I Am Just Like You

A few days back, I wrote about David Dunning's book Self-Insight, which presents a compelling case that there are numerous impediments to self-awareness and that many of these roadblocks are mighty difficult to overcome. I am now on the last chapter, which contains some interesting ideas about how to increase our awareness of how skilled or unskilled we might be at things and our awareness of how others see us.  Dunning points out that a host of studies show that one major impediment to self-awareness is that people see themselves as unique -- usually as superior to others --  when that actually are  not: as more ethical, emotionally complex, skilled, and so on.  Dunning proposes on page 166 that:

"People would hold more accurate self-perceptions if they conceded that their psychology is not different from the the psychology of others, that their actions are molded by the same situational forces that govern the behavior of other people. In doing so, they could more readily learn from the experiences of others, using data about other people's outcomes to forecast their own."

I find this quite fascinating. I believe that the average person would benefit from this perspective, but some industries would suffer -- especially those that have a kind of Ponzi scheme quality where most people fail, a rare successes happens now and then, but no matter what happens, the people who run the system always seem to benefit.  Both casino operators and venture capitalists come to mind.

The implication, however, that if we assume "I am just like you" rather than "I am special and different," or even that "we are all the same," we might make better decisions and learn at others' expense rather than our own strikes me as a lesson that could be quite valuable.  For example, I've been rather obsessed about the virtues and drawback of learning from others mistakes rather than your own (see this post on Randy Komisar and Eleanor Roosevelt), as this question has huge implications about how to teach people new skills and the best way to develop competent and caring human-beings.

Comments

[Mitchell Baker]

One interesting follow-up would be to look at cultures that do not emphasize the "I am special" mentality but instead emphasize role or status-based behavior and see if that adds anything interesting to the analysis.

[dblwyo]

Good comments but a very good post because it draws attention to a serious and significant structural problem in managing HR issues. One of my flashing light moments was when I ended up supervising a co-worker who presented himself as competent but was in fact beyond the opposite and was completely self-delusional. On his assigned tasks he dropped the balls so badly he jeapordized the entire project and left the rest of us scrambling. That's far from atypical. In fact my experience is that 20% of the people are obstacles, about 60% are competent but non-proactive if they have extensive training, a manual and a narrow expertise(asking a contracts administrator to learn marketing operations turned out as a disaster), about 15% are willing to change, adapt and overcome while only 5% are willing to tackle new things.
Then we get to the equivalent problems as you move up the management hierarchy - most people aren't willing to look beyond their noses at how their work fits into the larger picture. That calls for more but some other time.
So how do you address these challenges?

[Courtney]

I have Asperger's Syndrome so my psychology is literally different from the average human being's. However, by knowing this about myself, it has given me tremendous insight into why the behaviors of others seem illogical from my perspective.

In my case, I must assume that I AM special and different so I can understand people who should think "we are all the same". Knowing that I am different has provided great clarification for me.

[Randy]

Excellent observation; thanks!
As a young creative professional in my first supervisorial role, I learned to apply a "flashing yellow light" policy when I observed someone arriving at a solution by a different path than I would have followed, arriving at a different solution than I would have presupposed, or using different techniques to produce.

The "flashing yellow light" told me to:
1. First assume that I had something to learn in the situation;
2. If not, then be grateful for a
"teachable moment" to help course correct;
3. If neither of those, and only then, to help avoid looming catastrophe :) .