Know Thyself

Abstract

Self-knowledge has never been a central topic; in empirical psychology. There are pockets of research on self-knowledge in different subdisciplines of the field, but until now there has been little communication between them. I believe that these areas will converge in the next few years into a cohesive study of how people form judgments about their past, current, and future selves and about the accuracy of these judgments. I discuss theoretical developments in this area, the costs of poor self-knowledge, how people can know themselves better, and some of the obstacles to the study of self-knowledge.