Becoming the real you: Do we become more authentic as we get older?
By Christian Jarrett
Do you think you are closer to your “true self” today than in the past? If so, is this a work in progress? Will the you of the future be even more authentic than you are today?
A pair of US psychologists recently put these kind of questions to over 250 volunteers across two studies, to find out if there is a general pattern in the way that we think about the development of our true selves.
Reporting their findings in Self and Identity, Elizabeth Seto and Rebecca Schlegel found there is a tendency for us to see ourselves as becoming progressively more authentic through life. “If these reflections are at all reflective of how people feel in real time,” they concluded, “it is possible that people believe they will be the closest they have ever been to who they really are when they reach the end of their lifetime.”
Seto and Schlegel started out by looking at the near past, present and future. They gave 125 students (mostly 18 to 19-year-olds) a definition of the true self:
Your TRUE SELF is made up of the characteristics, roles, or attributes that define who you really are – even if those characteristics are different than how you sometimes act in your daily life.
Then they asked the students to indicate how much overlap there was between their true self and their self when they graduated high school, their self today, and their self as they will be at the end of the current semester. There was a clear trend for the stu...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: BPS Research Digest Tags: Personality Source Type: blogs