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True Selves

   Why do the things we discover about ourselves so often run counter to our own expectations? How is it our view of ourselves so often turns out to be somewhat skewed?

   The answers to these questions are slowly beginning to emerge from research in neuroscience. Freud, it turns out, had it more right than he knew: far more of the "we" that we consider "us" lives beneath our range of consciousness than we ever imagined. Not only are we composed of multiple "selves" often in conflict with one another—unconscious programs, or zombies, as neuroscientists like to call them, that run far beneath our conscious awareness—the vast majority of our behavior comes from their interactions with each other, not with our conscious selves.

   The conscious mind, however, is a great explainer. It's irresistibly drawn into making sense of the world and everything in it, including itself. Unfortunately, it prefers the deluded explanations that keep its view of the world intact to true ones that threaten to shatter it. 

 

   Given our conscious mind's propensity to tell stories that make the world cohere, even, at the expense of the truth, as well as the fact that most of our behavior emerges from places in our minds unseen, it's little wonder we're so often wrong about why we actually do the things we do, and the type of people we actually are. Add our ego-driven need to appear to be all things virtuous and good into the mix and we find ourselves mixing a potent recipe for significant self-delusion. 

 

   Which isn't to say we can't see the truths about why we do the things we do—just that the truth is quite often less obvious than we might think—that we can be utterly certain we're right and still be mostly wrong. That our truth meter can be easily misled when it comes to self-knowledge is, quite, unsettling to realize.



   But, as we all have a visual blind spot of which we aren't aware until someone points it out, we have mental blind spots of which we aren't aware, as well. Unlike being shown how objects can be made to disappear behind our visual blind spot, however, having truths pointed out to us that hide behind our mental blind spots isn't necessarily accompanied by a joyful sense of discovery.

   Yet once we understand intellectually that we do have mental blind spots, we can leverage that understanding to become more accurate in our self-appraisals. One way to do this, once we fully recognize what unreliable storytellers we are, is to attempt to completely ignore what we want to be true about ourselves or the reasons for our actions and, like an unbiased researcher, imagine ourselves as disinterested third parties hypothesizing about ourselves from the only data such third parties would have available to them: our observable actions. For, in fact, people who know us reasonably well but who aren't bound by our biases may have, paradoxically, a clearer view of the truth about us than we do ourselves. 

 

    This suggests an even better way to get an accurate view of ourselves may be, ironically, to ask other people. If genuine self-knowledge is what we're after, the best way to get it may be to summon up the courage to hear the truth and simply ask close friends and family members what we want to know.

"Am I warm?" "Am I honest?" "Am I fun?" 

 

   We may think we already know the answers to these questions, but sometimes we don't. Others, of course, may come at such an exercise with their own agendas and biases, but if you ask enough people such biases tend to cancel out. It then becomes a question—another one whose answer we may think we know but which we actually don't—of just how courageous we are.

Alex Lickerman

Psychology Today