The limits of self-knowledge

"There have been times in my life when I felt incredibly happy. Life was full. I seemed productive. Then I thought, 'Am I really happy or am I merely masking a deep depression with frantic activity?' If I don't know such basic things about myself, who does?"
-Phyllis Rose, Women's Lives, Introduction, p. 36

It's pretty uncontroversial to say that there are some things people are not very good at knowing about themselves. It's not easy to know how funny you are, or whether people find you charming. But surely there are some things you know beyond a doubt, like how happy you are or how you're feeling right now. Or do you?

Most of us probably believe that if we know anything about ourselves, we know what we're feeling and thinking. I believed that, too, until I read the work of some philosophers and psychologists who argue otherwise. First, Dan Haybron argues in his new book "The Pursuit of Unhappiness" that we may be wrong not only about what makes us happy but even about how happy we are, right now. His argument is based on very convincing examples and solid psychological research. For example, Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert, two psychologists who study "affective forecasting", have shown that people often make incorrect predictions about what will make them happy.

In an even more extreme move, philospher Eric Schwitzgebel argues that when we introspect about what we're thinking or feeling, we often get it wrong. He also provides extremely compelling examples of times when individuals or entire societies have been woefully mistaken about their own subjective experience. For example, why is it that the common wisdom in the 1950s was that we dream in black and white? How could so many people have been so wrong about their own subjective experience? If we can be wrong about what we're imagining or dreaming, we can probably also be wrong about what we're feeling.

The empirical evidence is also pretty strong. On of the most interesting examples is a study by Shedler et al. (1993, American Psychologist) who asked people to fill out self-report questionnaires of mental health, and then had clinicians assess each person's mental health. For some people, their self-reports matched the clinicians' ratings. That is, some people described themselves as distressed and were rated as distressed by the clinicans, and some described themselves as mentally healthy and were also rated that way by the clinicians. But the interesting group is the group that claimed to be mentally healthy but was described as distressed by the clinicians. This group showed strong physiological signs of distress, and the more they denied being distressed in their self-reports, the more physiogical signs they exhibited. The authors refer to these people as "defensive deniers."

Of course we could argue about whether these people actually knew, deep down, that they were distressed, but just didn't want to admit it to researchers on a questionnaire. But we can all think of people who seem deeply unaware of their own emotional states - people who think they are fine when in fact they are suffering. I think we can probably even think of the reverse - people who think they are suffering when in fact they are relatively happy. It's strange to me that I can believe I know someone's happiness levels better than they do.

After considering these pieces of evidence, I am less sure that we are such experts about our own mental and emotional states. I still think that most of the time, we know our own thoughts and feelings better than other people do, but it is definitely shocking how often we can be wrong.