This ties into another theme in these excellent comments — the contextual nature of self- and other-knowledge. As Doris points out, the question is not whether self- or other-knowledge is better, but when people have or lack self- or other-knowledge. The SOKA model focuses on trait properties that answer the “when” question (i.e., moderators), but surely there are other types of moderators – who the “self” is (e.g., does the “self” have a personality disorder?), who the “other” is (e.g., does the “other” see the self in only one context, or many different contexts?), and of course the usual suspects: gender, age, and culture. I’m very interested in learning how these variables influence self- and other-knowledge.

Another good question was raised by Solomon raised – is it better to believe we know ourselves, or should we be skeptical about our own self-knowledge? As Haybron points out, if we don’t adopt a skeptical attitude about our own self-knowledge, we won’t apply the basic truths about human nature to ourselves, and thus we’ll know less about ourselves than any intelligent being (or government) will know about us, because they will recognize that these tendencies apply to us.

This also ties into the question Alexandrova asked about whether most people acquire self-knowledge as they grow up. I think this depends on how much humility people have about their self-knowledge. Those who are absolutely convinced they have nothing to learn about themselves likely will be immune to feedback, even when it bites them in the behind. And, as Tiberius pointed it, feedback is often likely to bite quite hard, and as a result many people likely have strong defenses against self-insight. I completely agree with Tiberius that the process of acquiring self-knowledge is likely to be painful, but I suspect the pain eventually gives way to a deeper and more sustainable happiness than was possible without self-knowledge. But that’s an empirical question!

Which leads me to the next thread that runs through these comments – almost all of them hit on a topic we are currently exploring in our lab:

1. Young asks whether self-knowledge for internal phenomena (thoughts, beliefs) may suffer when dealing with transient states rather than traits. We want to know that, too, and are examining how aware the self and others are of fluctuations in a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. We’ll keep you posted!

2. Solomon asks whether people really know their own preferences better than others. What she didn’t mention is that her own research is investigating this question! Together, we’re planning a study looking at people looking for and entering relationships, which will shed light on how good people are at making these types of decisions. Solomon makes an important point that people’s lack of insight into their personality may impair their ability to know their preferences, to the extent that our preferences are constrained by our personalities (I may want to like public speaking, but if I’m uncontrollably anxious, it’s not really in my powers to have that preference).

3. Schwitzgebel and Haybron point out several ways in which self-knowledge is social in nature. Here they anticipate a paper I’ve been working on and hope to submit soon, tentatively titled “The Social Nature of Self-Knowledge.” As Schwitzgebel points out, knowing our personalities requires knowing what other people are like, because personality traits are inherently comparative (“I am very agreeable” implies that I am more agreeable than most people, thus it requires knowing the distribution of agreeableness in the population). As Haybron points out, the development and maintenance of self-knowledge also depends on others in important ways. I would add a few more ways in which self-knowledge is social. For example, one of the important benefits of self-knowledge, I claim, is that it makes life easier for those who have to interact with you every day. Self-knowledge: Do it for the ones you love.

4. Schwitzgebel also asks whether people know their own moral characteristics. This is the question we’re asking in one of our upcoming studies. I’m with Schwitzgebel; I suspect people have little to no insight into their moral characteristics. Furthermore, I think this might be an area where self-knowledge would be detrimental. As the ancient Chinese thinker Zhuangzi said “Be virtuous, but without being consciously so, and wherever you go, you will be loved.”

5. Doris points out that if people sometimes have self-knowledge, but do not know when they do and when they don’t, then the skeptic wins because people are then forced to adopt a skeptical attitude towards their self-views all the time. I agree that this is a problem. One potential answer comes from Erika Carlson’s work, showing that our confidence in our judgments about ourselves (loosely) tracks our accuracy about ourselves. Thus, it’s possible that we can use our gut feelings about whether to trust our self-perceptions, and be skeptical only when we have doubt about our self-views (which, I admit, is most of the time).

