Through all the years, many, including personality and social psychologists, have believed the individual is the best judge of his or her own personality.
But now a latest study from the Washington University in St. Louis has shown that we are not the 'know-it-alls' that we think we are! The research team 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."
Personality is not who you think you are, it's who you are. Some people think by definition that we are the experts on our personality because we get to write the story, but personality is not the story – it is the reality. So, you do get to write your own story about how you think you are, and what you tell people about yourself, but there still is reality out there, and, guess what? Other people are going to see the reality, regardless of what story you believe, say the researchers.
Personality is pervasive in many things that we do – clothing choice, bedroom arrangement, Web site and Facebook profiles, for example. Everything we touch we leave a mark of our personality; traces are left unintentionally, giving off hints of our personality that we don't even see ourself!
Underlying traits that drive behaviour comprise personality. The model that the researchers developed is called the self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. To test this, 165 volunteers were called and were given a number of different tasks, wherein they had to rate themselves and others as well. The model correctly predicted that self ratings would be more accurate for internal things, such as thoughts and feelings, sadness and anxiety, for example, than the ratings of friends and strangers.
You probably know pretty well your anxiety level, whereas others might not be in the position to judge that because, after all, you can mask your inner feelings, the scientists say, adding that others are often better than the self in things that deal with overt behaviour.
The self has difficulty in accurately judging itself in areas that are desirable or undesirable, what are called evaluative traits. Intelligence, attractiveness, creativity are hard for the self to judge objectively because there is so much at stake, meaning your life is going to be so much different if you are intelligent or not intelligent, attractive or not. Everybody wants to be seen as intelligent and attractive, but these desirable traits we're not going to judge accurately in ourselves.
Take attractiveness and your mirror. We look in the mirror all the time, yet that's not the same as looking at a photo of someone else. If we spent as much time looking at photos of others as we do ourselves we'd form a much more confident and clear impression of the other's attractiveness than we would have of our own.
For some personality traits we miss the point if we look at thoughts and feelings and ignore the behaviour. Bullies, for instance, fit the SOKA model, because their thoughts and feelings tell them they're insecure and want to be liked and admired, which is not a horrible, nasty notion. They cannot see their behaviour as nasty and horrible, though, because their thoughts obscure their actions. Similarly, if you think that you are warm and friendly, and your friends and family say even if you think along those lines, you don't come across that way, you might pay more attention to your behaviours.
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