842 vIII. EMERGING  ISSuES AND  NEW  DIRECTIONS
tion: To evaluate whether a person’s self-
view of his or her personality is accurate, 
the best approach is to compare his or her 
self-view to (1) how others who know her 
well describe him or her (peer reports); (2) 
how the person behaves in a controlled, di -
agnostic, laboratory-  based behavioral test; 
(3) how the person behaves in his or her ev -
eryday life; and (4) objective life outcomes 
that represent the consequence of many be -
haviors over time. However, another solu -
tion to the criterion problem is to shift the 
target: Instead of asking whether people 
know what they are really  like and trying 
to compare their beliefs to what they are re-
ally like, we can ask whether people know 
how others see them (meta-  accuracy; Kenny 
& DePaulo, 1993). By changing the target to 
a person’s reputation, the criterion problem 
becomes much easier to solve—  simply test 
whether someone’s metaperception (how 
the person thinks others see him or her) 
lines up with how others actually see him 
or her. The criterion (how others see him or 
her) is clear and relatively easy to measure, 
but it also likely reflects what that person is 
actually like. We return to this topic (meta -
perceptions and meta-  accuracy) later in this 
chapter.
The Glass‑Half‑Empty  Problem
Another challenge in accuracy research 
is that asking whether people have self- 
knowledge is not a “yes” or “no” question. 
Surely people’s self-views are not completely 
out of touch with reality (i.e., the correlation 
with criterion measures will not be zero), but 
neither are they perfect (i.e., the correlation 
will not be 1.0). This raises the question of 
how much accuracy is a lot. This depends in 
part on a person’s intuition or expectations 
about how much insight would be an im -
pressive amount. To a cynical person, even 
low levels of self-  insight might be surprising, 
whereas to an optimist, small blind spots 
would be disappointing.
It is even harder to quantify the accuracy 
of people’s self-views because, typically, ac -
curacy is measured using arbitrary metrics; 
that is, we do not usually ask people to es -
timate the absolute levels of their behavior 
(e.g., “How many funny things do you say 
per day?”), but rather to rate themselves on abstract, Likert-  type questions (e.g., “How 
much do you agree with the statement ‘I 
see myself as someone who is funny’?”). 
Thus, we cannot express people’s level of 
self- knowledge in absolute terms when the 
criterion is actual behavior. The summary 
statistic for self-  knowledge will typically be 
a correlation describing the degree of cor -
respondence between people’s abstract self- 
judgments and the criterion measure.
So how do we decide what counts as a 
large correlation (high accuracy)? One way 
to solve this problem is to use an informative 
benchmark. We have proposed that others’ 
knowledge is a good benchmark to determine 
whether the accuracy of self-views is high or 
low; that is, we compare the accuracy of self-
views to the accuracy of close others’ views 
(Vazire & Carlson, 2010, 2011). This essen -
tially answers the question; do people know 
themselves better than others know them? 
When self-views are less accurate than close 
others’ views, people fail to see things that 
others can see, which suggests that there are 
serious blind spots in self-  knowledge. This 
pattern also raises interesting theoretical 
questions about what motivational or infor -
mational processes account for these blind 
spots. If self-views are more accurate than 
close others’ views, there are bright spots 
in self-  knowledge, which suggests people 
have privileged access to valuable informa -
tion about themselves. Notably, one major 
limitation of using others’ knowledge as a 
benchmark is that close others’ views cannot 
be used as the criterion for accuracy.
Evaluating Self -Knowledge: 
Theoretical  Considerations
Why might people have bright spots and 
blind spots in self-  knowledge? Vazire’s 2010 
paper outlines the “self–other knowledge 
asymmetry” (SOKA) model, which presents 
two core factors that influence the accuracy 
of self- and others’ perceptions: informa -
tional processes and motivational processes. 
This model builds on previous work show -
ing that self- and others’ perceptions differ 
both in the information that is available and 
in how information is processed (e.g., An -
dersen, 1984; Andersen & Ross, 1984). The 
actor–  observer literature from the 1970s 