How Well Do You Know Yourself?
How well do you know yourself? It’s kind of a tough question, isn’t it? Often times it’s hard to know exactly who you are, or what you would truly do in a certain situation. We can cover up this uncertainty by lying to ourselves. We tell ourselves that we know how we behave and why we do it, but research suggests this is usually pretty far off. It’s why we all think we could take out eight bad guys after watching Enter the Dragon, with no prior martial arts experience and a maybe few push-ups back in gym class under our belt.
What we tell ourselves we know about ourselves is different than how we really are. Anybody with a mother or significant other has heard the classic line – “I know you better than you know yourself.” The funny thing is, there’s actually probably some truth to that.
Our natural way of behaving is what’s considered the “implicit personality.” This is the purest form of you, without the pressure of social constructs and the like. There’s no faking this; it’s the gut reaction. Implicit personality is what you would actually do if you were in a situation like being victim to a robbery, perhaps.
What we think we would do is what’s considered the “explicit personality.” This is the form of you that you refine to present to others. We do this because it helps us get by in the world. The explicit personality is shaped by social constructs, which is why we often think we would perform in a good way. The explicit personality is the one that says, “I would totally karate kick the robber and take his weapon from him.”
“If you’re given an implicit and explicit personality test, they might be very different, and they almost always are,” David Osmon says, a psychology professor at UW-Milwaukee.
With this dissonance in perception, it’s hard for anyone to make an accurate call about his or her own true personality. But of course, science is clever and found a way to measure both a person’s implicit and explicit personality without one influencing the other.
Let’s say the test is measuring racial bias, which is how this particular test first gained credibility. Measuring explicit personality is pretty simple and straightforward. The researchers give test subjects statements to agree or disagree to on a scale (1 to 5, usually), and the subjects give their temperature on that statement. One example for this case would be “I like white people,” or “I like black people.” Circling 1 would mean that you don’t like them at all, and circling 5 would mean you like them a lot.
Measuring implicit personality takes a bit more tact. In order to sidestep one’s desire to sound like a good person and lie on the explicit personality test, researchers have to measure gut reactions to tell their true feelings. In these studies, subjects are often given a test that provides them with words like “I,” “Me,” “Mine,” and other words that related to the self, and words like “They,” “Them,” “Theirs,” or others that relate to other people. The subjects are measured on the amount of time in which it takes them to click on either the “I” or “Others” button corresponding to the word they just saw. The faster the reaction time, the more likely it is that the subject truly feels that way.
Seeing the word “Me” and clicking “I” and seeing the word “Them” and clicking “Others” isn’t such a hard task, but when the subject is primed by a certain loaded word before doing this, something strange happens.
If the researchers put the word “hip-hop” on screen before doing the “I” or “Others” task, a racially biased person will have a slower reaction time. A non-racially biased person would not show the amount of change in reaction time on the task. But something in the biased person’s brain throws them for a loop when they are confronted with this situation, and it shows in the slowed reaction time. While it’s not sufficient to use this is a sole measurement of implicit personality, it does provide some solid backup.
“I wouldn’t say that we ought to start testing people using this measure, but for research purposes, it has been validated in a number of ways,” Osmon says.
The usefulness of this is to see how frequently people are inaccurate on their perception of their character. If a person gave answers that showed that they were not racially biased on the explicit personality test but showed some delay in the implicit personality test, it’s likely that that person has some underlying racial prejudice that they are unaware of.
“The greater the discrepancy in those answers, the more bias there is in a person,” Osmon says.
Racial prejudice is an interesting trait to measure using this method, but it may not apply to everyone. One thing that does apply to everyone is their perception of their character. David Osmon of UWM conducted a study that measured people’s results on this method in regard to the Big Five personality test, which we will follow up in the next article.
Follow this article up with the next article on how Osmon found out that we might not know our true character as much as we think we do.
Cheers, nerds.
