Not self-aware? Psychological antecedents and consequences of alienating from one’s actual motives, emotions, and goals

Abstract

Philosophers and scientists have been puzzling over the potential antecedents and consequences of self-awareness or its relative absence since time immemorial. One major reason is the difficulty of identifying individuals’ actual needs, emotions, or goals and thus making statements about their level of self-awareness. Drawing on a “duality of mind” approach, we review our research that quantified discrepancies between first-person perspective and third-person perspective assessments of motives (“needs”), emotions, and goals as indicators of relative self-awareness. Also, we expand on their proximal causes related to personality–situation interactions and their emotional and motivational consequences. We discuss similarities among the three branches of research on motives, emotions, and goals and, lastly, provide an outlook for future research.

Dynamics of personality: The Zurich model of motivation revived, extended, and applied to personality

“…Note, however, that ZM makes assumptions regarding personality states and traits, whereas the five‐factor model is based on research about self‐reports of these characteristics. The validity of self‐reports of traits and states is limited by cognitive and motivational biases, and this has been shown to be particularly the case for social need traits (Malekzad et al, 2021), which are the pivot of ZM. An adequate compromise might be to assess these traits with indirect procedures (Quirin et al, 2018; Runge et al, 2016; Schönbrodt et al, 2021; Schultheiss & Pang, 2007), while assess the dynamics of states with economical samples of (self‐reported) experiences.…”