
People Don't Know Themselves Very Well - dmurthy
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/03/you-dont-know-yourself-as-well-as-you-think-you-do/554612/?single_page=true
======
jm__87
Something worth adding is that there isn't anything in your brain that is
immutable. We aren't really capable of observing some changes as they happen
so gradually, yet it is quite obvious the changes have occurred. The way you
perceive the world is going to be significantly different today than it was
when you were an adolescent, yet you can't recall exactly what it was like to
be that adolescent since you would have had to create an exact copy of your
brain/body at that point in your life to have access the same context.

I always try to remember this fact when dealing with others. Past experiences
and environmental context (that is to say, internal environment, e.g. blood
sugar levels, hormone levels, neurotransmitter levels, etc) are extremely
important to how you experience life on a day to day basis. It is literally
impossible to fully imagine what someone else's experience is like, so it is
important to listen carefully and be empathetic with others.

~~~
narag
_yet you can 't recall exactly what it was like to be that adolescent since
you would have had to create an exact copy of your brain/body at that point in
your life to have access the same context._

Or I could just simply remember what I felt. I actually do. And to people
talking about writing down your thoughts, the thing that always surprises me
when reading my texts from decades ago, is how similar they were to my current
thoughts. Circumstances are very different, I'm not.

~~~
alexashka
_the thing that always surprises me when reading my texts from decades ago, is
how similar they were to my current thoughts. Circumstances are very
different, I 'm not._

I've had the exact opposite experience. I blush at the posts I see on facebook
from what I've posted 2-3 years back, and that's stuff that I had given a
little thought to, before posting.

If I kept a diary/journal, I'd be perpetually embarrassed of my past trail of
thoughts.

~~~
da_chicken
Hm. I used to be the same, but now I look back and I'm no longer embarrassed.
I'm already so hard on myself about everything, I really don't want yet
another thing to beat myself up about. What's the use in being upset because I
was wrong in the past? I'm wrong about things every day. All I can do is try
to do better.

I think one key was that I have gone back and read something that I wrote
which I no longer remember writing that genuinely impresses me. I've stumbled
upon my own answers on, say, StackOverflow, or found old posts on discussion
boards before for topics I find interesting, or found some old scripts I wrote
long ago that do something I now have need of. When I've had a question that
needed an answer and discovered that _my own answer_ from years ago is the
best one I can find, it feels pretty good. When the argument I've used in the
past is still well-reasoned, that also feels pretty good. When the code I used
in the past was correct and complete and well commented, that really feels
good.

No, not everything I've done before has been good quality, but it's a lot of
fun to stumble on your own things that are good quality. It also makes it
easier to forgive yourself for all the errors that you've made in your life.

~~~
skunkworks
Agree wholeheartedly. I've posted my fair share of cringeworthy things over
the years, but that has improved as my sense of self-identity has stabilized
and my insecurities have faded. What makes me cringe is usually not the
content of the message but the way that I say it -- a tone of superiority,
condescension, anger, self-pity, or attention seeking. Without being too
reductive, my feelings about myself have changed and that's made it easier to
be nicer to myself and by extension to others.

------
wmccullough
I would like to add another viewpoint from my own real world experiences.

Many people know who they really are deep, deep down. I find that most of the
life long struggle is just to be, and express who we know ourselves to be.

I'm sure there are plenty of people that do not genuinely know who they are,
and it's hard to blame them. In my 30s, I feel like our generation as born,
lived, and died with extreme amounts of advertising and promotion in front of
our faces.

The only thing that scares me more than not having an implicit identity is
having an identity that is driven by so much consumption that you believe you
need to buy the Crest Whitestrips, do squats for a bigger butt, or person who
has lots of Starbucks Star Rewards. No disrespect to those goals in their own
right, self-improvement is always a noble cause to me, but I fear of people
just becoming: Guy with the good teeth, girl with the Kardashian butt, or
person who knows every piece of Starbucks lingo.

I genuinely mean it when I say that I hope that folks don't allow their
identity to be supplanted by everything that the glowing box says we should
be. I hope we don't become as unique as the sum of our corporate fingerprints,
but perhaps we should accept that corporate fingerprints are allowed to be
part of us too.

