Self-Insight

Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself

David Dunning

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135432751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

People base thousands of choices across a lifetime on the views they hold of their skill and moral character, yet a growing body of research in psychology shows that such self-views are often misguided or misinformed. Anyone who has dealt with others in the classroom, in the workplace, in the medical office, or on the therapist's couch has probably experienced people whose opinions of themselves depart from the objectively possible.

This book outlines some of the common errors that people make when they evaluate themselves. It also describes the many psychological barriers - some that people build by their own hand - that prevent individuals from achieving self-insight about their ability and character.

The first section of the book focuses on mistaken views of competence, and explores why people often remain blissfully unaware of their incompetence and personality flaws. The second section focuses on faulty views of character, and explores why people tend to perceive they are more unique and special than they really are, why people tend to possess inflated opinions of their moral fiber that are not matched by their deeds, and why people fail to anticipate the impact that emotions have on their choices and actions.

The book will be of great interest to students and researchers in social, personality, and cognitive psychology, but, through the accessibility of its writing style, it will also appeal to those outside of academic psychology with an interest in the psychological processes that lead to our self-insight.

Thales's Lament

On the Vagaries of Self-Assessment

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be standing just outside the village of Namche, in the crisp and arid air of Nepal, staring up at the mountain that the locals refer to as Sagarmatha, the goddess of the sky. Rising over 29,000 feet (or 8,000 meters), the mountain fascinated the British when they first came to the Indian subcontinent. They took pains to measure it precisely, and then later gave it the name, Everest, by which it is known worldwide. Today the fascination with Mt. Everest continues unabated, with hundreds of mountaineers every year attempting to climb its ice and rock to reach the roof of the world, the highest point on Earth.

But one fact remains clear for those attempting the summit. To scale Everest, climbers had better have an accurate impression of themselves. They have to know their strengths and weaknesses as a mountaineer, their capacity to surmount all the challenges that lay ahead, and their strength of will when the body and then the mind begin to fail. Climbers have to know whether they have the courage and agility to walk in full mountain gear across rickety aluminum ladders perched over 100-foot–deep crevices of ice along the Kumba icefall. They have to know whether they have the health and stamina to walk up to the 26,000-foot elevation of Camp 4, in the “death zone,” above the highest point where any rescue helicopter can reach.

And then one day, they have to know whether they have the fortitude to get up early in the morning, perhaps with little sleep or food, to walk the last 3,000 vertical feet to the summit, in an environment with only a third of the oxygen of sea level, where winds can reach hurricane force and the wind chill can drop to –150 degrees Fahrenheit. They have to know whether they have the technical skill to scale the sheer vertical treachery of the Hillary Step just 200 feet below the summit. They have to know whether they have the discipline to turn around in midafternoon, no matter how close they are to the summit, to reach camp before darkness, the clouds, and the cold envelopes the mountain.

These insights are not luxuries. Through 2001, a total of 1,496 climbers have reached the summit of Everest and returned safely, but 172 others died—a ratio of 1 to every 9—with roughly 120 of their bodies still lying somewhere on the mountain (Brunner, 2002), either lost in some unknown fissure or to be stepped over by other climbers on their way to their own fates.

This book is about the accuracy of the impressions that people hold of themselves. It focuses not on mountaineers but rather on the rest of us who face all those more mundane but no less important summits in our own lives, such as getting an “A” in that important class, getting promoted at work, raising smart and moral children, or perhaps even writing one's first book. It explores whether people have adequate insight into their capacities and their talents. It examines whether people are aware of their shortcomings. It assesses whether they have a good sense of the content of their character.

The notion that accurate self-insight is important is not a new one. One has only to go back to the classical Greeks to see the importance that they placed on accurate self-knowledge. The Oracle of Delphi, for example, was a place where kings, queens, and lesser personages went to ask questions about their lives and futures. Although their questions were important, receiving wisdom from the Oracle tended to be a tricky business. The Oracle answered questions with questions, posed riddles, or responded with frenzied non sequiturs. But on the building that housed the Oracle itself were two admonitions that were crystal clear in their meaning, thus indicating their importance, at least in Western thought. The first was “nothing too much”; the second was “know thyself.”

This book, in essence, is about that second admonition. It addresses the extent to which people have an adequately accurate view of self. It is clear that such accurate views are helpful, if not essential, for navigating our everyday worlds. People need to know what their strengths are in order to choose, for example, the right careers and avocations. They need to be aware of their weaknesses so that they can improve upon them or, failing that, know which situations to avoid. They need to have a firm grasp of their moral character to know when they may be weak in the face of temptation, when they might transgress to commit sins they will be punished for later, either by their own guilty conscience or by the disapproval of others.

