What we think of ourselves, including our personality traits, is our identity. What others think of us makes our reputation.
Reputations matter, and it also matters whether they match our identities. Although most want to be known as having desirable traits, we also wish to be seen accurately. For example, if people see our traits as we do, their behaviour towards us and our reactions are more predictable for everyone.
For instance, if you think you are a diligent person, but your partner does not, then his or her behaviour towards you may occasionally seem surprising. But if you mutually agree that you are not very diligent, then their same behaviour might not surprise you — even if it doesn't necessarily make you happy. Your reputation for low diligence matches your identity, so all makes sense.
Or, you may think that you don't have the personality traits expected from a leader, but your boss thinks differently and keeps assigning you leadership roles that stress you a great deal. But if your reputation did converge with how you see yourself, you may be assigned different roles, making your job less stressful.
Do people's reputations usually match their identities?
For example, across hundreds of studies, thousands of people have completed personality tests about themselves and have someone else who knows them well also rate their traits. For each participant, this has given researchers two scores for each trait, one based on self-ratings and the other based on the other person's ratings.
How similar are the two kinds of trait scores, based on identity (self-ratings) and reputation (other-ratings), respectively?
They are much more similar than one would expect.
Usually, partners agree on each other's traits slightly better than friends or relatives, although the difference is not large. Spending much of their time together helps people to learn some of each other's quirks that remain less known to others.
So, our partners often see our traits differently than we do, and other people may agree with us on our traits even less often. But this does not necessarily mean that they are wrong about our traits.
In fact, it is often others who see us more accurately than we do see ourselves. This means that others can pick up something about us that we cannot or are not willing to see. Other times, of course, we are the best judges of our personality.
So, we cannot expect others to see us as we do.
Others' perceptions of our traits are often just as accurate or even more accurate than our own, so we can learn from how others see us to better understand ourselves.
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