Recently, the assumption of first personal authority has come under sustained attack. (And also not so recently, since we can find the attack in Freud and others.) On the basis of pretty compelling empirical evidence, Dan Haybron doubts that people know what’s good for them, and Eric Schwitzgebel doubts that people have reliable first personal access to phenomenal states like sensations and perceptions. I’ve indulged in a bit of this skepticism myself: in a previous segment of On the Human, I’ve wondered whether people really know their own motives (why am I writing this, anyway?).

Vazire takes up another aspect of self-knowledge, knowledge of personality, or knowledge of what one is like. Here, it’s tempting to think the assumption of first personal authority is on a pretty firm foot. Who should know better than me if I’m shy? After all, even if I’m carrying on like the life of the party, I may feel shy inside, and that seems to come pretty close to settling the question of whether I’m shy, even if I’ve got my fellow revelers fooled. (Turns out, it’s not so easy to trace the tracks of my tears.)

In a series of suggestive and methodologically innovative studies, Vazire and her colleagues have shown, convincingly, that the picture is more mixed. Sometimes people’s awareness of what they’re like seems pretty accurate (when compared both to peer ratings and “objective” test measures), and other times not so much. This sounds about right to me. If cases of accurate self-awareness are easy to come by, so are cases of inaccuracy: he wouldn’t keep telling those jokes, would he, if he knew how funny he wasn’t.

Then Vazire’s approach is broadly contextualist (in the spirit of peace, I won’t call it situationist): in some conditions we’re pretty good at knowing ourselves, and in some instances we’re not. As a personality psychologist, for Vazire the conditions in question concern the target attribute: people may be accurate for internal attributes like anxiety, and inaccurate for external attributes like funny. Moreover, they might be inaccurate for evaluatively laden attributes like honest, and accurate for evaluatively neutral attributes like absent-minded. Vazire’s elegant SOKA model is an attempt to schematize these observations in an empirically substantiated way.

Does this leave the glass half-empty, or half full? That is, should skeptics like Schwitzgabel, Haybron, and Doris claim victory, or do optimists like Vazire carry the day? I’m going to be stubborn, and lodge two complaints on behalf of the skeptic.

First, if people tend to have blind spots in the region of evaluate attributes, we may be talking about rather a large region of darkness. I’m betting there are masses of evaluative attributes, many of which are among the most interesting to both psychologists and philosophers (to say nothing of our selves and our intimates). For instance, when I was trying to think of a neutral attribute a few lines back, I struggled, and I’m not even sure absent-minded fits the bill. (I doubt it does for the people I miss appointments with, and the compulsive among you may have balked when I first suggested it.) So even on Vazire’s optimistic model, there may be ample area for skeptical glee.

Second, if the skeptic is to hang his shaggy head, we need to know quite a lot more about when we’re good and when we’re bad. For the skeptic might respond to Vazire as follows: “Let’s grant that self awareness is sometimes accurate. But unless we can state with some precision which those cases are, the reasonable thing to do is with hold attributes of self-awareness, and this is enough to undermine the assumption of first personal authority.” Of course, this is just the challenge Vazire’s SOKA model is designed to meet. It’s too early to say, I think, but if Vazire can further articulate the bright spots and blind spots of self-awareness, we might be justified in holding a bounded assumption of first personal authority. And that would be a victory for the optimist.

The SOKA model offers a very helpful framework for thinking about the nuances of self-knowledge, but I follow other commentators in wondering exactly what shape the asymmetry takes, in particular whether certain types of internal traits (and states) can often be better-known by external observers. One question is who the observers are. Perhaps long-married spouses tend to assess their partners’ happiness more accurately than the partners themselves. Or maybe only when the spouse is particularly discerning, and/or the partner especially unreflective. (Another variable is culture: some cultures may breed better introspectors, or keener observers.) And maybe this only applies to certain aspects of happiness: diffuse moods like anxiety, tension, stress, mild depression may be hard to introspect, and people often assess those states not by introspection but by observing their own behavior and physical symptoms (Am I sleeping a lot, losing my temper easily, popping lots of Tums…). Insofar as people are right to assess their own internal states via external signs, the SOKA model itself seems to suggest that others may sometimes be better-placed to judge those states. Which may be why, when I really want to know how I’m doing, I ask my wife.

