FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — How do you know who you are or what you feel? These fundamental questions about introspection and self-knowledge are the focus of research by University of Arkansas psychology professor Eric Knowles. Knowles and Lynne Steinberg of Portland State University in Oregon have recently been awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate "Meaning Making and the Processes of Self-Description."

Over the next three years, Knowles and Steinberg expect to improve the way that questionnaires and interviews are conducted and to understand more about the psychological processes underlying introspection. Their results could have ramifications in business, research and politics.

Many researchers, opinion pollers and interviewers assume that people answer questions about themselves by simply inspecting one’s self and then reporting what they find.

"This is not the case," Knowles said. "One’s own character, feelings and self are not the sorts of things that can be clearly perceived."

An individual’s self-reports tend to be constructed at the moment, assembled from imperfect memories rather than from clear self-observations, Knowles said. Sometimes people rely on past characterizations, such as, "I’ve always called myself this," or "My roommate said that I’m that." Although these sorts of labels are consistently reported, they may not be accurate. When no clear label can be recalled, people rely on remembering relevant events and specific instances from their lives.

"These sorts of memories are notoriously biased," said Knowles. People have a nearly infinite number of specific experiences that cover the whole range of character and feeling, he explained. Most people can think of times when they were anxious and times when they were calm, times when they were punctual and times when they were tardy. When someone is asked a question for which they have no readily remembered label, the answer that gets constructed depends on which specific instances happen to come to mind.

In addition to people’s unreliable methods of self-assessment, the mode of questioning can skew a person’s self-report. Knowles’ previous research has shown many ways that an individual’s self-reported answers can be changed based on the context and purpose of the interview and by the way the specific question is asked.

For instance, people are much more likely to endorse a feeling or trait when it is phrased as an assertion such as "Are you calm?" rather than when it is phrased as a negation of the opposite, such as "Are you not anxious?" The simple rephrasing of a question can produce dramatic changes in the self-report.

In one poll 70 percent of the sample reported that they were "calm," while only 23 percent of the same sample reported that they were "not anxious." In this same poll 55 percent of the sample reported that they were "anxious," while only 15 percent of the same sample reported that they were "not calm." Knowles believes that the introspection is not reliable if it gives these different answers.

Knowles’ co-investigator, Steinberg, is a leading expert in the new mathematics of Item Response Theory. This highly technical methodology has revolutionized the way standardized aptitude and achievement tests are constructed. Steinberg’s previous research has demonstrated that simple changes in question wording can dramatically alter the meaning of a question and of the answers that are given. Steinberg and Knowles will apply this methodology to self-report questions to improve the way questions are asked and to better understand how answers are generated.

The researchers’ grant is funded by two different programs at NSF. The Methodology, Measurement and Statistics Program at NSF is funding the portion of the research that investigates the biases in self-reports and how questions might be improved to avoid these biases. The goal of this program is to learn how to obtain more accurate self-report answers by asking better questions. The Social Psychology Program at NSF is funding the portion of the research that identifies the basic processes involved in introspection. The goal of this portion of the research is to understand how people answer questions about themselves.