“What exactly does it mean to know yourself? For neuroscientists, the answer is straightforward enough: Self-knowledge is the combination of two forms of information, direct appraisals (your own self-beliefs) and reflected appraisals (your perception of how others view you). The first generally employs the parts of the brain associated with a first-person perspective, such as the posterior cingulate; the second with regions associated with emotion and memory, such as the insula, orbitofrontal, and temporal cortex.
[..] they [oracles at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi] no doubt meant “Know thyself accurately.” That is a much taller order, requiring a huge quantity of truthful information about your interior states—attitudes, beliefs, emotions, traits, motives—over time, in all three of its phases: present, past, and future. Accurate self-knowledge also means avoiding mistakes and correcting illusions, being completely honest with yourself, possessing a reliable memory, and predicting how you will feel and react in the future.
[..] we probably all overestimate our capacity for accurate self-knowledge. Many studies have shown how flawed people’s self-assessments are. Psychological experiments have revealed that ratings of one’s own skill and performance are “moderate to meager” in accuracy and are generally less sound than external evaluations. Similarly, scholars have demonstrated that we can’t even predict our future behavior better than others can predict it for us. [..]
One reason we know ourselves so poorly is that we’re prone to major cognitive errors about what we see happening in our lives. Researchers have found that humans are vulnerable to gross omissions, to the extent that we miss seeing our problems, mistakes, and opportunities. We exist, you might say, in a fog of meta-ignorance: Not only do we not know ourselves; we don’t know we don’t know ourselves.
Many things in our lives go unnoticed because we lack language for them and don’t understand them. This is called hypocognition—meaning a deficit of cognition (as opposed to hypercognition). In studies exploring this phenomenon, British participants were more likely to notice cheese than Asian dumplings in their daily lives, while Chinese participants noticed the reverse. A less trivial instance than foodstuffs might involve the way some trauma affects your daily life and who you are, but you are unable to recognize its impact because you have no knowledge about the effects of trauma. (That said, having this knowledge can lead to pitfalls, because learning about trauma can cause a person to incorrectly identify its cause and origin.)
Much of our self-knowledge deficit comes from the willful ignorance—dishonesty, really—that we indulge to protect our self-esteem. For more than a century, psychologists have observed the human tendency to use motivated reasoning to reassure ourselves that our opinions are right, to rationalize bad choices, to ignore information that reflects critically on us, and generally to maintain positive illusions and find ways to avoid facing reality-based negative emotions. So integral to our being are these traits that collectively they have been called our “psychological immune system.” This characteristic rationalizing is almost certainly based in our biology; neuroscientists have shown that people presented with critical evaluations of themselves display signs of stimulus in the brain’s limbic regions associated with threat perception.
This human capacity to maintain ignorance in the face of potentially negative self-knowledge might make you more comfortable in the short term. But as is true of so much human craving for comfort, it leads to many missed opportunities for greater well-being and success in the long run. Research has shown that more honest self-awareness—of both positive and negative information—improves self-development because you know what to improve. This enables better personal decision making rooted in accurate information, especially when striving toward goals. And experiments in the workplace have demonstrated that good self-awareness enhances job contentment, enthusiasm, and communication. [..]
1. Stop protecting yourself.
Training yourself to accept the regular, systematic physical discomfort of a tough workout in the gym builds strength and endurance. Over time, you will feel much fitter—and far more comfortable in your skin than if you’d never left the couch. You can apply the same principle to the work of self-knowledge: Regular bracing, difficult self-assessment will feel uncomfortable at first but will make you stronger as a person in the end. Ask your friends and family for honest criticism regularly, and insist that they don’t hold back. You can call this your emotional workout routine. [..]
2. Embrace a change narrative.
[..] when people see the potential for growth in their strengths, they are more likely to accept negative feedback and use it to stimulate effort. I see this phenomenon all the time in my best students: Those who have a mindset oriented to aggressive improvement are actually impatient with empty compliments; they prefer criticism, and see it as a secret weapon they need to improve even more.
3. Decide what to change and get started.
It’s not enough to believe that positive change is possible; you also need a plan to make it happen, which accurate self-knowledge can facilitate. Some self-improvement goals are straightforward, such as becoming more skilled at your job or a better listener to your partner. But a more fundamental change to who you are as a person is also possible. Research over the past 15 years has shown that personality is more malleable than was once thought, and will naturally evolve over a lifetime, mostly in positive ways. But you can speed up the changes you want by remodeling your behavior to match that of the person you’d like to be. This is called the “as if” principle, which I have written about previously. In a nutshell, practice acting like a better person and you will actually start to become that person.”
Full article, AC Brooks, The Atlantic, 2025.4.18