Christoph Heine at Psyche:
We found that people varied meaningfully in the strength of their self-insight motive. While it seems to matter a great deal to some people, others do not care about it that much at all. Perhaps you have noticed this among your friends and colleagues, with some of them being far more self-curious than others.
This led us to wonder what kind of a person has a greater self-insight motive. Is it the spiritual seeker who dresses in linen and practises yoga half of the day, or is it the manager who drives an expensive car and lives in a big house, suddenly experiencing a midlife crisis, asking if there is more to life than this? Of course, these are comical stereotypes so we couldn’t answer those exact questions. However, we did give our participants some established personality questionnaires and looked to see how other aspects of personality correlated with their scores on the self-insight motive questionnaire. Rather than throwing a bunch of statistics and correlations at you, I will tell you what we found out about the typical self-insight motivated ‘persona’. Think of it as the kind of profile that marketing folks often create to imagine their typical customer. Just remember, this is a major oversimplification of what were more complex relationships in our data.
We found that the typical persona with strong self-insight motive is a relatively young and educated individual who’s curious, open to new experiences, and concerned about maintaining their close relationships. Picture someone who constantly seeks ways to improve themselves. Finally, we also found that part of the persona is wanting to be admired by others.
More here.
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