There is no pretending here, I'm not anymore free of this than anyone else,
but I sometimes think this is why the world (and to some extent Americans) say
that if you leave milk and America by themselves, only one of them will
develop a culture. We have the unfortunate chance of being a nation that
developed in a relatively modern era with more advertising being done in the
last two hundred years than in the entire span of human history (note: I have
no proof of this, this is purely conjecture on my part)

P.S. I apologize if this came off as preachy in any way. I love humanity and I
get sad thinking about people living and dying without ever knowing who they
really are. This just ended up becoming a stream-of-conciousness type post
more than anything.

~~~
s_m_t
I'm skeptical of the idea that if we just looked deep enough we'd find our
"genuine" selves. As if we were the representation of some platonic ideal of
ourselves.

Also, assuming such a thing does exist, why assume it would be a good thing to
find it. Reminds me of Rousseau vs Hobbes.

~~~
state_less
I'm skeptical too. Keep searching for your "true self" and you may not find
anything there. Like a hurricane, it has a name, a shape, tendencies, but can
appear and fade away into material substrate. While we might say the hurricane
has a personality, it's affected by the conditions around it (wind,
temperature, etc...). We get angry when our life is threatened and we get
angry when the ego is threatened, but was that upset ego you? Or was it a
reflection of shape of the comments directed at it? Who are you?

~~~
jklinger410
I find you will have better results thinking about what has MADE you the way
that you are, rather than trying to FIND what you are.

Learning about how my childhood has affected my adult psyche has been more
revealing than trying to find some static inner "me." I think your "you" is
nebulous and ever changing. I would go as far as to say relative and
situational, even. But you can learn about your patterns of thought by reverse
engineering them, both in real-time and historically.

If you do this enough you will find a pattern that you can define as yourself.
Then it turns into a game of playing to that pattern's strengths and stress-
testing it for growth.

------
drjesusphd
This is something I struggle with and am profoundly bothered that, in my 30s,
I can't answer simple questions about my own personality. Things like: am I a
morning person or a night person? How close am I to burning out? Introvert or
extrovert? Do I actually enjoy travel?

Maybe 10 years ago, I had solid answers to all of these, but now I don't. Or
at least the answers change month to month. Maybe this is an example of
Socratic wisdom: it's better to admit not knowing than "know" the wrong
answer.

~~~
wccrawford
I am absolutely a morning person. I know this because I absolutely prefer to
get up before the sun rises. And I prefer going to bed earlier than most
people. I have more energy in the morning and like to get important things
done then. My wife is more of an evening person, but has adapted quite well to
my schedule and it's not nearly so clear for her.

My wife is absolutely left-handed. She has trouble doing things with her right
hand. I'm mostly right-handed, but I have no trouble doing things with my left
hand, so it's much less clear for me.

My point is that everyone has some things that are very, very clear, but not
_everything_ is clear. Don't expect to be able to put yourself into pre-made
categories for everything.

And don't be upset when you're more adaptable than other people. Failing to
classify yourself isn't a problem. Being adaptable is an asset.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm a morning person, but I like to go to bed once I've seen a summer sunrise;
does that make me a night person?

Actually I just love peace at any time of day.

~~~
sesqu
I'd say I'm an evening person, but I like waking up before the sunrise.

I suppose that makes me also a night person. I'm constantly either a morning
person or an evening person. Quiet daytime is nice too, sometimes.

~~~
52-6F-62
Maybe you’re both like me— more of an “I don’t want to miss a moment” person

------
taneq
> So if I wanted to know how smart political candidates were, I wouldn’t
> bother with an IQ test. I’d just ask one question: How intelligent do you
> think you are?

This is a terrible measure. It's not "dumb people think they're smart, smart
people think they're dumb, so just flip the answer." It's "everyone thinks
they're roughly 75th percentile."

~~~
watwut
Moreover, there is difference between what people think about themselves and
what they say about themselves. Politicians in particular are bound to say
what is considered "appropriate". If confidence is popular and rewarded, they
will call themselves smart and if humbleness is woke, they will say something
humble.

> The real geniuses will know it’s not their place to judge.

I was taught or picked up this sort of self-depracation thing as a child and I
think it hurt me more then it gave me any sort of advantage.

~~~
andmarios
Personally I strongly disagree with the author here.

A characteristic of intelligent people is that they know their limits, what
they know and what they don't, how quickly or slowly they can learn a new
thing and in general have a pretty good idea about their intelligence and how
they might be positioned across other intelligent people they know well.

