Self-awareness - in Psychology

In Psychology

In psychology, the concept of "self-awareness" is used in different ways:

• As a form of intelligence, self-awareness can be an understanding of one's own knowledge, attitudes, and opinions. Alfred Binet's first attempts to create an intelligence test included items for "auto-critique" – a critical understanding of oneself. Surprisingly we do not have a privileged access to our own opinions and knowledge directly. For instance, if we try to enumerate all the members of any conceptual category we know, our production falls much short of our recognition of members of that category.
• Albert Bandura has created a category called self-efficacy that builds on our varying degrees of self-awareness.
• Our general inaccuracy about our own abilities, knowledge, and opinions has created many popular phenomena for research such as the better than average effect. For instance, 90% of drivers may believe that they are "better than average" (Swenson, 1981) Their inaccuracy comes from the absence of a clear definable measure of driving ability and their own limited self-awareness; and this of course underlines the importance of objective standards to inform our subjective self-awareness in all domains. Inaccuracy in our opinion seems particularly disturbing, for what is more personal than opinions. Yet, inconsistency in our opinion is as strong as in our knowledge of facts. For instance, people who call themselves opposite extremes in political views often hold not just overlapping political views, but views that are central to the opposite extreme. Reconciling such differences proves difficult and gave rise to Leon Festinger's theory of Cognitive Dissonance.