You Don’t Know Yourself as Well as You Think You Do

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It can also feel like a vital part of life, as though if you’re not seeking self-understanding, you’re missing out. (Our old pal Socrates also said: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”) “If you haven’t noticed how pervasive this message is in society, just pay attention for the next few days,” Rebecca Schlegel, a Texas A&M University social psychologist, told me. “It’s so baked into our culture that we almost take it for granted.”

But the dream of perfect self-knowledge is unattainable, and chasing it too doggedly can leave you more confused and stuck than when you started. Humans’ ability to see themselves clearly and accurately has limitations that neither personality quizzes nor Fitbit data can overcome. “We should never think that we know ourselves very well,” Simine Vazire, a University of Melbourne psychology professor who has studied self-knowledge, told me. “Anyone who thinks they do—by definition, they lack self-knowledge, because they’re wrong about that, at least.”

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Knowing yourself is difficult, in part, because some behaviors and attitudes stem from the unconscious mind, outside your sphere of awareness. “The mind purrs along under the hood in various ways,” Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist and the author of Strangers to Ourselves, told me. One of many examples he gives in his book is how people interpret ambiguous situations (and why). If I tell a joke at a party and no one laughs, my unconscious patterns will determine whether I think I’m a socially awkward fool whom everyone hates or assume that my audience must not have heard me over the din of the party, because I’m clearly charming and hilarious.

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Schlegel has found that belief in the true self is linked to seeing greater meaning in your life, but she described herself as a “true-self agnostic.” (She referenced the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, who called the true self a “troublesome myth.”) For all the idea’s benefits, “the downside,” she said, is “what happens if we close ourselves off to change. And then we miss out on something we might have loved.”

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