Wherever we place the asymmetries, the finding that outsiders sometimes know our personalities better than we do ramifies broadly. For instance, it is possible that even governments, armed with this sort of research, will sometimes be more reliable judges of our personalities than we are. This can seem crazy, since they usually don’t even *know* us. But suppose observers can more accurately rate signs of, say, self-absorption or narcissism. You might then get a population of highly self-absorbed individuals who greatly overrate their social orientations and virtues. Researchers or government agencies might thus know that the average person is highly self-absorbed (or high in relevant behaviors, at least), even as the average person mistakenly thinks they exhibit those behaviors only a little. “This is a society of narcissists. Not me, of course.”

For my money, though, the most interesting upshot of this research is what it suggests about the social bases of personality and self-regulation. On the face of it, you might expect a highly individualistic society, where people spend inordinate amounts of time with themselves, having mostly superficial interactions with others, would foster self-knowledge. Hardly knowing anyone *but* ourselves, we’d *really* know ourselves. Yet the opposite might be true, for at least two reasons.

First, Vazire’s work suggests that self-knowledge may substantially come from other people, insofar as those individuals can judge facets of our personalities better than we can. I may only know how much I interrupt people, for instance, by hearing about it from others. Individualistic societies, if they weaken social bonds and hence important channels for such feedback, can thus hinder important forms of self-knowledge. (For our compatriots, this is the most salient kind of self-knowledge; I don’t much care if you’re in touch with your feelings, but I’d really prefer you knew what you’re doing to me.)

Second, much of our self-knowledge may only emerge in *dialogue* with others, where (among other things) epistemic demands tend to be higher than they are in our inner monologues. (Here my remarks bear the influence of John Doris.) The more we converse with close friends and trusted neighbors, the more disciplined and coherent our thinking may become. We can more easily weed out contradictory or crazy ideas, and develop a better sense of who we are and what we really value. Alone, we may devolve into the sorts of deeply incoherent, self-ignorant beings that seem increasingly to populate the United States today. Offhand, my sense is that the great majority of Americans have, at bottom, quite reasonable values, but that their express opinions about many issues are increasingly divorced from those values—perhaps because they engage so little in serious discussion with friends and neighbors about them. This seems to me at least partly to involve a deficit in self-knowledge—such people no longer really know what they stand for or what they really value.

In short, self-knowledge may be substantially a social phenomenon, requiring sustained and deep engagement with other people. Individualistic societies may thus tend to undercut self-knowledge by depriving people of its social bases. This can degrade the quality of our views and votes, as in the last paragraph. Or, worse, it can degrade our conduct toward each other, as in the paragraph before: self-regulation is critical for civility and decent behavior generally, but it is impossible to self-regulate effectively if you don’t know what you’re doing. Much of the purported decline in civility over recent decades, if genuine, may result from the fraying of traditional feedback mechanisms that inform us about how we’re doing. (And given positivity biases, self-ignorance of this sort is likely to skew toward overstating our virtues. We’re jerks who talk too loudly into our cellphones, cut off other drivers, etc., but think we’re quite considerate, unlike all the other jerks.)

All of which is to say, this is a really interesting and important line of research. Thanks so much for sharing it.

Consider anxiety and optimism, which you describe as traits where self-knowledge is superior to other-knowledge. First: Impressionistically, it seems to me that we are not especially better than others in judging our characterological anxiety and optimism. Partly, this might be because, considered as traits, anxiety and optimism are comparative: Am I more anxious than others, more optimistic than others? We might not be especially good at these comparisons. For example, from the inside, perhaps, most people feel that they are unusually anxious about speaking in public; others can judge more objectively.

