The Quest for Self-Insight

CHAPTER 25 THE QUEST FOR SELF-INSIGHT THEORY AND RESEARCH ON ACCURACY AND BIAS IN SELF-PERCEPTION RICHARD W. ROBINS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS OLIVER P. JOHN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY I. INTRODUCTION The quest for self-insight has been a pervasive concern for over 25 centuries. In the 7th century B.C., when the citizens of ancient Greece sought advice from the oracle at Delphi they were greeted with the salutation, "know thyself." The influence of this maxim on Western thought is generally attributed to Socrates, who ques tioned why people should pry into the heavens while they are still ignorant of their own selves. "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates told his disciples, for through self-knowledge lies the path to truth, virtue, and happiness. The ancient Greek mandate to "know thyself foreshadowed a perennial problem: What is self-insight and how does one acquire it? Since the early days of psychology, researchers interested in self-insight have explored a number of intri guing questions: How well do people know themselves? Which psychological pro cesses promote accurate self-perception and which promote distortion? How can true self-knowledge be distinguished from self-deception and hubris? What criteria can be used to evaluate the veracity of a person's self-views? COPYRIGHT © 1997 BY ACADEMIC PRESS. HANDBOOK OF PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY 649 ALL RIGHTS OF REPRooucnoN IN ANY FORM RESERVED. 650 ROBINS AND JOHN This chapter provides a review and integration of current theory and research on self-perception accuracy in personaUty and social psychology.^ We address two broad conceptual issues in the study of self-perception accuracy: (a) What is accuracy and how should it be measured? and (b) What psychological processes are involved in self-perception? To organize our review and analysis of the literature, we discuss two conceptual frameworks. The first defines the various criteria researchers have used to measure accuracy and classifies them into six broad categories: operational, social consensus, functional/pragmatic, normative models, information processing, and internal consistency (Robins & John, 1996a). The second framework character izes the self-perception process from four different theoretical perspectives and uses a metaphor to capture the essence of each perspective: the Scientist, the Consistency Seeker, the Politician, and the Egoist In the final section, we illustrate the heuristic value of these metaphors by applying them to our own research on self-enhancement bias. In this section, we also discuss the implications of accurate self-perception for mental health. Is self-insight worth pursuing, as Socrates suggested, or are people better off maintaining positive illusions about themselves (cf. Taylor & Brown, 1988)? n. WHAT IS ACCURACY AND HOW SHOULD IT BE MEASURED? A. The Criterion Problem How do we know whether a person has self-insight? At first, the answer seems deceptively simple: Individuals have self-insight if they perceive themselves accu rately. To study self-insight, then, one need only compare a person's view of him- or herself with what that person is truly Uke. And therein lies the problem. We do not know the true nature of the person. That is, there are no absolute, perfectly objective measures of a person's traits, capabilities, motives, and so on. Thus, although we can tell how tall people are by measuring their height with a ruler or how heavy they are by weighing them on a scale, we cannot tell how neurotic people are in an equally objective manner. For most attributes of interest to psychol ogists, we have only indirect measures (e.g., a questionnaire scale of neuroticism) from which the constructs of interest must be inferred. Thus, we are left with a conundrum: How can we study self-insight in the absence of an absolute standard for reaUty? ^ In this chapter, we define the tenn accuracy broadly to include both validity and bias. Validity is typically defined by the correspondence (e.g., correlation) between self-perceptions and a criterion, whereas bias is typically defined in terms of directional deviations (e.g., positive or negative) from a criterion. These two measures are statistically independent; for example, self-perceptions could be more positive than a criterion but still be highly correlated with that criterion. CHAPTER 25 ACCURACY AND BIAS IN SELF-PERCEPTION 651 B. Defining Accuracy: Three Perspectives Unfortunately, the criterion problem has no simple solution. Instead, researchers have conceptualized accuracy in ways that make it amenable to empirical inquiry. To provide an overview of these various conceptualizations, we summarize three perspectives below (see also Fiske, 1993; Hastie & Rasinski, 