What Do People Misunderstand About You?
You know some things about yourself better than anyone. Other things, they know better.
In 2010 a researcher had people rate themselves while friends and strangers rated them too, and found something the usual advice ignores. You are the best judge of your own anxiety, because nobody else can see it. Your friends are better judges of how clever or likeable you are, because those are the traits you have the strongest reason to get wrong about yourself. Nobody has the whole picture, and the gap is not uniform - it is predictable, and it has a shape.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you come across to people who know you reasonably well. This one is more useful the less flattering you are prepared to be.
What it measures
Three kinds of gap between the inside and the outside. Hidden is what you feel that never shows. Misread is what does show but means something other than it looks. Unseen is the part where other people have better information than you do, which is the least comfortable of the three and the most useful.
Based on: Self-other knowledge asymmetry (Vazire, 2010)
Possible results
What stays hidden
What you feel that never reaches the surface.
What gets misread
What shows, but means something else.
What you cannot see
The part where other people have better information.
Common questions
Do other people really know me better than I do?
On some things, yes, and it is quite specific. The research found the self to be the better judge of anxiety and other internal states, because there is nothing visible to go on. Friends were the better judges of traits like intellect - the ones with a strong social value attached, where your own view has a reason to drift. And on extraversion, everybody was about equally accurate, including strangers. So the question is not who knows you better but which parts each of you can see.
How is this different from the first impressions test?
That one is about strangers and speed - what gets picked up in the first few minutes, before anyone knows anything. This one is about the gap that survives being known: the things that are still misunderstood after years, by people who have had every chance to work you out. Different timescale, different mechanism. The first impression is a guess made on thin evidence; the long-term gap is a difference between two vantage points that both have plenty of evidence and cannot see the same things.
What do I actually do about this?
It depends entirely on which bar is high, and the moves are almost opposites. A high first bar closes by saying more - the inside world has no other route out. A high second bar closes by labelling: four words attached to an ambiguous signal, at the time it happens. A high third bar closes only by asking, and by tolerating the answer without arguing with it, which is the hardest of the three and the one that changes most. Doing the wrong one is common and does nothing: explaining yourself more does not fix a blind spot, and asking for feedback does not help if the problem is that nobody knows what you feel.
Sources
- Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self-other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin.
An honest note There is an obvious problem with this test and it is worth stating first: it asks you to report on your own blind spots, and a blind spot you can report is not quite the thing. What the questions can measure is your awareness that a gap exists, which is related to the gap but not the same as it. The honest version of this test would require asking three people who know you, which is exactly what the original research did - and its central finding is well supported: across traits, the self is the better judge of internal states and others are the better judges of traits that carry a social verdict. Two limits. Those studies used groups of raters in controlled designs, and a single friend is a much noisier instrument than a research panel. And the asymmetry is an average across people, not a law about you - some people really are accurate about themselves, and there is no way to tell from the inside which sort you are.
Try one of these next
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