Over 5,000 total participants in their investigative studies. Most people believe they are self-aware, but only 10-15% of participants fit the criteria for it.
There are two types of self awareness (which is important because different definitions have been used throughout its research history):
- Internal self-awareness is how clearly we see our own values, passions, aspirations, environments, reactions, and impact on others.
- External self-awareness is how clearly we see how others view our values, passions, aspirations, environments, reactions, and impact on others
- They assumed there would be a correlation between the two (those higher in one would be higher in the other), but they found no relationship between them.
Experience and power were found likely to hinder self-awareness: "seeing ourselves as highly experienced can keep us from doing our homework, seeking disconfirming evidence, and questioning our assumptions"
- More experienced managers were found to less accurately assess their leadership effectiveness... and more significantly overvalued their skills.
- Researchers proposed this could be attributed to lack of feedback from higher ups, or lack of constructive feedback from subordinates.
- On similar vein, found that the leaders evaluated as most effective commonly sought critical feedback.
Introspection doesn't always improve self-awareness — but "the problem with introspection isn't that it's categorically ineffective, it's that most people are doing it incorrectly".
- "Why" is often seen as the guiding question to introspection. But, more often than not, it leads people to craft narratives based off of what they know rather than considering and diving into what they don't know.
- In qualitative sessions with participants evaluated as self-aware, the word "why" appeared less than 150 times, whereas "what" appeared over 1000 times. What focuses more on reality, why is more speculative