Aiding self-knowledge

ABSTRACT

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic.     

Two Russellian Arguments for Acquaintance

Bertrand Russell [1912] argued that we are acquainted with our experiences. Although this conclusion has generated a lot of discussion, very little has been said about Russell's actual arguments for it. This paper aims to remedy that. I start by spelling out two Russellian arguments for acquaintance. Then I show that these arguments cannot both succeed. For if one is sound, the other isn't. Finally, I weigh our options with respect to these arguments, and defend one option in particular. I argue that we have good reason to believe that we can be, and sometimes are, acquainted with our experiences.     

Content externalism and phenomenal character: a new worry about privileged access

Some philosophers argue that the thesis of content externalism, according to which the contents of a subject’s thoughts are in part individuated by environmental factors, threatens the standard idea that a subject can know the contents of her thoughts without empirical investigation. It is typically assumed, however, that this thesis does not threaten another common idea about privileged access: that a subject can know the phenomenal character of her experience–its “what it’s like” aspect–without empirical investigation. That is, even if content externalism is true and does imply that a subject cannot know without empirical investigation the contents of some of her thoughts (e.g., her thoughts about water), surely she can know without empirical investigation what it’s like for her to be having whatever experience she is having. I argue that if content externalism threatens privileged access to content (I do not discuss whether it does), then it also threatens privileged access to phenomenal character. My argument does not involve claiming that phenomenal character is itself externally individuated. Rather, it depends on two other claims: (1) that introspective access to phenomenal character is conceptual; and (2) that standard arguments for content externalism suggest that some phenomenal concepts are externally individuated.     

Ordering our world: The quest for traces of temporal organization in autobiographical memory

An experiment examined the idea, derived from the Self Memory System model (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), that autobiographical events are sometimes tagged in memory with labels reflecting the life era in which an event occurred. The presence of such labels should affect the ease of judgments of the order in which life events occurred. Accordingly, 39 participants judged the order of two autobiographical events. Latency data consistently showed that between-era judgments were faster than within-era judgments, when the eras were defined in terms of either: (a) college versus high school, (b) academic quarter within year, or (c) academic year within school. The accuracy data similarly supported the presence of a between-era judgment effect for the college versus high school dichotomy.     

The effect of career interventions designed to increase self-knowledge on the self-concepts of adolescents

This paper reports a study that used a quasi-experimental design to examine if a career intervention designed to increase self-knowledge enabled self-discovery or self-construction, determined by the structure of the personality inventory used. This study, situated within the theoretical model of Markus’s research in self-schemata (1977), used instruments that measured the Big Five personality factors. Results showed that after only one exercise designed to increase self-knowledge, high school students in the experimental group elaborated “self-schemata” that encompassed the five dimensions corresponding to the structure of the instrument used. Findings suggested that the self-knowledge tool constituted a sort of structured “looking glass” in which young people saw themselves reflected according to the dimensions in the inventory used.     

Knowing your heart and your mind: The relationships between metamemory and interoception

Humans experience a unified self that integrates our mental lives and physical bodies, but many studies focus on isolated domains of self-knowledge. We tested the hypothesis that knowledge of one’s mind and body are related by examining metamemory and interoception. We evaluated two dimensions of metamemory and interoception: subjective beliefs and the accuracy of those beliefs compared to objective criteria. We first demonstrated, in two studies, that metamemory beliefs were positively correlated with interoceptive beliefs, and this was not due to domain-general confidence. Finally, we showed that individuals with better metamemory accuracy also had better interoceptive accuracy. Taken together, these findings suggest a common mechanism subserving knowledge of our cognitive and bodily states.     

Parenting in relation to child and adolescent vocational development

Processes of child and adolescent vocational development include acquisition of knowledge, beliefs, and values about work options and requirements, exploration of interests that will be relevant for occupational interest development, development of academic aspirations, self-efficacy, expectations, and attainment. These elements serve to provide preparation for entry into a range of occupations and provide for the establishment of vocational aspirations, occupational self-efficacy, expectations, planning, and attainment. Parenting occurs within a family context influenced by a myriad of factors, including availability of financial capital, human capital, social capital, child agency, work-family interfacing, family roles, family structure, and the historical conditions affecting parents. These family contextual factors promote our understanding of differences in parenting in relation to child and adolescent vocational development. Far more complex than specific steps to entering the labor market per se, child and adolescent vocational development includes the interfacing of parenting and developmental processes.     

Bridging the gap between explicit and implicit measurement of personality: The questionnaire-based implicit association test

This study presents the questionnaire-based implicit association test (qIAT), a method that resembles the assessment procedures of self-report scales and allows an implicit assessment of constructs measured by such instruments. The qIAT measures the speed of association between ordinary questionnaires’ items (i.e., short statements rather than single words) and true versus false self-related sentences. Participants completed self-report measures of all Big-Five domains and the qIAT that measured extraversion. The qIAT implicit extraversion score showed good levels of internal consistency and it correlated with explicit extraversion but not with other explicit scales, thus supporting the convergent and discriminant validity of this measure. It also predicted a criterion behavior, and this prediction was incremental to self-report assessment of the same set of items. The qIAT opens the door for the indirect assessment of numerous psychological phenomena measured by existing self-report scales.     

Meta-perception for pathological personality traits: do we know when others think that we are difficult?

The self allows us to reflect on our own behavior and to imagine what others think of us. Clinical experience suggests that these abilities may be impaired in people with personality disorders. They do not recognize the impact that their behavior has on others, and they have difficulty understanding how they are seen by others. We collected information regarding pathological personality traits--using both self and peer report measures--from groups of people who knew each other well (at the end of basic military training). In previous papers, we have reported that agreement between self-report and peer-report is only modest. In this paper, we address the question: Do people know that others disagree with their own perceptions of themselves? We found that expected peer scores predicted variability in peer report over and above self-report for all 10 diagnostic traits. People do have some incremental knowledge of how they are viewed by others, but they do not tell you about it unless you ask them to do so; the knowledge is not reflected in ordinary self-report data. Among participants who expect their peers to describe them as narcissistic, those who agree with this assessment are viewed as being less narcissistic by their peers than those who deny being narcissistic. It therefore appears that insight into how one is viewed by others can moderate negative impressions fostered by PD traits.     

Evaluating the predictive validity of personality trait judgments using a naturalistic behavioral criterion: A preliminary test of the self-other knowledge asymmetry model

We tracked 87 participants over two days using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR). Coded variables included expressions of mood, amount of talking in various situations (e.g., with one other person, with a friend, etc.), locations, and behavioral markers of the Big Five. Collection of self-, informant-, and stranger-ratings on markers of the Big Five allowed for a unique test of the Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model. Although effect sizes were modest, there was evidence for the validity of both self- and informant-ratings across most trait dimensions. Stranger-ratings showed evidence of validity in the domain of Extraversion. Predictions derived from the SOKA model were partially supported, though more research with larger samples is needed to provide stronger tests of SOKA.