844 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
nificance, but may nevertheless be useful for 
future research; Mehl, Gosling, & Pennebak -
er, 2006). Finally, self-  reports of Big Five 
traits also tend to predict life outcomes such 
as work performance, criminality, divorce, 
and mortality (e.g., Fiedler, Oltmanns, & 
Turkheimer, 2004; Ozer & Benet-Martínez, 
2006; Roberts et al., 2007), but these effects 
are weaker than those observed in labora -
tory and daily life behaviors. For example, 
self- reports are weakly to moderately associ -
ated with occupational success and divorce 
(r’s = .23 and .18, respectively; Roberts et 
al., 2007).
Self- reports are associated with a wide 
range of accuracy criteria that suggest peo -
ple have some insight into themselves, but 
are these effects impressive or important? 
As discussed earlier, rather than focus on 
statistical significance or effect size, we can 
compare self-  knowledge to others’ knowl -
edge to better understand what the upper 
and lower limits of self-  knowledge might be. 
If others’ reports are more strongly linked to 
behavior than are self-  reports, we know that 
higher levels of accuracy are possible. When 
the self and others do not accurately report 
on personality traits, then perhaps expect -
ing self-  knowledge in these domains is ask -
ing too much.
The SOKA model (Vazire, 2010) explic -
itly tested whether and when the self knows 
more or as much as others. Specifically, this 
study compared self- and friends’ ratings of 
personality to how people behaved in vid -
eotaped laboratory exercises (e.g., leaderless 
group discussion, stress tests) and how they 
performed on intelligence and creativity 
tests. Consistent with the SOKA model, self- 
ratings of internal, neutral traits (e.g., anxi -
ety, self-  esteem) were better than friends’ 
ratings at predicting behavior, but friends’ 
ratings of evaluative traits (e.g., intelligence, 
creativity) were better than self-  ratings. 
Other research has shown similar effects. 
Close others are often better than the self 
at predicting very desirable or undesirable 
outcomes, such as college GPA (Wagerman 
& Funder, 2007), relationship dissolution 
(Agnew, Loving, & Drigotas, 2001), psycho -
pathology (Carlson et al., 2013), and coro -
nary disease (Smith et al., 2008).
A very important caveat to self- and oth -
ers’ knowledge findings is that, on average, self- and others’ perceptions are roughly 
equally good at predicting behavior in a 
laboratory (e.g., behavior in a group dis -
cussion; Kolar, Funder, & Colvin, 1996; 
Vazire, 2010, but see John & Robins, 1994), 
predicting real-world behavior (e.g., behav -
ior when out with friends; Vazire & Mehl, 
2008), predicting outcomes (e.g., discharge 
from the military; Fiedler et al., 2004), and 
predicting psychopathology (Carlson et al., 
2013). Taken together, it is likely that we 
experience ourselves somewhat differently 
than others experience us, and that person -
ality psychologists probably need to assess 
both self- and others’ reports to fully cap -
ture what a person is really like.
Knowing How Others See Us: 
Metaperception  and Meta‑Accuracy
Given that we seem to experience ourselves 
somewhat differently than others do, an 
important question is whether we aware of 
how others see us. Our beliefs about how 
others see us are called metaperceptions,  
and a growing body of work suggests that 
metaperceptions of the Big Five moderately 
correlate with the impressions we make on 
others (mean correlation of .38; Carlson & 
Kenny, 2012). Going further, we realize the 
different impressions we make across social 
contexts (e.g., how our friends see us differ -
ently from how our parents see us; Carlson 
& Furr, 2009), and we have some insight 
into how others see us differently from how 
we see ourselves (meta-  insight; Carlson, 
Vazire, & Furr, 2011; Oltmanns, Gleason, 
Klonsky, & Turkheimer, 2005). Indeed, 
self- and metaperceptions are uniquely asso -
ciated with the impressions we make, which 
suggests that while we can see ourselves 
through the eyes of others to some degree, 
we do not always adopt their perspective as 
our own. Yet our perceptions of ourselves 
and of our reputation do not completely 
match our reputations. When self- and 
metaperceptions are entered as predictors 
of a person’s reputation, there are still sig -
nificant aspects of personality that the self 
does not see or report on (Gallrein, Carlson, 
Holstein, & Leising, 2013). Thus, while we 
have knowledge about how others experi -
ence us, we are still blind to some aspects of 
our reputations.