Second: You present empirical evidence suggesting that objective measures did tend to line up with people’s judgments about their anxiety and optimism (e.g., Vazire, 2010). But here I worry about reactivity between the measures. In your 2010 study, people first self-described their levels of various character traits. Then afterwards they present a speech and engage in social interactions and also take intelligence and creativity tests. One possibility is that people’s behavior in that speech and in that social interaction is partly affected, in a self-fulfilling way, by the previous self-description. For example, the person who previously self-described as especially anxious might be less prone to hide her anxiety during the speech than the person who previously self-described as not anxious — in part just to ensure that her behavior coheres with her previous self-description. Similarly for extraversion and optimism. The outward signs of these are partly under the subject’s control (perhaps even in sampled audio). The outward signs of creativity and intelligence might be somewhat less under the subject’s control — or (alternatively) perhaps all subjects are motivated to appear creative and intelligent to the experimenter regardless of previous self-description, resulting in a smaller fulfill-my-self-description effect.

Unfortunately, reactivity runs the other way too: If you measure the objective behavior first and then collect the self-description, the self-description may be especially informed by knowledge of the measured objective behavior. So these remarks aren’t intended to suggest that there’s any obviously better research design, but just that testing your hypotheses is hard — and that overall we might expect reactivity in a self-attribution-confirming direction and thus poorer self-knowledge than you report. This should be so especially to the extent the objective behaviors are (a.) under the subject’s control, (b.) variable in the degree to which subjects are motivated to display them, and (c.) obviously relevant to the self-report.

A brief thought on a related topic: How much knowledge would you predict people have of their overall moral character? My guess would be that there would be approximately zero correlation between how morally well someone tends to behave and their opinion about how morally well they tend to behave. Of course, both dimensions are very difficult to measure — or even, perhaps, to conceptualize in a scalar fashion.

It is also exciting to learn about a theoretical model she is developing to synthesize and explain the various findings. The SOKA model appears to rely primarily on two distinctions: internal vs external, and evaluative vs neutral traits. Of course, these distinctions do not need to be sharp. Many traits involve both internal and external, and evaluative and neutral elements. Kindness, modesty, sincerity, are all examples of traits that are complex mixtures of all four. But that’s not a problem. The model will still apply to traits that have more or less of one element than another, which is very plausible in most cases. But I can also imagine cases of complex interaction between the four elements. Have you come across traits that are both primarily internal and primarily evaluative? I imagine intelligence can be an example. In this case, does the SOKA model predict that the evaluative asymmetry effect will overwhelm the internal asymmetry effect? In general, does the SOKA model postulate any dominance of one of these axes over another? Is it the case that the less neutral a trait is, the harder it is to sustain personal authority despite the wealth of internally available information?

Valerie Tiberius’s example of insecurity is also very pertinent here too. One could be seriously insecure and yet fail to pick up on it and moreover fail to manifest it in overt behavior (if, say, one has good manners). And yet the SOKA model appears to predict better knowledge by the person himself. Do you regard this as a problem?

Finally, regarding the possibility of learning about oneself. Reading the teaching evaluations my students wrote on me a few years ago, I learned that I wasn’t particularly charitable and encouraging, though I sincerely believed I was. A few honest comments by friends confirmed that. Looking back I now remember incidents in my early youth that should have had the same effect, but didn’t. Though the journey has been tough for me, I do believe I’ve made some progress in self-knowledge. Do you not believe that this is a fairly typical experience? It seems like such an integral part of growing up. Don’t we get better at it as we grow older?

