 41. What Do We Know When We Know Ourselves? 843
and 1980s provides much fodder for this 
model, as do models of personality judgment 
(especially Funder’s [1995] realistic accuracy 
model).
What are the informational limits on self- 
knowledge? One important piece of infor -
mation that the self lacks is the visual per -
spective from which to observe one’s own 
behavior (Robins & John, 1997a, 1997b). 
Although we have access to our own facial 
expressions, posture, and so forth, from our 
kinesthetic sense, we have to infer how these 
facial and body movements look to an ob -
server. Our lack of familiarity with how our 
own behavior looks from the outside can 
be painfully clear when we watch videos of 
ourselves or see ourselves in photographs.
Another informational obstacle is the sa -
lience of our thoughts and feelings. Com -
bined with our lack of objective information 
about our overt behavior, the salience of our 
own thoughts and feelings may detract from 
the accuracy of our self-views, because we 
are overwhelmed with internal information, 
with little external information to coun -
terbalance it. Specifically, when trying to 
take stock of our own behavior, it may be 
difficult to discount how we felt and what 
we were thinking, and focus only on what 
we did. For example, imagine that Clau -
dia is anxious but feels very warm toward 
Leo. She intends to act warmly toward him, 
and is thinking and feeling warmth, but her 
anxiety prevents her from manifesting that 
warmth behaviorally. If we asked Claudia 
how warmly she acted toward Leo, she might 
be unduly swayed by her thoughts, feelings, 
and intentions, and not place enough weight 
on her actual behavior.
Many motivational forces are likely at 
play as well; after all, humans are subject to 
all kinds of motivations, perhaps especially 
when they are thinking and reasoning about 
themselves (Robins & John, 1997a). Indeed, 
self–other agreement tends to be lower for 
evaluative traits than for neutral traits (John 
& Robins, 1993), arguably because people 
are motivated to process evaluative infor -
mation about themselves in desirable ways. 
There is also some evidence that people pro -
cess potentially negative information about 
themselves in shallow ways (Sedikides & 
Greene, 2009). Perhaps the most famous 
bias we attribute to self-  perceptions is the self- enhancement bias. As many introducto -
ry social psychology textbooks will tell you, 
self- enhancement is an almost-  universal 
bias. Taylor and Brown’s (1988) highly 
cited paper argues that self-  enhancement is 
typical and adaptive for people. Since then, 
controversy has erupted over whether self- 
enhancement dominates other self-  related 
motives (Swann, 2012), whether it is constant 
across cultures (Heine, Lehman, Markus, & 
Kitayama, 1999), and to what extent there 
are individual differences within cultures 
(Chung, Schriber, & Robins, 2016; John & 
Robins, 1994; Robins & Beer, 2001).
Do People Know Their Personality?
Knowing Our Traits
What do people know about themselves? 
Our fairly recent summary of the litera -
ture revealed that the links between self- 
perceptions of personality traits and people’s 
reputations, their behavior in and outside of 
the laboratory, and their life outcomes tend -
ed to yield moderate correlations, ranging 
from .20 to .40 (Vazire & Carlson, 2010; see 
also Back & Vazire, 2012; Vazire & Solo -
mon, 2015; Vazire & Wilson, 2012; Wilson 
& Vazire, 2015). The strongest effects tend 
to be observed when a person’s reputation is 
the accuracy criterion. For example, across 
all levels of acquaintanceship, meta-  analyses 
have found that people’s self-  reports strongly 
converge with their reputations on Big Five 
traits (mean correlation of .55; e.g., Con -
nolly, Kavanagh, & Viswesvaran, 2007) and 
moderately converge with their reputation 
on personality disorder traits, which are in -
herently more evaluative (mean correlation 
of .39; Klonsky, Oltmanns, & Turkheimer, 
2002). Effects are somewhat weaker when 
behavior is the accuracy criterion (mean cor -
relation of .25; Vazire & Carlson, 2010). For 
example, in one study, there was an average 
correlation of .34 between self-  reports of the 
Big Five and laboratory behavior (e.g., body 
language, tone; Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 
2009), while another study using the EAR 
to record audible behavior in daily life (e.g., 
time spent socializing, swearing) revealed an 
average correlation of .27 among significant 
effects (an estimate that is biased from the 
selection of effects based on statistical sig -