EVER wondered what other people think of you â I mean, what they really think of you? I consider myself decent company, for instance, even if I know I get a bit vociferous after a few pints of bitter. I like to think I am open-minded and considerate, too, though I recognise I can be dismissive at times. But lately, particularly the morning after a few of those pints, I have become curious about how other people see me.
Letâs be honest: sometimes I wonder if people think Iâm more obnoxious than I realise. Because presumably you wouldnât know. That is partly where the intrigue lies for me. How accurately do we see ourselves? And who is the real you anyway â the person you think you are, or the person other people see?
Advertisement
It isnât that I am self-obsessed, you understand. I am just intrigued about the extent to which the way people see my personality tallies with the way I view myself. Ultimately, I wonder whether being more aware of these shadowy hinterlands of self-knowledge might make life better â not only for me, but for those who spend time with me. Did I say I wasnât self-obsessed?
In search of answers, I did what most sensible people tend to avoid: I solicited honest insights into my nature from a dozen friends, family members and colleagues. I asked them to fill out a 60-point questionnaire designed by psychologists to assess personality, and to give the two traits they most associate with me â one positive and one negative. Then I waited nervously for the scales to fall from my eyes.
Personality test
The call to âknow thyselfâ echoes from antiquity. Socrates famously declared that the unexamined life isnât worth living. But for the ancient Greek philosophers, the pursuit of self-knowledge was a dialogue with others to figure out human nature and how to govern. The focus on introspection came to the fore later, in the 17th century, with RenĂ© Descartes. âThe idea that we sit and just reflect on ourselves, that navel-gazing, is distinctively modern and Western,â says , a philosopher at the University of Connecticut who has studied self-knowledge.
In one sense, it is impossible to avoid knowing yourself. You are constantly thinking about how you feel, what you are going to eat tonight and so on. In addition, we each have privileged knowledge of our own personal history, our own thoughts and feelings and what we get up to when no one else is looking. So you might think we know all there is to know about our true selves, which I am defining here not as some immutable inner essence, but as the way you typically think, feel and behave over years or decades. Your personality, in other words. And yet it is far from clear that we can gain an accurate picture even of that.
For psychologists, the question is an empirical one. The trouble is that self-perception presents a particularly thorny case of the âcriterion problemâ â that is, how can you assess the accuracy of the way you perceive yourself without an objective criterion for comparison? In recent years, researchers have tried to overcome this by comparing self-perceptions with other peopleâs perceptions of you. âThere is no direct pipeline to your true self,â says , a psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. âHow a group of other people, who know you well across different contexts and who have different biases to one another, see you might be the closest you can get to a good accuracy criterion for what youâre really like.â
In a few studies, researchers have been able to compare self-perceptions with third-party observations of behaviour. One group compared peopleâs self-ratings on their core personality traits with behavioural indicators of each of those traits in a lab environment, and found that there was a . Similar results have been reported from experiments in real world settings, where researchers .
The Big Five
âOur self-perceptions do generally predict our behaviour pretty well,â says , a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. They also correspond well with the perceptions of people who are close to us, she says. That chimed with my own feedback experience. I used an online version of a test called the Inventory-2, which is based on a model that psychologists use to assess personality. It divides our personalities into five independent traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism and gives you a score out of 100 for each. When I took the test, I scored highly on extroversion (71) and open-mindedness (96), middling on agreeableness (65) and low on neuroticism (48) and conscientiousness (46).
When other peopleâs perceptions of me came trickling in, I was struck by how similar they looked to my own. There were a few differences, of course. On the test, several people rated me higher than I did on extroversion and conscientiousness, for example. A handful of my volunteers very much warmed to their second task, sending a barrage of negative traits they associate with me that arenât captured in the Big Five scores. Highlights included âstridentâ, âbelligerentâ, âintractableâ and â from someone we will call Ben because that is his name â the instant classic, âIs there a German word for not letting you get a word in edgeways?â
But itâs not as if I wasnât aware of those traits, even though I can now see that I might have underestimated their extent. So, broadly speaking, the discrepancies between self and othersâ perceptions were small enough to make me think I know myself pretty well.
