快猫短视频

Can you ever truly know yourself?

is one of the most celebrated characters in literature. The hero of Miguel de Cervantes鈥檚 novel, first published in 1605, decides to act out his knightly aspirations, performing acts of great chivalry and righting wrongs. So he thinks, anyway. Sadly, the gulf between his self-perception and how the world views him is vast 鈥� so much so that the word 鈥渜uixotic鈥� has come to describe delusional behaviour.

But here is a troubling thought. What if we are all more quixotic than we allow for? We might think that with our privileged access to our every thought and motivation, we are the best judge of our own character, but what if we aren鈥檛?

In recent decades, psychologists have revealed that we are beholden to all sorts of biases and mental blind spots that put a positive spin on our characters. In one study from the 1960s of drivers hospitalised by car accidents, for instance, all judged their driving ability to be better than average.

This 鈥渋llusory superiority鈥� bias has been demonstrated many times since. Indeed, it turns out that the worse we are at a particular task, 鈥� something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. And we are crashingly unaware of all of this: while we recognise the impact of bias in other people鈥檚 judgements, we miss it in our own.

It isn鈥檛 all bad news though. In a , Simine Vazire at the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked participants to rate themselves on various skills and traits. They were also rated by friends and strangers before undergoing a battery of behavioural tests. She found that we tend to be the best judge of our own emotional state, but when it comes to characteristics such as intelligence and creativity, others who aren鈥檛 strangers tend to rate us more accurately.

鈥淲e have different blind spots for ourselves than we have for close others,鈥� she says. 鈥淲e are not very good at rating how attractive or intelligent we are, whereas we are pretty good at judging that in others we know well.鈥�

The outsider perspective

Knowing too much about ourselves might, perversely, cloud our judgement of how others see us. One reason is that we base our self-opinions on memories. , for instance, that when asked how a stranger would judge our skill at something like playing darts, we invoke our knowledge of past performance 鈥� something that the other person has no access to.

鈥淪elf-knowledge is often regarded as an unquestioned good鈥� but is it?鈥�

Yet, a positive self-view might be a more accurate one. Research led by at McGill University, Canada, demonstrates that people with higher self-esteem and life satisfaction when judging what they are truly like 鈥� in part because they behave in ways that accurately reflect their true personality, she says.

All this raises a thorny question. If, in general, we are putting too positive a spin on our character and abilities, do we necessarily want to burst that bubble? That鈥檚 tricky, says Human. Although self-knowledge is regarded as an unquestioned good in many philosophical traditions, and the idea of 鈥渉onest feedback鈥� is embedded in many management manuals, the scientific take is more equivocal. 鈥淭here is evidence that there are benefits to both holding overly positive self-views and to having self-knowledge,鈥� says Human.

Accurate self-views are , she says 鈥� meaning that others like us more if we have greater self-knowledge. Positive self-views, meanwhile, are 鈥� meaning that they make us feel good and protect our self-esteem. 鈥淪o it might depend on what is more important to a person,鈥� says Human.