Can we know more about ourselves through self-reports?
Self-monitoring refers to the ability of an individual to modify their behaviour depending on the different social situations that they find themselves in, just like an actor, who takes on different roles. According to this theory, high self-monitors are able to maintain various self-appearances whereas low self-monitors are more likely to have one consistent personality, independent of the context.
As soon as I learned about this theory, I was very interested in knowing where I would stand in the self-monitoring scale. Primarily because, as an immigrant, I notice that I behave very differently at home than in other social settings (e.g. at school or at work). Taking this into account, I was worried to find that I was high in the self-monitoring scale, because I associated this trait with lack of authenticity and consistency. I also thought that this meant that I favoured pretending over being my own self. Nonetheless, I decided to take a test to know more about this aspect of my personality.
I chose a to complete a self-report test, since this is one of the most common ways of assessing personality traits. I chose a scale developed by Mark Snyder, it contained 25 statements which had to be rated True/False. When completing this test, I found it to be overly simplistic; it was very short and the items were very general and vague. The test only contain only 25 items and the true/false component of the test did not allow me to have any degree to my answers. Nonetheless, I think that making the scale longer would not necessarily make the test more reliable since the participant could get tired of answering the same type of questions and the answers would not be accurate. Furthermore, the statements should be broad, in order to represent the complexity of personality traits. In fact measuring these kind of traits is difficult because of the ambiguity and the inconsistency of personality over time. For example, there were certain items that I would of rated differently in previous years.
After completing the test, the score was sixty percent over average. This was consistent with my expectations, showing that I was a high self-monitor. At first, I thought that this was a very negative trait to have, but, now I see the trait as positive. Arriving at a new country, I had to develop the ability to be more aware of my surroundings to to adapt to a new culture and different situations. From this experience, I think self-reports are a simple and straightforward way of knowing more about our own personalities and can actually give us a different perspective on our actions. This being said, it is important to take the results of some of these tests with a degree of scepticism because there are many tests and not all of them are valid or reliable.