You can't get far if you can't perceive your limits and limitations. This is
also where your modesty should come from; the understanding of your
boundaries.

~~~
fredch
Depends which kind of intelligence. If what you wrote were true, there'd be a
lot fewer sanctimonious libertarians with six figure programming jobs.

------
maaark
>And at Morning Star, employees get to write their own job descriptions based
on how they plan to contribute to the company’s mission that year. But they
have to get their closest colleagues to buy in on it, and then their coworkers
rate their performance and determine their salary.

Sounds terrifying. Payscale linked to your coworkers opinions of you.

~~~
TimMurnaghan
And subject to gaming. Morning Star might be a nice cooperative environment -
but when corporates try "360 review" it can get nasty. I've seen investment
banks where people treat their colleagues as competitors for the bonus pool.
If the review forms part of the bonus assessment why would people play nicely?

~~~
sjg007
MBAs basically 5 star everyone in a 360 review. One reason is that you may
work with these people again or they may be your boss sometime in the future
(so yes do good work but why would you screw someone over). It should be noted
that your 360 feedback is not anonymous. And two, it devalues the 360 review
because it is effectively worthless. I've only seen 360s that work in cross
functional teams where each person have independent and specific job
responsibilities where the team is evaluated on performance and not the
individual.

------
psyc
It seems obvious that how I see myself is completely different from how person
A sees me, which in turn is different from how person B in a different context
sees me. But as an individualist, I bristle at the premise that self knowledge
is a matter of other people’s perspectives. I’ve had other people say all
kinds of whacky things about me, such as “I always assumed you were a pretty
religious Christian,” while I think of myself as agnostic atheist.

I consider others view of me very important, for certain limited purposes. I
guess I’m not sure what “more accurate” would even mean here. I wouldn’t
necessarily privilege other’s view of me all that much, especially in the
context of what “self knowledge” means to me.

~~~
iamcasen
Right? That's my takeaway as well. I think people mostly paint others with
their own preconceived notions about the world.

They might be accurate in judging how someone will react in a given situation,
but my coworkers truly don't know more than the tip of the iceberg.

------
colmvp
> One: If you want people to really know you, weekly meetings don’t cut it.
> You need deep dives with them in high-intensity situations.

I'm sure most people experienced situations in a company where things were
rocky and others in the company were experiencing the same situation. I
haven't spoken to certain co-workers in years, yet I know for a fact that if I
e-mailed them today saying I'm coming into town, they'd be excited to meet for
dinner.

> Two: Looking under your own hood at what makes you tick and writing it down
> can provide a useful reference.

That's also where mindfulness can be very helpful in that you build up the
sensitivity to see what's going on within yourself.

> Three: Put yourself in situations where you can’t ignore feedback from
> multiple sources.

If only I had design critiques / code review for my past life decisions.

I think for much stronger beliefs (e.g. "I'm intelligent", "I'm
attractive"...) it takes repeated blows over a course of time to update the
error. It wasn't until I got my ass kicked from learning STEM subjects over a
course of a year and got rejected A TON in online dating until my priors got
updated to a more accurate calibration.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
One of the issues with practical psychology vs STEM is that STEM has a formal
language which allows cumulative intergenerational learning.

You can literally look at the words and math used by people who have been dead
a long time, follow their arguments, and learn from their insights in a semi-
standardised course of study.

Psychology has stories and studies, but there's no formal process of learning
from the mistakes of previous humans.

So people tend to make similar mistakes in every generation - politically,
socially, and personally.

~~~
sjg007
There are theories in psychology and there are experiments. You could read
these papers and perform the experiments can come to the same conclusions (if
they were reasonable to begin with and not biased).

Politics and social structures evolve in strategy but are essentially similar
(you can read old newspaper articles and while the language is no longer
appropriate, you see the same arguments rehashed today with different window
dressing). These are forms of economic control by the wealthy and essentially
appeal to racism and classism. We had slavery, then redlining, and then a war
on drugs. And now we have failed cities. This structure has been maintained
throughout society since America was founded and is passed along generation
lines. You do see a dampening effect between generations unless some conflict
reinforces it (largely economic/resource competition). But a conflict can be
unifying as well. For example WWII had a unifying effect since a GI was a GI.
But if we had diverse neighborhoods, schools and work opportunities we would
rapidly see a more humane world.

------
scandox
I think a great deal of our confusion in life comes from the idea that we have
a strongly fixed identity - that we are this or that "kind of person" \- with
definite characteristics which don't vary much with context.

I think we construct an enormous number of illusions, especially with regard
to what our - usually untested - values are.

I think many of what appear to be our innermost feelings are learned/mimetic
reactions that have become deeply ingrained.

This can be disturbing to some people because it makes them feel unstable -
but it is also very freeing because it means we can really change. Even how we
feel about things.

It also means we can become monsters.

