Do we really know ourselves

It was a sunny Tuesday in January, no cloud, 5 degrees. I was sitting in the Brown building, waiting for a consoling session. My name was called, and I was given a pack of questions to fill in. As I was filling in the questions in on the sheet, a question suddenly bumped in to my head and stacked there.

Do I not know myself? This is a question that constantly bothers me. I come to consolation because I don’t know what is going on in me, but self-report questionnaire highly rely on my self-knowledge to accurately portrait my personality and the current situation I’m in.

It sounds like a dilemma.

This leads to my question of to what extent these self-reporting questionnaire actually helps. Are they reliable? Are these tests valid?

I decide to start my research from observing an individual case: my roommate. After consolation, she decided to change her major in order to fulfill her interest and plan for future. The way she explores her interest is by taking a psychology test on Career Cruising.

The questionnaire is constructed by 136 questions, every question has five options from “dislike very much” to “like very much”, and “doesn’t matter” is in the middle as an neutral option. While she is taking the test, several problems comes in her way:

First, some of the question is ambiguous and might be interpreted in very different ways. Such as the “draw” in question “Do you draw precisely?” can be understand both as drawing diagrams or art drawing, which are two very different indicators.

Second, the answer “doesn’t matter” is a very bizarre term and was constantly picked during the test. Later she realized that she choose it under two circumstances: when it’s not important to her, or when she think she can’t unify her behavior because it’s highly situation dependent. If the two circumstances has two different options, her result might alter.

Third, all the questions depends on one assumption: our personality is consistent. However as stated in the study of Daryl Bem(1974), personality is only fixed when people recognize its relevancy. Thus test result might vary a lot accordingly due to recent events.

In conclusion, self-reporting test’s reliability and validity are sometimes shaking as they might be interpreted in different angles. It also depends highly on a person’s self knowledge which might vary overtime.

Sometimes, we think we know ourselves, but do we?