BPS Research Digest reports on a study illus­trat­ing our appar­ent inabil­ity to read insights into our per­son­al­i­ties from watch­ing a video of our own body lan­guage. We are, how­ever, quite adept at mak­ing reveal­ing insights on oth­ers from sim­i­lar videos, sug­gest­ing we have a sort of “ego­cen­tric blind spot”.

Why can’t we use a video of our­selves to improve the accu­racy of our self-perception? One answer could lie in cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance — the need for us to hold con­sis­tent beliefs about our­selves. Peo­ple may well be extremely reluc­tant to revise their self-perceptions, even in the face of pow­er­ful objec­tive evidence.

In my mind I am link­ing this with an arti­cle from The Naked Speaker per­suad­ing you to video your speeches so that you don’t miss out on valu­able feed­back; some­thing I haven’t done for the few speeches I have given and a piece of advice I def­i­nitely plan on implementing.