We’re always telling and retelling our life story. In the process, we may veer into myth-making.
By Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D.
How do you respond when people ask you to tell them about yourself? You might focus on facts, such as where you grew up and when you graduated from school. Or, if the situation demands, you might be more reflective and talk about what it was like growing up in your family or what factors led you to make your major life choices. Perhaps your answers have by now taken on an automatic quality, so you no longer even have to think about your response. As this stock self-narrative takes shape, the details may shift, but it will hold to a core theme or framework.
What Your Life Story Says About You
Your “life story” reflects a personal sense of self or identity. Some experiences you relate to others may have a solid basis in reality, like facts about your family and birthplace. Other elements, though, will reflect your interpretation of key events, as your identity, or at least your sense of it, comes to influence the narrative.
The prominent elements of your identity may emerge from characteristics like your gender, race or ethnicity, age, location, or social class. Their meaning may also be shaped by social norms or expectations. Prominent themes can also be based on the way you’ve come to define your own personality. For example, you may see yourself as an optimist, introvert, or procrastinator. But are those perceptions based on accurate self-reflections, or have they been formed through the myths you’ve created about yourself? In other words, are you really the introvert you believe you are? Research suggests our conclusions may not be as accurate as we imagine.
A study by University of California Riverside psychologist William Dunlop and colleagues examined “the lifeblood of narrative identity” by contrasting outside observers’ ratings of other people’s life stories with the personality ratings that the storytellers made of themselves. Key scenes in a personal narrative may be organized around the ways one’s self-perceived qualities—optimism, introversion, or procrastination—have led to critical outcomes. Because you’re such an “optimist,” for example, you were able to figure out a way to stay positive throughout pandemic lockdowns. Or, because you’re such an “introvert,” you spent much of your time in high school listening to music alone in your room. Such personal myths color the narrative you share with the world, but can other people discern your true personality from these stories?
The researchers asked subjects to provide descriptions of highs, lows, and turning points in their lives and analyzed those stories for prominent motivational themes, such as whether participants perceived themselves as in control of the events in their lives. The participants then rated their own personality traits using a measure based on such items as “I see myself as someone who is talkative” and ‘‘I see myself as someone who is moody.” Then, using the same personality measures, a small team of observers who didn’t know the participants rated their personalities, based only on the content of their stories.
Put yourself in the position of a participant in this study: What highs, lows, and turning points of your life would you share? And how closely do you think they reveal your true personality or, perhaps more to the point, how well do they portray your personality as you perceive it?
In the study, the strangers picked up on many personality traits fairly well; some, like neuroticism, were easy to detect. People who described themselves as high in openness to experience, on the other hand, were likely to tell stories that unintentionally disguised that trait. The raters found those participants’ tales to be unconventional, the researchers believe, because they didn’t jibe with their own life experiences. Busy making sense of the stories themselves, the listeners were less able to identify the personality trait that manifested within them.
Who Knows You Best?
Storytelling is “a ubiquitous feature” of our social interactions, as these researchers noted. We are always telling our story—not only to others but, significantly, to ourselves as well. And if personality truly shapes those stories, and even alters them, the question then becomes how closely the events as we recall them actually conform to the experiences as they played out in real life.
Consider the story you might tell about the day you met your partner. You may believe that you were the one who initiated the contact that eventually led to your forming a relationship—after all, you’re the extravert in the pair. But how does your partner describe those first moments together? With an understanding that your life story may have been powerfully shaped by your vision of your own personality, it’s possible you could come to realize and accept that the situation was actually the opposite of the tale you’ve adopted. With a better sense of how myths about your personality can shape the way you see yourself and the events in your life, you can achieve greater clarity about your identity.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D., is a professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
Originally published at Psychology Today