Mar 01 2010
The Limits of Subjectivity
In a recent post, Human Sexuality and How Questionnaires Can Fail, I concluded this way:
To the philosophical dictum “know thyself” I would thus add, “and realize there are limits to your self-knowledge.”
Well darn. Should I have five points deducted from my post’s score for going a bit cliché? At least I ended with that bit of over-used Socratic tidbit. A news release out Washington University in St. Louis used it in their first line:
Since at least the days of Socrates, humans have been advised to “know thyself.”
Minus ten for them. But maybe not. For the idea was central to their announcement: Others may know us better than we know ourselves, study finds. Summarizing research results that appeared in the February 2010 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the article states:
Simine Vazire, Ph.D., Washington University assistant professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences, has found that the individual is more accurate in assessing one’s own internal, or neurotic traits, such as anxiety, while friends are better barometers of intellect-related traits, such as intelligence and creativity, and even strangers are equally adept as our friends and ourselves at spotting the extrovert in us all, a psychology domain known as “extroversion.”
Interesting. Of course, as a hard-core skeptic, I’d like some numbers to go along with my study results, please. The only number I found was for the number of subjects: 165 volunteers. This Certainly makes it a preliminary finding/study. But what I really want to know is the degree of difference. How much better are we at gauging our internal states? How much better are others at gauging our intelligence and creativity?
Can we know something of ourselves? Sure. But perhaps we should keep in mind (as should psychotherapists everywhere) that what we know is not so much ourselves as it is our perceptions of ourselves. And not only does our power of perception have limits but it can be altered and skewed. Perhaps even mistaken.