~~~
notabee
I agree. We're a collection of stories that we tell about ourselves, and if
something happens to cause cognitive dissonance with our desired self image we
become distraught and often rationalize our way back into a comfort zone.

------
eksemplar
When I picked up my management education, part of it included psychology. The
approach was focused on management, and things like Helle Hein’s archetype
theory, Deci and Ryan’s motivational theory or stuff like DiSC profiles, all
had the end goal of teaching me how to maximize worker and group performances
in a professional and assertive setting, but I learned a lot about myself
going through it.

I knew I was a perfectionist. I also knew compromising on quality demotivated
me because I want to do things right. I learned that I could stop losing
motivation and keep both the joy and personal ownership despite compromising
by looking at the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter that parts of the software
suck if the end user still see an improved product.

This may be obvious to some, it may even sound self-deluding to others, but I
learned how to better handle one of the most common place occurrences in my
daily life, compromise, by getting to know myself better and finding solutions
to my weaknesses.

I highly recommend it.

------
nailer
I had an odd experience recently: I took around 20 milligrams of sativa, in
edible form, as someone who hasn't really experimented with cannabis before.

The sativa made me feel somewhat egoless - I could re-examine different events
from my life and seperate the stories I tell myself to placate my ego vs what
actually happened. It's a very vulnerable state - your ego is also a necessary
shield - but I felt like I was able to look at myself with more impartial
point of view.

------
11thEarlOfMar
Echoing what others have said, the extent to which we know ourselves depends
in (large?) part to the range of life experiences we've endured. Extremes
might be enjoyment such as roller coaster or paintball wars, grief from losing
a loved one, pride in seeing your child excel at a sport, fear while being
under fire in a war zone, pain in a boxing ring,... If you haven't had extreme
experiences, can you really be certain how you'd react and how intense those
reactions would be? Can you really place your day-to-day experiences in
context of the entire range of possibilities? I've found that, in general,
people with less life experience tend to under-react to some circumstances and
overreact to others, for example.

The other half would be how honest we are with ourselves on reflection of
those experiences. (Did I really enjoy it that much? Was it really as painful
as I felt at the time? Why did that circumstance cause so much embarrassment?
I believe others would not have felt it so poignantly...)

It's a complex endeavor, but certainly worthwhile, especially if you're in or
aspiring to be in, leadership. Leaders who don't know themselves are less
likely to supplement their weaknesses and also less likely to exploit their
strengths.

------
aizatto
For me, knowing myself well is done by asking questions, and journaling about
it.

I built a platform where I ask myself deep questions
[https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/](https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/)

For me, it has helped give me a better holistic view of myself. At the moment
I have over 35,000+ questions, and almost 2700 topics/keywords.

It is mostly me sharing at the moment, though there are some other users.

~~~
untangle
> I built a platform where I ask myself deep questions
> [https://www.deepthoughtapp.com](https://www.deepthoughtapp.com)

Nicely done.

For my reflections of life, I favor "what have you done?" and "what are you
willing to do?" questions over "what do you think/believe?"

~~~
aizatto
Two different kinds of questions :)

I think analyzing your beliefs is also important as well!

I've added yours:

[https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-have-you-
do...](https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-have-you-done/)

[https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-are-you-
wil...](https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/en/questions/what-are-you-willing-to-
do/)

------
tc7
Tangential: I was so pleased to see inline links to the actual studies cited.
<3

I accept that others can evaluate us on some of these traits better than we
can ourselves. Given that, how hard is it to update our mental models to
better match reality? Besides doing a poll of my friends (which seems shaky),
how can I self-evaluate to know more objectively where I stand on these? Is
that even possible (by, e.g., studying biases, rationality, 'taking every
thought captive', etc)?