1988; Judd & Park, 1993; Jussim, 1993; Swann, 1984). Kruglanski (1989) differentiated three notions of judgmental accuracy: consen sus, correspondence, and pragmatic utility. The first, consensus, implies that a judg ment is accurate if it agrees with judgments by others. The problem, however, is that human judgments are fallible and subject to bias. The correspondence notion of accuracy refers to the relation between a subject's judgment and a criterion for reality. For example, self-ratings of personality can be said to be accurate if they correspond with ratings by knowledgeable informants. The major problem, accord ing to Kruglanski (1989), is identifying an appropriate criterion: "criteria for accurate judgments are not invariably self-evident. Often they need to be justified by complex argument or indirect evidence .... [T]he accuracy of any given criterion ... is perennially open to criticism. [and] accuracy standards are themselves judgments contingent on argument and evidence" (p. 396). Kruglanski suggested that it is especially important for subjects and experimenters to agree about the appropriate ness of the criterion. Kruglanski's third notion of accuracy involves considerations of pragmatic utility—the adaptive or functional value of the judgment. From this perspective, a judgment is accurate if it is useful to the individual, that is, if it is related to successful task accomplishment, goal attainment, and other desirable outcomes. Accuracy, then, should be assessed on the basis of outcomes that have adaptive significance for the individual. Kenny (1991, 1994) focused on the use of observer judgments in research on accuracy and consensus (i.e., interjudge agreement) (Robins & John, 1996b). Noting that the human observer is "the most valued instrument' used by psychologists" (p. 156), Kenny provided a formal definition of accuracy formulated in terms of observer judgments: "the average judgment made by all possible observers of all possible target behaviors" (p. 159). This definition, intended as a theoretical ideal (like a true score), carries three basic assumptions derived from psychometric theory. First, averaging judgments across observers helps cancel out random errors in individual judgments. Second, the use of "all possible observers" eliminates systematic bias due to a particular sampling of observers. Third, the observation of all possible behaviors ensures that all relevant informa tion is available to the judges. To Kenny, then, the truth about a person can be found at the intersection of judgments by all observers of all behaviors exhibited by the person. Funder (e.g., 1987, 1990, 1993) has written extensively on accuracy issues, particularly in the context of personality judgments. He has argued that "the study of accuracy in judgment is exactly the same thing as measurement validity, where 652 ROBINS AND JOHN the measurements being validated are interpersonal judgments" (Funder, 1990, p. 208). From this perspective, a personality judgment is accurate if it agrees with judgments by others and predicts behaviors relevant to the trait being judged. Although Funder did not equate interjudge agreement with accuracy, he pointed out that judgments that agree with each other are more likely to be accurate than judgments that do not agree. That is, consensus is a necessary but not sufficient condition for accuracy. Funder also emphasized the importance of studying accuracy in real-world contexts, noting that a judgment deemed an error in the laboratory may be accurate, or at least adaptive, in a person's everyday life. In this context, Funder contrasted two broad categories of judgment research, the accuracy para digm and the error paradigm. Accuracy is usually gauged in real-world contexts by comparing subjects' judgments to an external criterion. Errors, in contrast, are usually gauged in experimental contexts by comparing subjects' judgments to criteria derived from a normative model that prescribes how the judgments should be made (e.g., Bayes' theorem). C. Measuring Accuracy: Six Categories of Accuracy Criteria The writings of Kruglanski, Kenny, and Funder point to the myriad ways accuracy has been conceptualized and assessed. However, each of these accounts is incom plete and the field has needed a comprehensive framework that would organize the various criteria used in empirical research. To this end, we recently reviewed the research literature and proposed a framework consisting of six distinct categories of accuracy criteria: operational, social consensus, functional/pragmatic, normative models, iriformation processing (cue use), and internal consistency (see Robins & John, 1996a, for a more extensive discussion; 1996b). The six categories are concep tually based, rather than being based on the specific

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