As you might expect, however, the devil is in the detail. Psychologists have demonstrated again and again that the way we see ourselves is modulated by a smorgasbord of cognitive biases that serve to make us all, to a greater or lesser extent, deluded about who we are. âOur self-perceptions are far from perfectly accurate,â says Vazire.
Illusory superiority
. âWe overestimate ourselves on the traits that are important to us, and traits that are ambiguous too,â says at Cornell University in New York. That can manifest as âillusory superiorityâ, where people overestimate their qualities and rate themselves more favourably than others do. For example, Vazire found that and other peopleâs perceptions. Whether we are deluding ourselves about our smarts, our physical attractiveness or our charisma, we seem to do it to . I fear I may have fallen into this trap when rating myself as 96 in âopen-mindednessâ, while several others rated me in the low 70s. One so-called mate even rated me as low as 43 on âagreeablenessâ.
On the flip side, many of us seem to underestimate our qualities and doubt our abilities compared with those of others â a phenomenon known as imposter syndrome. âWhether you tend toward one or the other depends largely on your self-esteem,â says Vazire. The students in the study mentioned previously with low self-esteem underestimated their intelligence, while the confident ones thought they were smarter than they really were.
In many cases, then, other people see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Or at least you can argue as much so long as you accept that the consensual perspective of third-party observers offers a more objective view of you than your own, even if each of them inevitably has their own biases and blind spots. Human says âother peopleâs perceptions often predict peopleâs behaviour better than self-reportsâ.
There are nuances here, too. When Vazire compared ratings of personality with behaviour in video recordings of lab-based tasks, she found that friendsâ ratings were more accurate than self-ratings for traits such as intelligence and creativity â but that . So maybe it is more accurate to say that those who know us well see things we donât see in ourselves, particularly when it comes to aspects of our personality that we care about and thus find it harder to judge accurately.
Other peopleâs perceptions
Generally, insofar as there is anything approaching objective truth about who you are, it lies in an aggregate of other peopleâs perceptions. In which case, I am not the person I think I am after all. âTo a large extent, you are what most others think of you,â says at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany.
The problem for me is that my perceptions of how other people see me, known as metaperceptions, are broadly aligned with how they actually see me according to how they scored me on the Big Five personality traits â notwithstanding my underestimation of how deeply annoying I can be in full flow. The thought occurs to me that maybe all this would have been juicier had it turned out people really do think Iâm obnoxious. But when I reflect on the overwhelming agreement among them that I am belligerent and loquacious, I can see what Leising means when he says that .
The upshot is that if you want a complete picture of your personality, you ought to seek out some feedback. For Green, author of a book called Know Thyself: The value and limits of self-knowledge, the idea of the âadaptive unconsciousâ adds support to the argument. This is a set of mental processes that affects judgements and decision-making but lie out of reach of the conscious mind. âIf the adaptive unconsciousness is plausible, and there is lots of evidence to suggest it is, then youâre not likely to know about your blind spots and implicit biases through introspection,â says Green.
Itâs not that introspection isnât important. Itâs more that âyou need the relatively objective, third-party perspective tooâ, he says. âI would add that you have to beware, though, because hearing honest, in-the-round scrutiny of your personality can be a bit uncomfortable. Thereâs a reason that direct, honest feedback is rare.â
In my case, the Big Five personality scores werenât even remotely upsetting. But when it came to the choice words a few people proffered for my most overwhelming negatives, well, I can imagine that sort of feedback isnât for everyone.
Which brings us to the other big question: is the pursuit of self-knowledge even worth it? What do we actually gain by peering into our blind spots to get a more accurate, more complete understanding of who we are (see âHow to see yourself more clearlyâ).
Having more accurate self-views is generally considered to be a good thing, says Human. âThis is because knowing our personalities should help us make better life decisionsâ â what careers to pursue, who to form relationships with, and so on. âIt also enables us to have smoother interactions with others and provides a subjective sense of coherence and meaning.â A study she published with colleagues in 2020, for instance, showed that .
