Posted on September 7th, 2022.

A novel approach to self-insight.

KEY POINTS

• It's a well-known principle in psychology that accurate self-knowledge is the key to mental health.
• New research on "self-discrepancy theory" tests the benefits of knowing your personality type to predicting well-being.
• By observing your behavior, you can gain greater insight into whether your beliefs about your personality match your actual traits.

You would undoubtedly agree with the idea that self-knowledge is a key piece of psychological adjustment. Understanding your personality, talents, interests, and attitudes helps you better grasp your identity or sense of self.

Consider the realm of personality. If you see yourself as conscientious but are anything but, it can lead you into situations that create strife with others, not to mention the possibility of failure. Perhaps you know someone constantly claiming that they never miss a beat. Yet, in reality, you’ve lost track of how often they’ve been late or failed to attend a prearranged meeting. “You can count on me,” they assert. But in your mind, this translates into “You can count on me to be late.”

Why Knowing Yourself Should Predict Higher Well-Being

As outlined by Lund University’s August Håkan Nilsson and colleagues (2022), “Self-Discrepancy Theory” proposes that well-being is predicted by “disagreement between the ideal/ought self and the actual self” (p. 1) or what the Swedish authors call “Personality Estimation Discrepancy (PED).” You might get the wrong idea about your personality from several sources, Nilsson et al. propose.

One very likely candidate is an unvetted online personality test. One of these, in particular, the “16 Personalities Test,” claims to provide a “'freakishly accurate' description of who you are and why you do the things you do” and only takes 10 minutes to complete. Your personality shows up as falling into one of four “colors,” corresponding to such subdivisions as “analyst,” “diplomat,” or “sentinel.”

Maybe you’ve taken one of these quick tests and come away with what you thought were new insights about yourself. However, as Lund and his colleagues suggest, it’s quite likely that the estimation provided is “erroneous.” As a result, your feelings of well-being can be compromised, given that self-insight is “a strong predictor of subjective well-being (SWB)” (p. 1).

Digging deeper into PED, one of its key features is how much your ideal and real selves deviate from each other and whether your real or actual view of yourself deviates from the way you would score on an objective (and psychometrically sound) personality test.

In the theoretical model that the Lund U. researchers propose, the direction of PED (over- or under-estimation) should predict self-insight such that the closer to zero your PED is, the higher your degree of self-insight. In turn, higher self-insight should provide the basis for higher levels of SWB.

What’s Your PED?

From the methods that Nilsson et al. developed to test their model, you can get an idea of how you would rate on the PED and self-insight measures. To begin with, the Swedish authors use the personality framework based on the Five Factor Model (FFM), the theory that people’s personalities can best be understood along the dimensions of conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, neuroticism (emotional stability), and extraversion. To be clear, this model has nothing to do with the “4 colors” framework but instead has a long history in personality psychology as a valid way to conceptualize people’s basic traits.

The novel approach to measuring PED that Nilsson et al. used asked 202 adult participants (average age 37 years old) to complete a test based on the FFM (“actual” personality) that could be compared with a simple self-perceived trait measure. The FFM test asks people to rate their agreement or disagreement with a set of items describing specific behaviors. As an example of a conscientiousness item, you might rate yourself on the item “Carry out my plans.”

Using a simple self-rating, the authors then went on to ask participants to rate their self-perceived personality by answering a question asking them to rate items such as “In general, how conscientious are you?” See what your rating would be for all five traits.

PED can occur in either an over- or under-estimation in this framework simply by subtracting actual from perceived ratings on the FFM traits. If you think of yourself as highly extraverted, for example, but score in the introverted direction, you would therefore overestimate your levels of extraversion.

Moving on to self-insight, you can also gain an appreciation for what this concept means by answering some of the actual questions used in the study. Consider your responses to “I am usually aware of my thoughts” or “I usually know why I feel the way I do.”

Turning to the findings, the overall model did work as predicted, with over- or under-estimation of personality traits predicting SWB through the influence of self-insight. However, this result only applied to the situation in which people over-estimated their levels of personality traits, meaning they thought they scored higher than they actually did. The under-estimators came out with much higher SWB than the model predicted on the traits of extraversion, neuroticism (emotional stability), and conscientiousness.

To explain this conundrum, Nilsson et al. suggested that there may be something unique about people who score at the extremes of a personality trait measure. The further the PED scores deviate from zero, the more likely it is that the over-estimators have no place to go but down, and the under-estimators have no place to go but up. Scoring at either extreme on a trait, therefore, becomes a problem but for different reasons and with different outcomes.

How to Perform a Self-Knowledge Recalibration

Returning to the example of those individuals whose high behavior data don’t back up conscientiousness claims, you can see how their lack of self-awareness can become a problem in their everyday lives. Not realizing how far amiss they are from their identities as reliable people, they won’t take the necessary precautions to avoid letting other people down. The extremely unconscientious person, lacking self-insight, will become someone destined to fail.

Thinking about your personality, the Lund U. results suggest that there can be value to watching your behavior concerning the views you hold about yourself. It can be just as important to bring your self-estimation up if it’s too low as it is to bring it down if it scales the upper reaches of a trait rating scale. Maybe you’re more conscientious than you think you are or even higher on emotional stability. Wouldn’t it be helpful to be able to boost your self-image accordingly?

To sum up, having an accurate view of yourself, particularly in the personality domain, is an important route to greater satisfaction with who you are and what you strive for. Fulfillment depends on achieving your goals and being aware of how far along you are in that journey.

Source: click here.