It comes as no sur­prise to hear that we are poor at per­ceiv­ing how oth­ers view us and are poor at recog­nis­ing the true per­son­al­ity traits of those we observe, but it’s the extent to which this is true and meth­ods we can use to over­come these ‘per­son­al­ity blind spots’ that I find interesting.

When peo­ple are asked how long they think their roman­tic rela­tion­ship will last, they’re not very good at esti­mat­ing the right answer. Their friends, it turns out, fare far bet­ter. But if you ask peo­ple how sat­is­fied they are in a rela­tion­ship, their rat­ings accu­rately pre­dict how long they’ll stay together. In many cases, we have the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion to under­stand things as they are—but our blind spots don’t allow us to take it into account.

After look­ing at some of our biases that make this so (e.g. the illu­sion of trans­parency and the spot­light effect) and what traits we are able to dis­cern in our­selves and in oth­ers with some accu­racy, the arti­cle goes on to sug­gest that the best way to learn more about our­selves is to solicit feedback.

How you’re seen does mat­ter. Social judg­ment forms the basis for social inter­ac­tion itself. Almost every deci­sion oth­ers make about you, from pro­mo­tions to friend­ships to mar­riages, is based on how peo­ple see you. So even if you never learn what you’re really like, learn­ing how oth­ers per­ceive you is a worth­while goal.

The solu­tion is ask­ing oth­ers what they see. The best way to do this is to solicit their opin­ions directly—though just ask­ing your mom won’t cut it. You’ll need to get feed­back from mul­ti­ple people—your friends, cowork­ers, fam­ily, and, if you can, your ene­mies. Offer the cloak of anonymity with­out which they wouldn’t dare share the bru­tal truth.