How to Know Yourself Like Socrates

The Atlantic

17-04-2025

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Know thyself is the most famous maxim of Greek philosophy, carved into stone on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Why? you might ask. The greatest philosophers and writers throughout history are more likely to tell you why not, so foundational is the idea of self-knowledge to a meaningful existence. In his tragedy Thyestes, the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes, 'Death lies heavily on him / Who, though to all the world well known, / Is stranger to himself alone.' And as Shakespeare asserts in his comedy As You Like It, 'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man / knows himself to be a fool.'
Seneca and Shakespeare were artistic geniuses with extraordinary insight, but in an empirical sense, modern behavioral scientists can make an even stronger case for the value of self-knowledge. I'll get into the details of that in a moment, but what their work shows is that knowing thyself can protect people from the damaging errors and biases that lead them into self-serving delusion.
To acquire such knowledge may be one of the toughest challenges any of us faces in life, and self-knowing is one of the most difficult skills to master. But if you can make honesty and self-awareness your superpower, you will become happier, more empathetic, and more successful in all you do.
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What exactly does it mean to know yourself? For neuroscientists, the answer is straightforward enough: Self-knowledge is the combination of two forms of information, direct appraisals (your own self-beliefs) and reflected appraisals (your perception of how others view you). The first generally employs the parts of the brain associated with a first-person perspective, such as the posterior cingulate; the second with regions associated with emotion and memory, such as the insula, orbitofrontal, and temporal cortex.
This technical definition of self-knowledge concerns only the mechanisms involved and does not say anything about the quality of the information: In effect, if you think you're a rooster and believe others see you as one too, that counts as self-knowledge. I strongly suspect that the thinkers at Delphi had a bit more in mind than this; they no doubt meant 'Know thyself accurately.' That is a much taller order, requiring a huge quantity of truthful information about your interior states —attitudes, beliefs, emotions, traits, motives—over time, in all three of its phases: present, past, and future. Accurate self-knowledge also means avoiding mistakes and correcting illusions, being completely honest with yourself, possessing a reliable memory, and predicting how you will feel and react in the future.
By this impossibly exacting standard, you don't know yourself perfectly, and I don't know myself either. As a matter of fact, we probably all overestimate our capacity for accurate self-knowledge. Many studies have shown how flawed people's self-assessments are. Psychological experiments have revealed that ratings of one's own skill and performance are 'moderate to meager' in accuracy and are generally less sound than external evaluations. Similarly, scholars have demonstrated that we can't even predict our future behavior better than others can predict it for us. Cock-a-doodle-do, you're not who you think you are.
One reason we know ourselves so poorly is that we're prone to major cognitive errors about what we see happening in our lives. Researchers have found that humans are vulnerable to gross omissions, to the extent that we miss seeing our problems, mistakes, and opportunities. We exist, you might say, in a fog of meta-ignorance: Not only do we not know ourselves; we don't know we don't know ourselves.
Many things in our lives go unnoticed because we lack language for them and don't understand them. This is called hypocognition—meaning a deficit of cognition (as opposed to hyper cognition). In studies exploring this phenomenon, British participants were more likely to notice cheese than Asian dumplings in their daily lives, while Chinese participants noticed the reverse. A less trivial instance than foodstuffs might involve the way some trauma affects your daily life and who you are, but you are unable to recognize its impact because you have no knowledge about the effects of trauma. (That said, having this knowledge can lead to pitfalls, because learning about trauma can cause a person to incorrectly identify its cause and origin.)
Much of our self-knowledge deficit comes from the willful ignorance—dishonesty, really—that we indulge to protect our self-esteem. For more than a century, psychologists have observed the human tendency to use motivated reasoning to reassure ourselves that our opinions are right, to rationalize bad choices, to ignore information that reflects critically on us, and generally to maintain positive illusions and find ways to avoid facing reality-based negative emotions. So integral to our being are these traits that collectively they have been called our 'psychological immune system.' This characteristic rationalizing is almost certainly based in our biology; neuroscientists have shown that people presented with critical evaluations of themselves display signs of stimulus in the brain's limbic regions associated with threat perception.
