Surprising gaps in your self-knowledge

Jeremy Dean fre­quently high­lights clas­sic social psy­chol­ogy research that helps us under­stand why we think and act the way we do. He turns to self-schema the­ory and a 1977 study by Hazel Markus for insight into why many of us are bliss­fully unaware of cer­tain aspects of our per­son­al­i­ties. Self-schema refer to the beliefs we have about our­selves. We use them to under­stand and explain our behav­iour, espe­cially when that behav­iour is sig­nif­i­cant to our self-conception. Once we have devel­oped a schema, it is remark­ably resilient. In this study Markus exam­ined women who iden­ti­fied with independent/dependent schema and those who did not (that is, aschematic). Some of the par­tic­i­pants believed they were inde­pen­dent, some did not, and the oth­ers didn’t know or, appar­ently, did not care. The aschemat­ics are the most inter­est­ing cat­e­gory because they did not seam to real­ize whether or not they were inde­pen­dent —  a sur­pris­ing gap in their self-knowledge. Markus’s orig­i­nal paper is avail­able at PyscNET.