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There are a lot of reasons to think you’d be the best judge of you. After all, you’ve known you longer than anyone else (except, perhaps, your parents). You’ve spent more time with you than anyone else. You see yourself in all kinds of situations, from solitary reflective moments in your home to dazzling parties surrounded by friends and strangers.
But you’re also very biased; you have a vested interest in seeing yourself as decent and competent, and not evil or inept. When it comes to traits that matter to our self-esteem, we tend to have positive delusions—meaning on these dimensions, others see us more accurately than we see ourselves. “Other men’s sins are before our eyes,” said the Roman philosopher Seneca. “Our own are behind our backs.” You rarely get to participate in gossip sessions about yourself, and you have only limited access to how people react to you and what they say.
“It’s difficult to judge your own intelligence or other traits you have a lot invested in,” explains Vazire. When people are asked to rank their own intelligence, their ratings don’t match their scores on IQ tests. (When researchers ask our friends or others who know us well, on the other hand, they’re actually fairly good judges—because they have a less clouded lens.) The same goes for honesty. Such positive delusions about the self are often adaptive, boosting our confidence and helping us recover more quickly from rejection.
By the same token, we’re not very aware of how attractive we are—not just because we have an interest in seeing ourselves as beautiful, but also because we only see ourselves through our own eyes. Ditto for body language. “It’s just so salient to other people,” explains Vazire. “It’s a matter of physical perspective—your own body isn’t in your visual field. So in addition to the psychological advantage of being more objective, other people also have a physical advantage in detecting your overt behaviors.”
If you do know how irritating or attractive you are, it’s probably via direct or indirect feedback from others. At work you may find that, despite setting everyone straight on a few issues when you last served on a committee, you haven’t been asked to serve on any since then. If the attributes are positive—such as the fact that everyone likes you or that you’re very attractive—people are more likely to come straight out and tell you about them. If they’re negative, they may forever remain unknown to you.
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