HOW YOU SEE YOURSELFYou can’t read your own body language
If our self-knowledge is somewhat limited then perhaps we could
gain a truer picture by watching video footage of ourselves and
analysing our own body language. Sadly, it seems that this is
not the case. Whereas observers can watch that same video and
make insights into our personality, we appear to have a persistent
ego centric blindspot.
Wilhelm Hofmann at the University of Würzburg and colleagues
made this finding after asking dozens of undergraduate students
to rate how much of an extravert they were, using both explicit and
implicit measures. The explicit measure simply required them to say
how talkative they were, how shy and so on. The implicit measure
was the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which allocates categories
to different response keys on a keyboard. The idea is that we’ll be
quicker to respond if two categories that we associate in our minds,
such as words relating to the self and words related to socializing,
share the same key. The IAT was used as a way to tap subconscious
self-knowledge. As typically happens in this kind of research, there
was a mismatch between the participants’ explicit and implicit judge-
ments of their own personalities – they might describe themselves as
outgoing while their IAT responses suggested they saw themselves as
more of an introvert (see also p.177).
Next, the participants were tasked with recording a one-minute
television commercial for a beauty product. The participants then
watched back the video of themselves, having been guided on how to
use non-verbal cues to judge how extraverted or introverted a person
is. Having seen themselves on video, the participants then rated their
own personalities again, using the explicit measure.
To cut a long story short – the participants weren’t able to use the
videos to improve their self-understanding. The participants’ extraver-
sion scores on the implicit test still showed no association with their
post-film explicit ratings, and there was no evidence either that they’d
used their non-verbal behaviours (such as amount of eye contact with
the camera) to inform their self-ratings.
In striking contrast, outside observers who watched the videos
made ratings of the participants’ personalities that did correlate with
those same participants’ implicit personality scores, and it was clear
that the observers had used the participants’ non-verbal behaviours to
help them make these personality judgements.
Why can’t we use a video to improve the accuracy of our self-
perception? Cognitive dissonance – our discomfort at holding incon-
sistent beliefs about ourselves – could once again be to blame. People
may well be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even
in the face of powerful objective evidence.