June 12, 2009

know thyself

Wilhelm Hofmann and colleagues in the European Journal of Personality show that a person’s ability to accurately see himself, even when presented with video evidence, is surprisingly limited.

What was going on? Why can’t we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to inform their ratings of their “state” anxiety (their anxiety “in the moment”) even while leaving their scores for their “trait” anxiety unchanged.

(via marginal revolution)

posted by in consciousness, humans, psychology | * | 3 comments 

comments

  1. Dave Vogt on June 12th, 2009 at 9:11 am

    In the biblical sense I know myself better (or at least more often) than anyone else.

  2. Andrew Simone on June 12th, 2009 at 9:17 am

    This doesn’t shock me in the slightest. What does get my goat, however, is that I am not immune to it.

  3. woubie on June 12th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

    Andrew –
    Is your comment in response to the post or to Dave’s comment?

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