Better life decisions
That makes sense. The problem is that most of the evidence that supports such conclusions is correlational. âItâs difficult to know whether self-knowledge promotes well-being or well-being promotes self-knowledge,â says Human.
Vazire tends towards the sceptical. âThe goal of my research was not just to look at how well people know themselves, but also why it matters: whether people with greater self-knowledge have better life outcomes,â she says. âBut the truth is that we donât even know if self-knowledge is good for you or not. The evidence is totally inconclusive. Itâs an open question.â It is possible to imagine a study that compares people with good self-knowledge with a control group and tracks them over decades to see if they have better long-term outcomes in their health and relationships. But no such studies exist, and possibly for good reason. âThe idea that we could intervene on self-knowledge to improve peopleâs lives depends on the idea that self-knowledge is measurable, that itâs good for you and that we can change it. The truth is we barely know the first thing,â says Vazire. Human says something similar: âIt hasnât been empirically demonstrated yet that people can make these changes and that these can, in turn, enhance well-being and positive social outcomes.â
As Vazire points out, it is possible that when it comes to well-being, or happiness, biased beliefs offer better outcomes. Indeed, it has been proposed that there is an that hits the sweet spot between seeing yourself positively but not distorting reality so much that it causes problems in your relationships and career. That said, she does suggest that accurate self-perceptions might make the people around you happier.
Greenâs instinct lands somewhere in the middle. âI do think self-knowledge, in this more expansive sense that includes other peopleâs perceptions, is valuable, though I donât claim to be able to cite rigorous studies to back that up.â Rather it is an intuition largely based on the notion that our self-perceptions greatly influence our relationships and the life-defining decisions we make. âIf we donât know ourselves, we are in danger of wasting our efforts in pursuit of things that we donât genuinely want or care about,â says Green. In that sense, perhaps it is more beneficial to figure out what is truly important to you.
For my part, I would have to admit that tapping into other peopleâs perceptions of my true nature held no epiphanies. The scales havenât fallen from my eyes. I do think it was a worthwhile exercise, however, because I now have a much clearer idea of where my delusions lurk â and I will most definitely be working harder to stop talking over people. âObviously, your reputation is a signal of the impact you are having in the world,â says Vazire. âAnd what youâre subjecting other people to.â
How to see yourself more clearly
Ask your colleagues
Your cognitive biases and blind spots mean that other people see your true personality more accurately than you do, especially when it comes to traits you value (see main story). One way to tap into that is simply to ask them â if you think you can handle honest feedback. You can find so-called self-peer personality tests online.
But you should beware that everyone has their own biases and those closest to you are probably the most biased about you. This is why close family might not be the best judges, says Simine Vazire at the University of Melbourne, Australia. âThe ideal person is someone who knows you well but whose identity is not fused with yours â a long-term colleague who youâve also spent time with outside of work, for example.â
Examine your biases
If one measure of our true personality is how we unconsciously think about and behave towards others, rather than how we consciously believe we do, then one way to get to know the real you is to take an implicit association test â a quick-fire method of exposing your hidden biases. âThis is something you canât know through introspection,â says Mitchell Green, a philosopher at the University of Connecticut.
There is some debate about the reliability of such tests, but given the multiple problems associated with trying to figure all this out by yourself, they are probably more reliable than your own self-judgement. And it is surely useful to be aware of how society has shaped your assumptions about others.
Practise mindfulness
A key barrier to self-knowledge is what is known as motivated reasoning: if we put a premium on being charismatic or intelligent, say, we overestimate such qualities in ourselves because it wards off negative feelings and makes us feel good.
In which case, Erika Carlson at the University of Toronto in Canada has argued, mindfulness â paying attention to your thoughts and feelings in a non-judgemental way â may be a good way to overcome such barriers. The idea is that it can and thereby mitigate the drive to delude ourselves. Carlson has suggested that greater bodily awareness might also make us more aware of our non-verbal behaviour, such as frowning or grimacing.
Âé¶čŽ«Ăœ audio
You can now listen to many articles â look for the headphones icon in our app
