Self-knowledge is one of the most important things in life, but also one of the most difficult. We’re all prone to blind spots, but the good news is that there are many ways to deepen our self-awareness.

You’d think that you’d be the best judge of your own abilities—after all, you’re the only person who witnesses everything you do. In practice it’s a little more complicated. The evidence suggests that we’re not terribly accurate, and the reason for this is that we tend to judge ourselves by our intentions, while others only see our actions and the resulting impact.

Blind to our blind spots

In 1999, American psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper describing what is now known as the “Dunning–Kruger effect.” Put simply, their finding was this: the understanding you need to be good at something, and the understanding you need to assess your own abilities in that area, are basically the same. This means that if you have a poor grasp of something, you probably don’t realize it. In fact, below a certain level of competence, people often drastically overestimate their abilities, because they’re too incompetent to understand how incompetent they are (see “The Dunning–Kruger effect,”). This isn’t necessarily arrogance: it’s just that when we’re learning something new, we probably don’t know how complex it is yet.

Do we want accuracy?

When it comes to self-knowledge, we usually want conflicting things. On the one hand, we want to have an accurate assessment of ourselves. With that in mind we often fall back on objective measures, such as how we do on tests and in performance reviews, how we compare to our peers, how we’ve performed in the past, and so on. On the other hand, we also want to have a positive assessment of ourselves. Studies suggest that people who have slightly exaggerated views of how great they are tend to be happier and more popular. So, for most of us, there’s a tension between wanting the cold, hard facts and wanting to feel that others respect us and can see that our intentions are good.

the dunning–kruger effect

In a seminal paper David Dunning and Justin Kruger investigated the limits of our self-knowledge. They showed that people who don’t understand a skill generally don’t know that they don’t understand it, because they don’t realize what understanding would involve. In the study, the participants were asked to assess their capabilities, and then undergo a series of tests:

Dunning and Kruger speculated that the skills required to do something and the skills required to judge your own performance have a lot of overlap, and so able people are the most likely to be self-critical. 

Finding your Themes

When collating other people’s feedback (see “Gathering useful feedback,”), look for comments that corroborate similar attributes or behaviors. The information might look something like the example below. In this case, the theme is “level-headedness”: