 41. What Do We Know When We Know Ourselves? 845
Knowing Our Personality  States
Do people know when their thoughts, feel -
ings, and behavior deviate from how they 
typically are? In addition to asking whether 
people know what they typically are like 
(self-  knowledge of traits) and how others 
see them (meta-  accuracy), we can also ask 
whether people know how their personali -
ties fluctuate from situation to situation or 
moment to moment.
There is very little research on this topic, 
likely to due to the extreme methodological 
challenges associated with testing it. In ad -
dition to collecting intensive within-  person 
measures of how people perceive their own 
personality states, we would also need to 
collect corresponding intensive within- 
person measures of how people’s personali -
ties are actually fluctuating, independent of 
self- reports. This would allow us to com -
pare how within-  person fluctuations in self- 
perceptions of personality states correspond 
(or don’t correspond) with within-  person 
fluctuations in actual behavior.
Fortunately, new developments in re -
search methods and technology have opened 
the door to this kind of research. To measure 
self- reports, researchers use ESMs. In the 
past, people might have received notifica -
tions from a beeper to complete pencil-  and-
paper reports, but recent innovations with 
smartphones allow researchers to collect in -
tensive self-  perceptions with ease. For exam -
ple, people complete self-  report measures of 
their current states several times a day when 
prompted via text. More recently, tools for 
tracking people’s objective behavior in ev -
eryday life have also been developed. These 
include the EAR, Global Positioning System 
(GPS) tracking, and automatic assessments 
of social behavior using applications that 
can be downloaded on smartphones.
Preliminary research on the accuracy of 
self- reports of personality states suggests 
that they may be quite biased. Specifically, 
Finnigan and Vazire (2018) found that ag -
gregates of self-  reported state personal -
ity are less valid than global self-  reports 
of corresponding personality traits when 
validity is defined as correspondence with 
knowledgeable informants’ ratings. One 
possible explanation for this finding is that 
self- reports of states contain self-bias, just as self-  reports of traits do, but this bias is 
compounded when state measures are aggre -
gated within the person. Regardless of the 
explanation for this finding, it points to the 
importance of directly testing the accuracy 
of self-  reports of within-  person fluctuations.
A more comprehensive test of the question 
of whether people know what they are like 
in the moment was recently published by 
Sun and Vazire (2019). In this study, partici -
pants were asked to self-  report on their per -
sonality states four times per day for 1 week. 
During that week, participants also wore 
the EAR, and the recordings were coded 
to obtain observer ratings of participants’ 
personality states. The correspondence 
between self-  reported and observer-  rated 
personality states can be taken as one clue 
about whether people have self-  insight into 
their personality states (though, as we men -
tioned earlier, the criterion measure—  in this 
case, observers’ ratings—  could be wrong, so 
the results are necessarily ambiguous). The 
results suggest that people have very good 
self- insight into their momentary levels of 
extraversion and conscientiousness. Agree -
ment between self-  reports and observer rat -
ings of neuroticism was much lower, but this 
is likely due to neuroticism being very hard 
to detect from audio recordings. Finally, 
agreement was also low for momentary rat -
ings of agreeableness. The authors interpret 
this finding as suggesting that people may 
not know how rude or kind they are acting 
in the moment, though they acknowledge 
that other interpretations (e.g., that the EAR 
observers lacked necessary context to make 
accurate ratings of state agreeableness) are 
reasonable.
Because there is little existing research in 
this area, it is hard to predict whether peo -
ple will show high levels of self-  knowledge 
of their personality states. It is possible that 
self- knowledge of states may be stronger 
than self-  knowledge of traits. For example, 
a person may not be aware that they tend 
to be disagreeable overall, but they may be 
aware of when they are acting particularly 
disagreeable. Some theories of the self would 
predict that, indeed, it is easier for people to 
see the fluctuations in their own behavior, 
and that the difficult task is seeing the forest 
for the trees (i.e., extrapolating from states 
to traits).