Our understanding of someone’s “true self” is closely tied to our perception of their morality.

A research study showed that our assessment of how deeply we understand someone’s “true self” is proportional to how “moral” we think they are — the relationship is true in both directions. Participants who read passages about people described as having a strong sense of morals rated them as very “knowable”. Similarly, participants who read passages about people who were described as more “knowable” rated them as highly “moral”.

Summary here. Full research here.

Originally published at yourdailyscience.com on April 22, 2017.