Dr Andrew Huberman and Dr Nicholas Epley contains the adoption story that first awakened the wonder behind They Looked Different.
The quoted exchange used in Wonder Seed 0051 was transcribed directly from the recorded interview.
Watch the original Huberman Lab interview
Understanding Other Minds
Nicholas Epley Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
Epley explores the remarkable—and imperfect—ways human beings attempt to understand the minds of other people.
Attention and the Moral Life
Iris Murdoch The Sovereignty of Good
In The Idea of Perfection, Murdoch explores attention and the moral work involved in learning to see another person more justly.
Her description of attention as:
“a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality”
became an important conversation partner in this Companion.
Attention and Receptivity
Simone Weil Waiting for God
Weil’s writing explores attention as a form of receptivity, patience and openness to reality.
Her work strongly influenced Murdoch’s thinking about attention.
Belonging and Social Connection
Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529.
This influential review examines the importance of forming and maintaining meaningful interpersonal relationships.
The Imago Dei
For the biblical foundations of the Christian belief that human beings are made in the image of God:
Genesis 1:26–27
Genesis 5:1–2
Genesis 9:6
James 3:9
Christian traditions have interpreted the Imago Dei in different ways, but these texts provide the primary biblical foundation for the theological question explored in this Companion:
What changes when we begin from the conviction that another person’s worth does not depend upon our recognition of it?
Final Thought
Research can sometimes make the world feel smaller.
A mystery is given a name.
A mechanism is described.
A question appears to have been answered.
That has not been my experience with this journey.
The more I explored perception, attention, first impressions, belonging and human dignity, the more careful I became about claiming that I understood what happened in that original moment.
The photographs remained the same.
The children remained the same.
Two people said yes.
And somehow:
“They looked different.”
Maybe that is one of the gifts of good research.
It does not always remove wonder.
Sometimes it teaches us how to wonder more accurately.
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