While the Barnum Effect reveals the fact that many of our beliefs and attitudes are strikingly similar to others, it is clear that we are all unique individuals. When describing different people, we highlight their most salient characteristics and use different ways of describing them. Even newborn babies are not without features. We are born with different personalities, and as we grow up with continuous interaction with our surroundings, we will be influenced by this to form different patterns of social attachment. In short, we believe in the concept of personality, a set of characteristics that are relatively stable in all aspects of behavior, thinking, feeling, etc., that define us as unique individuals.
The earliest personality tests date back to the ancient Greek period, when the famous philosopher and scientist Theophrastus (c. 371 BC to c. 287 BC) used several words to describe the character of the Athenians. Recently, psychologists have put forward the "Big Five" personality model, which believes that personality is composed of openness, which refers to the degree of willingness to try new things and be imaginative; Conscientiousness, which refers to the degree of self-discipline and restraint; extraversion, which refers to social sociability; agreeable), refers to the willingness to help others; and neuroticism, which refers to the degree of insecurity and self-centered anxiety, which are five separate traits. The initials of the 5 traits are taken together and are referred to as ocean. The Big Five Personality Questionnaire is one of the most commonly used personality tests and is often used to improve people's quality of social relationships, life satisfaction, and job success and satisfaction.
The Big 5 personality test is highly rated, and one may be influenced by the belief that personality psychologists have denied the existence of self-hallucinations and that everyone shares a core personality. However, in order to pursue a stable test method, personality theorists ignore the possible changes in the scores of the Big Five Personality Questionnaire in different contexts and social roles.
For example, one researcher asked students to write about five typical social roles they would play today: college students, part-time workers, friends of other students, parents' children, and lovers. Subsequently, there were continuity and discontinuity of personality in their performance on the Big Five personality test. Discontinuity is manifested in the fact that individual test scores vary with social roles, but the most significant personality factors in each role are fairly stable when the scores are put into groups. In the Big 5 personality test, participants usually scored the highest score in the dimension of "openness" when playing the role of a lover, the highest score of "conscientiousness" when playing the role of a part-time worker, the highest score of "extraversion" when playing the role of a friend, the lowest score of "agreeableness" and the highest score of "neuroticism" when playing the role of a college student. It can be seen that the results of the Big Five Personality Test are reliable for an individual's social role, but as the mirror self-concept shows, once the role is switched, the results can be completely different. In other words, people may behave very differently in all aspects of their lives, and the colleague who is nitpicky at work may be a big lazy at home, leaving the house in a mess and not tidying up.
The influence of the environment on self-concept has been confirmed by many studies. In a classic study, students at Princeton Theological Seminary were asked to go to a school building and give a sermon on "The Good Samaritan." To do this, they need to cross the campus and encounter a patient who has collapsed in the aisle along the way. If they learn they're late, only about 10% of students stop to help the person; And if you are told that there is still plenty of time, the percentage of people you help will rise to about 60%. What were the students thinking when they saw the patient? Obviously, whatever they were thinking had nothing to do with the content of the sermon.
How do they respond to this inconsistency? The seminarians all discovered the sick person, but preaching can help more people and can therefore be considered a more important mission. In order to preserve the consistency of the self-narrative, it is undoubtedly very easy to reconstruct events.
Why do we let cognitive dissonance? Isn't it better to be honest with yourself than to deceive yourself? The first thing to point out is that the positive illusion, the illusion that we are better than the vast majority of people, may improve subjective well-being because it protects our self-esteem by underestimating our shortcomings ("I'm not the only one who evades taxes") and overestimating the strengths ("I'm more creative than most"). With the illusion of positivity, we feel that we are in control of the events around us, even when we are not in control of the course of events around us. This illusion of control can be effective in reducing anxiety. The positive illusion usually means that we are more likely to believe that good results are caused by our own efforts, while bad results are caused by the fault of others. This makes us blindly optimistic, but at the same time more resilient.
Perhaps in the process of evolution and selection, this tenacity gives us an advantage. Hunters living in the Serengeti grasslands of eastern Africa may be divided into two types: those with a positive illusion of mindset and persist in chasing their prey when the hunt is frustrated; The other group often gives up too early, often finding nothing and finding a partner to procreate. This is speculation, of course, but the difference is real: believe that you will succeed and that you will always achieve something at some point; And if you think you're going to fail, bad things will inevitably come.