TOK

“Can other people know us better than we know ourselves”

According to me, most people believe that they know
themselves better than anyone else knows them. However, a
complete picture of what a person is like requires both the
person’s own perspective and the perspective of others who
know him or her well. I think I know myself the best but there
are other external factors playing role in this. Many claim our
parents know us the best because they can easily predict our
mood looking at our face. Some of these blind spots are most
likely the result of a lack of information, whereas others are the
result of motivated distortions in our self-perceptions. Perhaps it
is for these reasons that others can perceive some aspects of
one's personality better than oneself. This is especially true for
traits that are highly desirable or unfavourable, as motivational
factors are more likely to distort self-perceptions. As a result,
much can be learned about a person's personality from how
others perceive him or her. Future research should look into
how people can use the knowledge of others to improve their
own.
I personally think that the point of views of others really
describes our personality in some way. I sometimes think my
close friends, cousins, parents and siblings know me better
than myself because they have solutions to my problems
whereas I don’t. For me they can be referred as the backbones
of my life because whatever I have achieved today in my
teenage is all because of their support and care. I also believe
a lot of our traits we have are the ones we have got it from our
family whether it be emotions, fun and joy. Humans have long
been advised to "know thyself," but new research suggests we
may not know ourselves as well as we think we do. While
individuals may be more accurate at assessing their own
neurotic traits, such as anxiety, it seems friends, and even
strangers, are often better barometers of traits such as
intelligence, creativity and extroversion. Individuals know
themselves better from emotional and anxiety point of view
where as our friends know us well from the intelligence and
social point of view. I have recently discovered with many of my
past experiences in TOK classes that I haven’t discovered
many traits of mine, we had a lot of sessions In TOK classes
such as we had to make mind maps relating to what are our
likes and dislikes during this, I realised many of my likes and
dislikes are similar to my sister’s likes and dislikes. The TOK
classes have been very interesting and joyful and the
discussions we had were very friendly with our teachers, I was
able to connect myself to all the serious discussions we had in
our classes related to our language, religion, culture and our
hobbies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY- https://journals.sagepub.com/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/