At first blush, such accurate self-knowledge would seem easy to attain. People are constantly exposed to an ongoing stream of information about their triumphs and failures, their habits and their limits. They see when they act superhuman versus when they are all too human. And, given that each of us is the most important person in our own little personal drama, one would conclude that people are motivated at some fundamental level to take such information in order to form accurate self-impressions.

In this book, however, I argue that it is surprisingly difficult to form accurate impressions of self. Even with all the time we spend with ourselves and all the motivation to achieve accurate self-understanding, we reach flawed and sometimes downright wrong conclusions about ourselves. If self-insight is a destination we all desire, we face many roadblocks and detours along the way, and each of us fails to reach that destination in some important fashion. No matter how useful an accurate self-vision would be, and no matter how motivated we are to attain it, this accuracy is a commodity that elusively remains outside of our reach.

This observation, however, is also not very new. One can again go back to the Greeks to find that accurate self-awareness was a difficult possession to obtain. As reported by Diogenes Laertes, the Greek philosopher Thales, one of the first Western philosophers whose thinking we still have records of, lamented that “knowing thyself” was one of the most difficult tasks people face—certainly more arduous than the easiest task he could think of, which was, of course, giving advice to others.

Evidence of Inaccurate Self-Views

Recent evidence of psychological research gives credence to Thales's lament about the human inability to achieve accurate self-impressions. If one scavenges through the literature, one finds ample evidence that the impressions people have of themselves seem to be detoured away from realistic self-views. Such evidence comes in two forms.

Correlational Evidence

The first form of evidence comes from studies about how closely tethered self-impressions of ability are to actual performance. Do people with lofty views of their own intelligence, popularity, and competence, in fact, display more smarts, social skill, and achievement than the rest of us? What about people with pessimistic impressions of their skills? Are they, indeed, less smart and popular than most of their peers?

A large number of studies from many corners of psychology research suggest that, as a general rule, people's impressions of their abilities—whether arrogant or humble—are not anchored very closely to their actual level of skill. Across a large number of domains—from scholastic performance to leadership ability to clerical skills to professional knowledge—what people think about themselves can be quite distinct from the truth of their competence and expertise.

The usual way research psychologists document this fact is to compute a correlation coefficient (or r) between people's perceptions of their ability and their objective performance. A correlation coefficient is a statistic that indexes how tightly one variable, such as perceptions of performance, rises and falls in tandem with another variable, such as reality of performance. Correlation coefficients can range from +1.0 (the two variables are perfectly related) to –1.0 (the two variables are still perfectly related, but in a negative direction). A correlation of 0 means the two variables are completely unrelated—knowing a person's perception of his or her ability, for example, would not give you any information about the reality of his or her ability. To give a real-world example of a correlation, it is well known that gender and height are correlated, with men tending to be taller than women. The relationship between gender and height is not perfect—some women are taller than some men—but the relationship produces a correlation coefficient of roughly .7.

How does the correlation between self-impression and actual skill compare with this benchmark? A good deal of research suggests that the comparison does not paint a kind portrait of our skills at self-insight. The correlation between perception and reality is often modest to meager, if it appears at all. For example, people's ratings of their intelligence tend to correlate roughly around between .2 and .3 with their scores on IQ tests and other intellectual tasks (Hansford & Hattie, 1982). When tested in their ability to tell when other people are lying, their impressions of performance correlate only .04 with actual proficiency (DePaulo, Charlton, Cooper, Lindsay, & Muhlenbruck, 1997). When expressing emotions to others, people's estimates of success fail to be related at all to actual success (Riggio, Widaman, & Friedman, 1985).

The dissociation between perception and reality can be found in real-world areas of some consequence. The views adolescent boys have of their knowledge about condom use correlates only slightly with their actual knowledge (Crosby & Yarber, 2001). Nurses’ estimates of their proficiency at basic life support tasks fail to correlate with their actual level of knowledge (Marteau, Johnston, Wynne, & Evans, 1989). Doctors’ beliefs about their understanding of thyroid disorders does not correspond at all to their actual level of understanding (Tracey, Arroll, Richmond, & Barham, 1997). Family practice residents’ views about their patient interviewing skills do not correlate highly (roughly .30) with what their instructors and other experts think (Stuart, Goldstein, & Snope, 1980).

Thus, the general rule is that self-perceptions of competence are generally not tightly tethered to actual performance. To be sure, self-views do have some validity. In an exhaustive review of the literature circa 1982, Mabe and West found that the correlation between perception of ability and the reality did tend to be positive—and at times it could climb as high as roughly .70, such as when college students guessed what their grades would be or when secretaries evaluated their clerical skills. In addition, the correlation dropped to around zero only occasionally, and it almost never went negative. But, when all was said and done, the typical correlation was roughly .29. That was high enough to suggest a real relationship between perception and reality, just not a very strong one. To put it in terms of an old cliché, their research suggested that the glass of self-insight was not completely empty, it just was not all that full.

