One Thought

Our personal identities are important to us.  They’re supposed to define us, to pick us out of a crowd.  When we define ourselves, we think we’re picking out characteristics that aren’t universal and whose combination is rare.  We don’t list “breathes air” and “has two arms” when asked to describe ourselves, after all.

But are our identities as specific to us as we think they are?  The answer, it turns out, is no.  We systematically underestimate the prevalence of some personality characteristics and, as a result, mistakenly form our identities around them.  We’re less different than we think.

A Personality Test

In 1948, psychologist Bertram Forer administered a personality test.  He had each of his students answer a series of questions, and he gave out personality analyses based on the test results.  Forer’s analyses were presented as unique personality profiles.  His students judged them as such, rating them on a scale from 0 (very poor) to 5 (excellent).  The result: an average rating of 4.26.  The students were impressed with the accuracy of their analyses.

There’s a catch: the analyses were all the same.  Each was the following:

You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself.  While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them.  You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage.  Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.  At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.  You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.  You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof.  But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.  At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.  Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Forer’s experiment has been repeated many times with the same result.  His result is now termed the “Forer effect.”

The statements Forer used are vague, yes, and that’s usually the focus of analyses of his experiment.  But it can’t be the only reason his personality analyses scored so highly.  They were presented as unique personality profiles, after all, and ones containing only known-universal statements like “You breathe air” and “You have two arms” (or their mental equivalents) would, presumably, have scored much lower.

What We Don’t Talk About

This much is obvious: Some components of our personalities are less rare than we think they are.  We think we’re different in ways we’re not.

But why do we think statements like Forer’s uniquely describe us?  What is it about them that makes them high scoring?  I have a hypothesis: We tend not to talk about some things, and because we don’t, our perception of ourselves is skewed.  We think some characteristics are more rare than they really are.

What don’t we talk about?  Two things: our problems, and opinions and desires we see as controversial.  We feel uncomfortable talking about internal problems: our insecurities, neuroses, doubts, depressed feelings.  We think they make us look unattractive, flawed, and weak.  We’re embarrassed by them.

We tend to keep controversial opinions and desires to ourselves.  We’re worried we’ll garner others’ disapproval and ruin our chances of getting of finding a job, getting a promotion, or finding a mate.  We may tell no one, or maybe only our closest friends, what we really think.

Our silence has consequences.  Because we don’t talk about our problems, we think ours are worse.  Because we’re not aware of others’ insecurities, we think we’re more insecure.  Because we keep controversial opinions and desires to ourselves, we see ourselves as lonely dissidents.

To make matters worse, we tend to see ourselves as more revealing that we really are.  We think we’ve conveyed information to others that we haven’t.  We see ourselves as misunderstood, and we internally chastise others for not treating us how we’d like.

Our own feelings, desires, and experiences are more real to us.  We can empathize with others, but we only really experience our own mental states.  Our own feelings, desires, and experiences seem stronger.  Our highs seem higher and our lows lower.  Our problems seem more severe.  We may not even be aware of others’ problems, and even when we are, it’s still hard to understand their severity.  We tend give ourselves more credit for overcoming our own challenges than we give others for overcoming theirs.  We don’t know what it’s like to be them.

Exaggerated Differences

A vicious cycle emerges.  Because we think we’re different, we isolate ourselves or form groups that isolate themselves.  This behavior exacerbates the problem: When we’re more revealing around our friends, we guarantee we’ll appear more similar to them (and therefore more different from others).  We don’t know what it’s like to be someone outside our group, and we often assume things that are incorrect.  We’re not aware of the inner lives of people we don’t know.  We exaggerate the supposed differences between us and them.

It’s impossible to understand people without knowing how they see themselves.  We know how we see ourselves, and we may know a little about how our friends see themselves, but we have no idea how most people see themselves.  Because of this, we think we’re different in ways we’re not.

What can we do?  We need to be honest and revealing of ourselves, even when doing so makes us uncomfortable.  We can’t assume we understand others or they understand us.  We need to communicate more than seems natural, and we need to talk about things that make us uncomfortable — even to people we don’t know well.  We’re less different than we think, and we’re all better off acknowledging that.