This human capacity to maintain ignorance in the face of potentially negative self-knowledge might make you more comfortable in the short term. But as is true of so much human craving for comfort, it leads to many missed opportunities for greater well-being and success in the long run. Research has shown that more honest self-awareness—of both positive and negative information—improves self-development because you know what to improve. This enables better personal decision making rooted in accurate information, especially when striving toward goals. And experiments in the workplace have demonstrated that good self-awareness enhances job contentment, enthusiasm, and communication.
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To know thyself sounds simple and sensible, but like many other sound injunctions—eat healthy food; treat others with respect—the excellent advice is hard to put into practice because it requires effort. The comfort factor, meanwhile, encourages you to ignore the advice most of the time. So just as dietary protocols may help you overcome a bad snacking habit, a similar set of rules can guide you away from comfort-seeking and toward better cognitive health.
1. Stop protecting yourself.
Training yourself to accept the regular, systematic physical discomfort of a tough workout in the gym builds strength and endurance. Over time, you will feel much fitter—and far more comfortable in your skin than if you'd never left the couch. You can apply the same principle to the work of self-knowledge: Regular bracing, difficult self-assessment will feel uncomfortable at first but will make you stronger as a person in the end. Ask your friends and family for honest criticism regularly, and insist that they don't hold back. You can call this your emotional workout routine.
You may be wondering how all of this squares with the conventional wisdom that people's self-esteem needs careful nurturing and protecting, especially in the case of kids, if they are to thrive and succeed. In fact, the self-esteem movement in education and psychology has not stood up to academic scrutiny; research by the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his co-authors showed that people high in self-esteem claimed to be more likable and attractive than those low in self-esteem, but found that the judgment of external observers refuted their claim.
2. Embrace a change narrative.
If you have a fixed mindset about your strengths and abilities, negative information will surely trip your psychological immune system; then it will unwittingly deploy whatever tricks it can to disregard the data. However, as a 2008 paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin demonstrated, when people see the potential for growth in their strengths, they are more likely to accept negative feedback and use it to stimulate effort. I see this phenomenon all the time in my best students: Those who have a mindset oriented to aggressive improvement are actually impatient with empty compliments; they prefer criticism, and see it as a secret weapon they need to improve even more.
3. Decide what to change and get started.
It's not enough to believe that positive change is possible; you also need a plan to make it happen, which accurate self-knowledge can facilitate. Some self-improvement goals are straightforward, such as becoming more skilled at your job or a better listener to your partner. But a more fundamental change to who you are as a person is also possible. Research over the past 15 years has shown that personality is more malleable than was once thought, and will naturally evolve over a lifetime, mostly in positive ways. But you can speed up the changes you want by remodeling your behavior to match that of the person you'd like to be. This is called the 'as if' principle, which I have written about previously. In a nutshell, practice acting like a better person and you will actually start to become that person.
One last point about self-knowledge: I've discussed practical ways to achieve greater self-awareness, and the utility value of doing so in your life. But realistic, even negative, self-knowledge can be extremely liberating, even when it does not lead to growth and change. Let me give this example: As a child classical musician, I never allowed myself to consider the possibility that I would not be in the very top tier of French-horn players worldwide. That belief that I simply had to be the best drove me to obsessive behavior and deep unhappiness. When, in my late 20s, I finally accepted the reality that I was a good musician but would never be a truly great one, that left me free to do other interesting and fulfilling things with my life. Knowing what I was not ultimately helped me be who I could be.
This brings us back to Delphi and the high priestess Pythia, who was known for her power of prophecy as the Oracle. One day, a man named Chaerephon asked the Oracle if anyone was wiser than the philosopher Socrates. Pythia replied that none was wiser. This oracular statement got back to Socrates, who, instead of basking in the praise, decided to use it to reflect on what would be better self-knowledge: that he was deeply ignorant.
Pythia's prophecy could prove true only if Socrates embraced the 'negative' self-knowledge that led him to formulate the paradox, as his pupil Plato reported, that compared with the man who believes he's wise, 'I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.' The moral integrity Socrates derived from this insight, with its unflinching method of self-examination, gave rise to the famous Socratic method—of seeking knowledge by asking questions, while never assuming an oracular authority for oneself—that is still used by teachers today. If we seek to follow the Delphic instruction to know thyself, then Socrates showed us the way.