It seems remarkably hard to try to address this in the workplace, where we
feel so much pressure to be and seem competent anyway. I don't know if I trust
my coworkers enough to honestly evaluate or be evaluated by them :D.

------
tortoise1
when they say co workers, whom do they mean? anyone in my company? some one
whom i work with for 30 mins per week? some one with whom we work for 5 hours
a day? some one whom i chat with through out the day as part of work?

>>They’re often more than twice as accurate.

which co worker is capable of being twice accurate than me in knowing about
me.

So surprising, so magical and so flawed.

How do we destroy such bullshit analysis all over the internet.

Some where some normal person or even a smart person is going to read this and
believe it to be true and is going to base this as source of his research and
going to come up with a whole lot of new bullshit.

This concept of flawed non sense and noisy logic i think deserves its own
word.

Any suggestions? How about SINFO ... any useful, meaningful info we can call
as INFO and anything that is not useful or misleading or nonsense we can call
it SINFO.

Because i think its a type of SIN to provide misleading information.

------
ender89
I'm not surprised, I'm a shifty character. No way I've told myself everything
about myself.

------
Bjartr
I notice one thing missing from the various threads of discussion about self
and what self means here: an acknowledgement that an individual's life is
unlikely to ever meaningfully cover the full scope of human experience. It's
always an attempt to stretch that individual's experiences out so as to
somehow apply with nigh universality across a population.

It's seemed pretty clear to me for a while now that I can barely begin to
imagine what it's really like to be in someone else's head, in terms of
experiencing their perspective on the world. Empathy alone isn't enough to
account for formative life experiences or physiological state.

------
slfnflctd
There are some good suggestions in this piece. Absorbing a diversity of
perspectives is often valuable.

The thing is, most of us view ourselves at least partly as 'who we aspire to
be'\-- we know we aren't actually that person technically right now, but we
believe or hope that we could be. As we mature, I think more often than not we
try to be more realistic about it.

It would be difficult or impossible for many of us to make progress in our
goals if we didn't regularly see ourselves as more than we currently are. It's
important to be honest, but it's just as important to have some optimism.

------
projektir
Well, this is a wonky topic. Before the question is asked, it should really be
clarified what is meant by the "you" part. A lot of the responses here seem to
talk about things like how you respond to situations or a crisis. I think this
mostly suffers from the fact that the current wisdom is to merge what is "you"
and what is "your body". You can control your body to some extent, but it's
like saying you're your Toyota. You're really not. And if something happens to
your body, it may drastically limit what you can express, i.e., you can become
a vegetable due to an accident. But that wasn't of /your/ doing, so it's not
really "you" (under the definition above). It's something that happened _to_
you. Just like most of your body, truth to be told. You don't create your
infant body, or your normal body, so how can it be you? It's not, it never
was.

So most of the time when people talk about their "true self" they're talking
about "my body, without too many tweaks". And I think that's the wrong way to
go about it. You should be tweaking and updating your machinery and
potentially you can get pretty far doing so. But it's still just that -
machinery. It's never going to be you. The "you" is not that interesting, and
the idea that we're all sorts of fundamentally different "you"s is problematic
in itself.

I think it's really the wrong question to ask, who you are. You got a machine
and you can study it if you wish but it's not exactly some stable construction
and it's not "you", regardless, you're just a meta-field it projects some
stuff onto. I think the less mysticism around this are, the better, as the
mysticism makes the machine seem too sacred and immutable, and as if it has
its own right to exist.

"I'm not like that, that's not something I can do" is my least favorite
response ever. You are not your machine. You may decide you don't want to do
it, which is valid. But saying you can't do it because you're some immutable
thing is not valid.

P.S.: I'd really like to know how they measured things like "smart" and what
not in this study and why they're so confident about their measurements...

Seriously, there's no such thing as a reliable and unbiased "smart" test right
now.

------
mlrtime
"Oh would some power the gift give us, To see ourselves as others see us."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Louse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Louse)

------
keepper
I’ve always gone by this little bit of wisdom...

“We see ourselves as who we want to be, others see us as who we are”

------
platz
I'm disturbed that writing actually determines your thoughts more than
thinking does.

------
fredch
The article was fine aside from not being news. But The Atlantic's quality has
plummeted over the last couple months. A lot of lazy, narrative-driven pab.
Someone upstairs must have decided quantity was the thing and screw quality.

