Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [128]
But such work is not always easy. Even if you are nothing like a bat and a great deal like me, there’s still an insurmountable difference between the way I understand you and the way I understand myself. I might understand you by analogy to myself, but I cannot understand you as a self. A self, by definition, can only be understood as such from the inside. That understanding isn’t necessarily accurate; as we’ll see in the next chapter, self-knowledge, too, can fail us. But it is very different from understanding someone from the outside, which is the only way I can understand other people.
This fundamental difference in perspective has an important practical corollary. Because we know other people only from the outside, we assume they can be known from the outside; we think we can understand people reasonably well based solely on their words and deeds. At the same time, because we know ourselves from the inside, we think we can only be known from the inside.* Each of us lives, day in and day out, with an intricate internal reality: with the fluctuations of our moods, the complexity of our emotions, the ongoing committee meeting in our brain, the things we think but never say out loud. As a consequence, it’s easy to feel that no one can grasp our true nature without access to this rich and dynamic inner world.
One mundane but striking example of this comes from a study conducted by Emily Pronin, the Stanford psychologist, with three of her colleagues. In the study, subjects were given word fragments (such as “_ _ N N E R” and “B _ _ T” and “C H E _ _”) and told to complete them with the first word that came to mind. Afterward, they were asked to explain, in writing, what they thought their responses revealed about their interests, motivations, and overall disposition. Then they were given the responses chosen by another participant and asked what that person’s answers revealed about his or her character. (For half the participants, the order was reversed: they evaluated someone else’s word choices first and then did the task themselves.) As the chart on the next page shows, the discrepancy between these assessments is both gaping and funny. For instance, the same person who characterized her own choice of words as “happenstance” and felt that they revealed nothing about her inferred the following from another person’s choices: “I think this girl is on her period…I also think that she either feels she or someone else is in a dishonest sexual relationship.”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: A. “I’m almost convinced that these are not at all revealing.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: A. “He doesn’t seem to read too much, since the natural (to me) completion of B _ _ K would be ‘book.’ BEAK seems rather random, and might indicate deliberate unfocus of mind.”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: B. “I don’t agree with these word-stem completions as a measure of my personality.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: B. “I get the feeling that whoever did this is pretty vain, but basically a nice guy.”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: C. “These word completions don’t seem to reveal much about me at all…random completions.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: C. “The person seems goal-oriented and thinks about competitive settings.”
ANALYSIS OF OWN COMPLETIONS: D. “Some of the words I wrote seem to be the antithesis of how I view the world. for instance, I hope that I am not always concerned about being STRONG, the BEST, or a WINNER.”
ANALYSIS OF OTHER PARTICIPANT’S COMPLETIONS: D. “I have a feeling that the individual in question may be tired very