Self-Knowledge: Its Limits, Value, and Potential for Improvement

Abstract

Because of personal motives and the architecture of the mind, it may be difficult for people to know themselves. People often attempt to block out unwanted thoughts and feelings through conscious suppression and perhaps through unconscious repression, though whether such attempts are successful is controversial. A more common source of self-knowledge failure is the inaccessibility of much of the mind to consciousness, including mental processes involved in perception, motor learning, personality, attitudes, and self-esteem. Introspection cannot provide a direct pipeline to these mental processes, though some types of introspection may help people construct beneficial personal narratives. Other ways of increasing self-knowledge include looking at ourselves through the eyes of others and observing our own behavior. These approaches can potentially promote self-knowledge, although major obstacles exist. It is not always advantageous to hold self-perceptions that correspond perfectly with reality, but increasing awareness of nonconscious motives and personality is generally beneficial.

A functional-cognitive framework for attitude research

“…In many cases, it can be difficult to determine whether an evaluative response has been caused by a particular stimulus, because there are many stimuli that could be responsible for the evaluative response. This situation is not much different for individuals themselves, in that it can be rather difficult to discern the true environmental causes of one's own evaluative responses (Wilson & Dunn, 2004).…”

Pragmatic Learning Theory: An Inquiry-Action Framework for Distributed Consumer Learning in Online Communities

“…Reflecting is defined as interpreting experiences to form assertions or beliefs about the problem or query at hand, using introspection processes that access an individual's stocks of knowledge and experiences about self, environment, and the relationship between them (Wilson and Dunn 2004). Reflective processes in our analysis involved noting similarities in symptoms, relying on abstract knowledge, and identifying contrasts (table 3).…”

The road to the unconscious self not taken: Discrepancies between self‐ and observer‐inferences about implicit dispositions from nonverbal behavioural cues

“…For instance, the self-perception of implicit dispositions may be more likely when multiple instances of behavioural feedback from different situations challenge an individual's self-view. The self-revelation of implicit dispositions may also become more likely by making people see themselves through the eyes of significant others (Wilson, 2002;Wilson & Dunn, 2004). Observers' superior sensitivity to unconscious aspects of the target's self may at least partly explain why self-other agreement in personality judgment is usually rather low (e.g.…”