Self as both target and judge: Who has an easier time knowing their own personality?

Abstract

The past two decades have established that people generally have insight into their personalities, but less is known about how and why self-knowledge might vary between individuals. Using the Realistic Accuracy Model as a framework, we investigate whether some people make better "targets" of self-perception by behaving more consistently in everyday life, and whether these differences have benefits for psychological adjustment. Using data from the Electronically Activated Recorder (n=286), we indexed self-knowledge as the link between self-reports of personality and actual daily behavior measured over 1 week. We then tested if consistency in daily behavior as well as psychological adjustment predicted stronger self-knowledge. We found that behaving more consistently in everyday life was associated with more accurate self-reports, but that psychological adjustment was not. Analogous to interpersonal perception, self-knowledge of personality might be affected by "target-side" factors, like the quality of information provided through one's behavior. However, unlike being a good target of interpersonal perception, self-knowledge does not seem to be related to psychological adjustment.