You don’t (want to) know yourself

by  Tyler Cowen in

Why can't we use a video of ourselves to improve the accuracy of our
self-perception? One answer could lie in cognitive dissonance – the
need for us to hold consistent beliefs about ourselves. People may well
be extremely reluctant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the
face of powerful objective evidence. A detail in the final experiment
supports this idea. Participants seemed able to use the videos to
inform their ratings of their "state" anxiety (their anxiety "in the
moment") even while leaving their scores for their "trait" anxiety
unchanged.

Here is more.  Is it an accident that so many people do not enjoy watching videos of themselves, while at the same time believing they are quite splendid?

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