846 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
The question of whether people have self- 
knowledge of their personality states also 
has profound implications for theories of 
personality and self-  knowledge. Specifically, 
in his classic article “What Do We Know 
When We Know a Person?”, McAdams 
(1995) argues that knowing someone’s traits 
is the “psychology of the stranger,” and that 
to know someone on a deeper level, one has 
to understand the contextual variation in his 
or her personality. It follows, then, that to 
really know ourselves, we have to have in -
sight into how and when our personalities 
fluctuate. Indeed, in order to have this kind 
of deeper self-  knowledge, it is not enough to 
know when our personalities are fluctuat -
ing, we need to understand the causes—  or 
triggers—  of those fluctuations. This is con -
sistent with dynamic models of personality 
(e.g., Mischel & Shoda, 1995), which posits 
that people differ not only in their typical 
levels of personality traits but also in the 
contextual factors that cause them to devi -
ate from their typical levels. Some of us may 
be particularly disagreeable when interact -
ing with our families, whereas others are 
uniquely disagreeable at work. Thus, the 
deepest kind of self-  understanding would 
be to understand the “psychologically active 
ingredients of situations” that cause these 
idiosyncratic fluctuations. The most self- 
enlightened person is the one who knows 
not only his or her typical level of agreeable -
ness and when they are deviating from that 
typical level, but also why they are deviating 
from that typical level. Indeed, it is easy to 
see how that kind of self-  knowledge could 
be extremely useful for making life decisions 
(e.g., anticipating which job, partner, or life -
style is most likely to elicit the best patterns 
of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors for one -
self).
Knowing What You (Do Not) Know
We wanted to briefly discuss the possibility 
that people are aware of their blind spots. In 
research, we ask people to make judgments 
of themselves and of others, but we rarely 
ask how confident people are in these judg -
ments. This oversight is important, because 
people may not be confident in or act on the 
judgments they provide in the laboratory. 
Indeed, when people are asked to report on how confident they are in their metapercep -
tions, they seem to have some insight into 
when their metaperceptions are accurate for 
people they just met, as well as for people 
they know well (Carlson & Furr, 2013; 
Carlson, Furr, & Vazire, 2010). Put another 
way, people who were less accurate seemed 
to realize they were less accurate. Also, 
when asked to report on how biased their 
self-views are, people’s reports of their bi -
ases seem to be accurate when the accuracy 
criterion is their reputation (Bollich, Rogers, 
& Vazire, 2015); that is, when people were 
asked to evaluate how biased they were, 
their reports of bias were similar to what 
close others would say about them. Thus, in 
closing our discussion of what people know, 
while there are important blind spots in self- 
knowledge, sometimes people have some in -
sight into the limitations of their knowledge.
Is Self -Knowledge  Adaptive?
Thus far, we have reviewed whether and 
when people might have self-  knowledge, but 
an equally important question is whether it 
is in people’s best interest to seek out self- 
knowledge. On the one hand, people who 
know what they are like should make better 
life choices and relate to others in better ways 
than do people without self-  insight. Thus, 
people with more self-  knowledge, including 
knowledge about negative qualities, should 
have greater psychological well-being and 
enjoy better-  quality relationships than peo -
ple with less self-  knowledge. On the other 
hand, it is also possible that people who see 
the best in themselves experience better psy -
chological health and relationships. Indeed, 
ideas such as “Fake it till you make it” re -
flect the notion that by convincing ourselves 
that we are great, we can better convince 
others, and perhaps one day, achieve our 
goal of greatness (Trivers, 1985).
The debate about the adaptiveness of 
self- knowledge and self-  enhancement is on -
going, partly because of the criterion prob -
lems we outlined earlier and partly due to 
other methodological issues (i.e., whether 
enhancement is relative to objective criterion 
or to a hypothetical average person; Chung 
et al., 2016; Kurt & Paulhus, 2008). How -
ever, most of our own work suggests that 