Other research has also demonstrated how empty the glass of self-insight can be, at least compared with other benchmarks of insight. Almost to add insult to injury, it appears that in some very important contexts other people have more insight about our proficiencies than we do ourselves. College students do a better job at predicting the longevity of their roommates’ romantic relationships than they do their own (MacDonald & Ross, 1999). What employees think of their job and social skills in the workplace tends to correlate only .36 with what their peers think of them and, perhaps more important, only .35 with what their supervisors think. However, both supervisors and peers seem to be spotting something in common, in that the correlation between supervisor and peer impressions tend to be rather high, roughly .62 (Harris & Schaubroeck, 1988).

What others see in us also tends to be more highly correlated with objective outcomes than what we see in ourselves. In a study of naval officers, self-ratings of leadership ability were not related to how often a sailor's superior recommended him or her for early promotion. However, leadership ability as rated by peers successfully predicted who would be recommended and who would not (Bass & Yammarino, 1991). Similarly, in a study of surgical residents, self-ratings of surgical skill failed to predict how well residents did on an object test of those skills. However, ratings by superiors and peers (which, of course, tended to be highly correlated with each other) successfully predicted performance on the objective test (Risucci, Tortolani, & Ward, 1989).

Indeed, perhaps the most intriguing demonstration that self-impressions carry little additional insight relative to the impressions of others comes from a study in which strangers were asked to judge a person's intelligence after having viewed only a 90-second videotape. On the tape, participants watched as the target person walked into a room, sat behind a table, read a standard weather report, and then got up to walk out of the room (Borkenau & Liebler, 1993). After seeing only this, participants’ impressions of that person's intelligence correlated just as highly with the person's scores on standardized intelligence tests (around .30) as did the person's own self-impression (around .32).

In sum, the notions people have about their skills and knowledge are far from perfect indicators of their actual proficiency. Those with the most vaulted beliefs of their competence are not necessarily the most competent; those who denigrate their skills are not necessarily the least skillful. Impressions of skill are somehow decoupled from reality—perhaps not completely, but to an extent that is surprising.

Overconfidence

But there is another set of findings that, perhaps more importantly, demonstrates that the opinions people hold of themselves are not well connected with reality or even with what can possibly be true. On average, people tend to hold overly favorable views of themselves. They overestimate their skill, their knowledge, their moral character, and their place on the social ladder. Ironically, they even overestimate their ability to provide veridical and unbiased judgments about themselves.

This overconfidence has been shown in what people say about themselves when they compare themselves with others. If asked if their skill level is “average,” “above average,” or “below average,” too many people endorse the above average option—so much so that the average person rates himself or herself as well above average, a belief that cannot be objectively possible.

For example, in 1980, Weinstein asked college students at Rutgers University how likely they were to encounter a number of positive life events while avoiding negative ones, relative to other Rutgers students. Typically, his respondents stated that they were be more likely than the typical student to live past 80, graduate in the top third of the class, have a good job offer before the end of their senior year, have a terrific salary, and to own their own home. At the same time, the typical respondent said he or she was less likely than the typical student to have a drinking problem, get divorced, have a heart attack, get fired, contract a sexually transmitted disease, and, last but not least, suffer gum problems.

Other studies have found similar patterns of overestimation. In a large survey of high school seniors, the College Board (1976–1977) found that while 60% rated themselves as “above average,” relative to other high school seniors, in athletic ability, only 6% rated themselves as “below average.” On leadership ability, a full 70% rated themselves as above average, but only 2% as below average. On their “ability to get along with others,” virtually every respondent described himself or herself as at least average, with 60% saying they fell in the top 10% among their peers on this skill—and 25% saying that their level of skill was in the top 1%!

Other researchers observe the same pattern of overestimation. Workers tend to think their absentee record is better than the typical employee in their workplace (Harrison & Shaffer, 1994). People think they are less susceptible to the flu than the average person (Larwood, 1978). Motorcyclists think they are less likely to cause an accident than other bikers (Rutter, Quine, & Albery, 1998). Elderly drivers tend to think they are better dri...

Table of contents

• Fornt Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Author
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Thales’s Lament: On the Vagaries of Self-Assessment
• Chapter 2 Ignorance as Bliss
• Chapter 3 Clues for Competence
• Chapter 4 The Dearest Teacher
• Chapter 5 False Uniqueness
• Chapter 6 In a Word
• Chapter 7 The Merest Decency
• Chapter 8 Beyond One’s Self
• Chapter 9 Reflections on Self-Reflection
• References
• Index