With such high praise for the Big-Five, one might be tempted to conclude that personality psychologists have dispelled the self illusion – that there is indeed a core personality that defines each of us. However, in seeking to find stable measures of the Big-Five, personality theorists have ignored the variation in the OCEAN scores that can come about by changes in the different situations and roles we adopt.24 For example, students were asked to consider themselves in five roles that that they typically occupy at that time in their life: as a student at college, as a temporary employee working to put themselves through college, as a friend of other students, as a child of their parents and as a romantic partner. They were then assessed on the OCEAN measures which revealed both inconsistency and consistency in their personality. The inconsistency was that individuals varied on their self-assessment of OCEAN measures over the different roles they imagined themselves in but as a group they were consistent on which personality factors were most prominent in each role. On the Big-Five measures, respondents were consistently most Open to experience when they were in the role of the romantic partner, most Conscientious in the employee role, most Extraverted when they were in the friend role, least Agreeable in the student role and most Neurotic in the student role.
These findings indicate that although the Big-Five factors of personality might be reliable within an individual in one role, it can completely change in another, just as the looking glass self predicts. In other words, people are not necessarily consistent in all aspects of their lives. This is why you can live with someone who is fastidious at work when it comes to detail but hopelessly disorganized when it comes to the domestic situation. This influence of context on the self has been shown over and over again. In one classic study, Princeton theology students were asked to present a sermon on the ‘Good Samaritan’ in a building across campus.25 If they were told that they were running late, only one in ten stopped to help a sickly man in a doorway on their way to the meeting compared to six out of ten who were not in a hurry. What were they thinking? Clearly nothing about the message of the sermon. How do they deal with such inconsistencies?
The answer is that we easily use our cognitive dissonance to reframe the events to justify our actions. Alicia Esteve Head may not have been a true victim of 9/11 but what Tania initially did was good for the survivors: Alicia could not have achieved this without becoming Tania. The theology students were aware of the poorly man but it was more important for their calling to deliver a sermon that would have greater impact on more people. It’s all too easy to reframe a story to protect the self-narrative from disentangling when presented with inconsistency.
Why do we create these distortions? Isn’t it better to be honest with oneself, otherwise, we will only end up fooling our selves? For one thing, positive illusions (that we are better than most others) may actually be beneficial to our mental well-being.26 These positive illusions ensure that our self esteem is protected by downgrading our failings (‘Everybody cheats on their tax returns’) to overegging our positive attributes as being special (‘Unlike most people, I have a really creative mind’). Armed with these positive illusions, we feel that we have more control over situations when in fact we have little or none. Remember how the illusion of control inoculates us from the stress of uncertainty?27 Positive illusions mean that we tend to see positive outcomes as a direct consequence of our actions whereas negative outcomes as someone else’s fault.28 This makes us unrealistically optimistic given the trials and tribulations that life can throw at us, positive illusions make us more resilient and willing to carry on.
Maybe this resilience gave us a selective advantage as we evolved. Somewhere back in the mists of time, this way of thinking may have been the difference between the hunter on the Serengeti who was willing to keep trying that bit harder and the hunter who gave up the chase too early and failed to make it back to camp to mate. It is speculation, of course, but believing you will succeed means that sometimes you will, whereas believing that you will fail means that you inevitably do.
Listen With Mother
When we describe our self to others we refer to our past experiences by way of an explanation of who we are and how we have arrived at this point in our life. This seems such an objective exercise that we never really question the truthfulness of our storytelling. However, culture plays an influential role in how we interpret the world around us. It turns out the individualism that is so characteristic of Western thinking and the collectivism of the East shape our autobiographical memories as well.
Qi Wang, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, has shown that childhood memories differ between Eastern and Western cultures with a greater focus on the individual in the West when it comes to recounting past experiences.29 The self-obsessed Western perspective (‘I remember the time I won the class test’) drives our thought processes to focus on an elaborate encoding of moment-to-moment personal events. This is why Western children recall more specific details compared to their Eastern counterparts.30 Those Eastern children who also had demonstrated greater detail for personal memories also scored higher on measures of individualism thus proving that it was not the culture or language that determined autobiographical memory but rather the way they viewed the world.31
The way children remember is partly aided by parents reminiscing with their children. As we learned earlier, we know that if parents talk over events with their young children then the amnesia barrier that is typically reported in two to three year-olds can be pushed back much earlier. This indicates that the framework of interpretation provided by the adults helps the child to make sense of their experiences and form better memories.32 However, studies have also shown that parents from the East and the West differ in the way they reminisce, with adults and show the typical individualistic or collective frameworks when talking to their children about their memories.33
What’s more surprising is that the full content of memories is not always lost either. If you prime individuals from either the East or the West to think more individualistically or collectively, then they recall more personal or group-oriented memories accordingly. This means that the memories are still available: it is just that they are not usually retrieved. The context in which we find our selves even defines how we retrieve memories to describe our inner self – memories that we know are selectively processed. As Sir Frederick Bartlett said, ‘Social organization gives a persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very powerfully influences both the manner and the matter of recall.’34 Even the memories we recall to define our self-story are defined by the groups to which we belong.
A Flight From Reality
For some individuals, their self-story is unacceptable – it’s too much to cope with so they seek to create a new self or at least lose the one they had. Take the case of Gene Saunders who had been experiencing considerable difficulties in his home life and had a huge argument with his eighteen-year-old son who called him a failure. Gene simply packed his bags and ended up 200 miles away in another town where he became ‘Burt’ – a short-order cook who had no memory of his past existence. This kind of memory loss is known as a dissociative ‘fugue’ state, from the Latin for ‘flight’.
‘Fugue states’ typically emerge in early adulthood and not very often after fifty years of age. They usually occur rapidly but also end abruptly and are thought to be a reaction to stress where the individual ceases to acknowledge who he or she is.