Many thanks, aa

While Dr. Vazire points out that people typically know better than others what their preferences are, this is an area that may also warrant further study. Presumably, people make important life choices based on their self-insight. For instance, someone who sees himself as being especially extroverted might choose a career in which he can interact with a variety of people on a regular basis. Someone who sees herself as very spontaneous might choose a romantic partner who shares similar tendencies. The reality, however, is that many people actually are unhappy in their work environments and in their relationships (as changing jobs and breaking up with romantic partners are common occurrences). This begs the question: Do people know what they want or do they just assume that they do? Relating this back to self-knowledge of personality, if people mistakenly believe that they know themselves better than research suggests, and moreover, if people make important life decisions based on their personalities, logical reasoning suggests that we should also explore the extent to which people hold accurate beliefs about their preferences. My guess is that we should be similarly skeptical about the degree of accuracy we hold for the types of work and relationships that make us happy as Dr. Vazire has pointed out we should have about the extent of our self-knowledge of personality. Whether close others have greater knowledge than we do about our perfect job or romantic partner is an interesting question for exploration, as such decisions are motivated by a vast range of considerations.

Yet I wonder whether there are some things on the inside that you, the observer, process better – or in a more automatic and obligatory fashion – than I, the agent. These things may include thoughts, versus feelings; or (transient) beliefs and intentions, versus (relatively stable) personality traits – reflecting a distinction within the internal self. On the one hand, I know what’s on my mind and heart. On the other hand, while I can access this information if prompted, I might not normally do so spontaneously – the way I attempt to guess at other people’s mental states when predicting, interpreting, or judging their behavior, e.g., why did she do that? what was she thinking? In other words, I may always know what I am thinking, but I may not always be thinking about what I am thinking – since I do not need this information to predict, interpret, or judge my own behavior.

There are hints of this alternative asymmetry in the literature, that mental states like beliefs and intentions matter less when I think about myself versus others. First, research suggests that our own feelings of guilt are independent of our intent: we feel just as guilty for accidents we cause as we do for harms we cause intentionally (reviewed in Baumeister et al., 1994). Second, research shows that in action explanations or predictions, the actors themselves use fewer mental state markers than observers (Malle et al., 2000). As the example goes: If I cancel the party because I think it will rain, I consider the rain, not my belief that it will rain. I would therefore say: I cancelled the party because of the rain – not I cancelled the party because I thought it would rain. These linguistic clues may indicate that when I am choosing whether to act, for example, I consider the contents of my reasons or beliefs rather than my beliefs qua beliefs. By contrast, when processing the external actions of others, I try my best to guess at what’s going on inside, challenging as it may be. In the spirit of SOKA, I would love to see whether different internal states are indeed processed differently by the self versus other – and with what consequences.

The question is about certain aspects of personality that are internal, but that seem particularly resistant to introspection and self-knowledge, for example, insecurity. It’s not uncommon to witness someone who is obnoxiously condescending to others and apparently quite arrogant and to think that the reason for the apparent arrogance is deep insecurity. Does the person actually acknowledge feelings of insecurity and hide them? Maybe in some cases, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like this is what’s happening. It often seems that the self-deception runs too deep. I wonder what’s going on in these kinds of cases. Is it that the behavioral output of insecurity is more obvious than the internal feelings? Is it the “costliness” of knowing this about oneself? Would you predict that people will be worse at knowing something about themselves the more acknowledging that thing conflicts with their public image?

My comment is about your last question about the value of self-knowledge. I think it’s worth distinguishing two questions: One is whether it is good to have an accurate picture of yourself. The other is whether it is good to seek self-knowledge, that is, whether it is good for a person to do what it takes to acquire self-knowledge. Given that we can’t take a pill to gain an accurate picture of ourselves, in order to improve our accuracy we’re going to have to *do* something (whether it’s therapy or introspection or heart-to-hearts with trusted friends). Since these efforts themselves have costs, and since the result can’t always be predicted, it’s worth thinking about the value of the process independently of the value of the outcome.

– VT