You Don't Know Yourself As Well as You Think You Do

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2 days ago

Know thyself: Many have said this. Socrates—maybe you've heard of him? Though he seems to have gotten the phrase from the oracle at Apollo's temple in Delphi, where it was chiseled into the stone facade. In the Tao-te Ching, Lao-tzu wrote, 'If you understand others you are smart. If you understand yourself you are illuminated.' And Shakespeare had his own pithy aphorism, 'To thine own self be true,' presupposing that thou knowest enough about thine own self to be true to it.
Good advice, to a point. If you know absolutely nothing about yourself or your likes, wants, values, or personality, you either are a baby or have bigger problems than a dead philosopher can address.
Yet sometimes all of modern life seems to be pushing people toward knowing themselves in more and more granular ways. People are going to therapy in rising numbers to seek self-understanding. They are tracking their steps, reading, and sleep. They are giving their data to corporate marketing databases so they can find out their Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram number, or Harry Potter house. On TikTok, as Rebecca Jennings reported for Vox, creators are inventing new micro-identities for people to resonate with: 'Dilly dally-ers' are people who like to fart around and waste time; a 'therapist friend' is someone whose friends talk to them about their problems. The quest to find and define yourself can feel never-ending.
It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you're not seeking self-understanding, you're missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.') 'If you haven't noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,' Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. 'It's so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.'
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But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started. Humans' ability to see themselves clearly and accurately has limitations that neither personality quizzes nor Fitbit data can overcome. 'We should never think that we know ourselves very well,' Simine Vazire, a University of Melbourne psychology professor who has studied self-knowledge, told me. 'Anyone who thinks they do—by definition, they lack self-knowledge, because they're wrong about that, at least.'
Knowing yourself is difficult, in part, because some behaviors and attitudes stem from the unconscious mind, outside your sphere of awareness. 'The mind purrs along under the hood in various ways,' Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist and the author of Strangers to Ourselves, told me. One of many examples he gives in his book is how people interpret ambiguous situations (and why). If I tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, my unconscious patterns will determine whether I think I'm a socially awkward fool whom everyone hates or assume that my audience must not have heard me over the din of the party, because I'm clearly charming and hilarious.
Bias is also a hindrance. For example, many people have a tendency to rate themselves as better than average across all kinds of traits, even though, obviously, we can't all be above average. Biases are part of the problem with a personality quiz, Vazire told me. Far from revealing some hidden truth that was locked within, she said, the test is 'just repeating to you what you tell it.'
Another tricky thing is that most people aren't fully aware of how much capacity they have for change. A study of 19,000 people that Wilson worked on, called 'The End of History Illusion,' found that although people reported having changed a lot in the past decade, on average they believed they were mostly done changing and wouldn't evolve much more in the next 10 years.
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The pursuit of self-knowledge is difficult even when someone goes about it in a thoughtful, deliberate way. Meditating, journaling, or asking yourself the hard questions can be greatly beneficial. But active, conscious introspection has a dark side: rumination, or getting fixated on a problem and going over it again and again, which can make things worse and trap people in a negative thought spiral.
People can also undermine themselves by thinking too much about the good things in their lives. In a small study Wilson conducted, when the researchers asked people to reflect on how their romantic relationship was going, the very act of reflecting seemed to change the subjects' minds. Some got happier with their relationship; some got less happy. But according to Wilson, these changes in perspective didn't necessarily reflect people's true feelings. Love is not fully explainable, after all, and Wilson theorized that the subjects put too much stock in whatever answers they came up with for the study. If they struggled to list a lot of good reasons they loved their significant other, they might conclude that they were less in love than they'd thought. People sometimes 'construct a new story about their feelings based on the reasons that happen to come to mind,' Wilson wrote.
Introspection, as he described it in his book, should be understood less as an archaeological dig to uncover the capital-T Truth of ourselves and more as literary criticism 'in which we are the text to be understood.' Just as a good novel doesn't have one single truth in it, a person has many truths as well. Rather than seeking a perfectly accurate story about themselves (which is impossible), people should try to construct a narrative that's 'pretty positive' and 'somewhat reality-based,' according to Wilson. This is one way to think about therapy—as a collaborative process of rewriting your story until it works well enough to let you stop thinking about it quite so much.
The notion that each person has one real, abiding self buried within, waiting to be discovered, is both widespread and difficult for many people to shake, Schlegel told me: When people go through a big change, for instance, particularly a good one, they tend to think of it less as a transformation from one thing to another and more as a discovery of something in themselves that was always there.
Schlegel has found that belief in the true self is linked to seeing greater meaning in your life, but she described herself as a 'true-self agnostic.' (She referenced the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who called the true self a 'troublesome myth.') For all the idea's benefits, 'the downside,' she said, is 'what happens if we close ourselves off to change. And then we miss out on something we might have loved.'
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Most of my life, I thought I was a dog person who hated running. Yet just a couple of weekends ago I ran a 5K then came home to my two perfect cats, Cherry and Ginkgo, whom I am utterly devoted to. If you had beamed a premonition of that Saturday into the mind of my younger self, she would have been confused, perhaps even alarmed. My preference for dogs and my disdain for running were two things I thought I would never change my mind about. But that might have been just a failure of imagination. As Wilson and his co-authors wrote in their 'End of History Illusion' study, 'People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself.'
Why did I change my mind? On the running, I really have no idea. I just got on the treadmill one day for some reason and found it to not be so bad. My husband wanted the cats, and I fell in love the day we brought them home as tiny kittens.
Was I always a cat person, secretly? Did I have an inner runner within me, just waiting to be discovered? Did I actually change or did I just become more myself? I don't know, and I don't really care. Both explanations seem plausible, and I ended up in the same place either way: watching Survivor on the treadmill every now and then and being woken up every morning at 6 a.m. by a scratchy little tongue licking my face.
Vazire, like me, runs 'very casually once in a while.' She told me that her well-meaning partner sometimes shares things he's learned about how to improve your form or otherwise optimize your running, and she gets annoyed. 'I'm not trying to optimize anything,' she said. 'I'm not trying to become a runner.' I wouldn't consider myself a runner, either. I just run sometimes. Not every habit or preference has to become an identity. Sometimes we just do things. As Schlegel put it, 'Not everything has to be so weighty.'
Instead of conceiving of our true self as set in stone, the secret to a healthy pursuit of self-knowledge may lie in building a flexible sense of self, one that allows for surprise and even mystery. Research has linked the belief that the self is changeable to positive outcomes: lower stress, better physical health, and less negative reactions to hardships. Maybe we should stop searching for ourselves quite so intensely, put down the Sorting Hat and the label maker, and just, I don't know, live life and try things without overly worrying about what they say about who we really are.
To be found, to be known: These are unreachable destinations. Not only is our ability to know ourselves limited, but scientists can probably only know so much about the nature of self-knowledge. Vazire is highly skeptical that research can solve that puzzle. 'I don't think the expertise we need here is quantitative empirical data,' she said. 'It's just wisdom, or something like that.' Parts of the self will probably always remain a little lost, resistant to easy categorization—and maybe that's fine.
I am a cat person now, though.
Article originally published at The Atlantic