Personality: The Three Faces Of You

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Personality: The Three Faces of You

Many books have been written about personality and the complex
ways in which it influences our interactions with others. There are
theories of how personality develops, how it differs from person to
person, and how it reveals itself in one’s behavior. However, regardless
of the particular theory of personality you follow, there are three
common ways that each person’s personality can be experienced. All
are relevant to understanding psychopathic manipulation, because
many psychopaths are astute students of human nature and, unlike
most people, are willing to use what they have learned for their own
selfish purposes. They may not all have textbook learning about personality
theory, but they have an intuitive feel that they put to good use. They use their knowledge of personality to control your view of them and ultimately to control you.

To recognize how psychopaths control the opinions others have
of them, it is important to understand the differences among three
points of view. First, there is the internal or private personality—the
“me” that we experience inside ourselves. Second, there is the projected
or public personality, sometimes called the persona—the “me”
that we want others to see, the “self” that we present to others when
we are in public. And, third, there is the attributed personality or reputation—
the view, based on what we say and do, that others form of
our personality.

Our private or inner personality is complex and made up of our
thoughts, attitudes, perceptions, judgments, drives, needs, preferences,
values, and emotions. Our private self also includes the products
of our imagination, including fantasies, hopes, and ambitions,
all of which are idealized visions of who we are and who we want to
be. In many people, the private self consists of positive traits and
characteristics, and we believe that these positive self-perceptions
represent who we are. We want others to appreciate these traits, and
we can get very upset if someone suggests they are not true. For example,
if you believe that you are a loyal, compassionate person, then
you would be concerned by anything someone said about you that
suggested otherwise.

Our private self also includes personal characteristics we don’t
like, which, typically, we don’t want others to see. While we may try
to improve some of these characteristics, we would just prefer to ignore
some others altogether. These unpleasant or darker traits include
harmful things we do to people, illicit or violent thoughts and
fantasies we have, and our general insecurity, greed, and illusions
about ourselves and our place in the world. Getting angry and losing
control, being excessively rude or annoying to others, acting
coarsely to those around us, and being depressed or despondent are
examples of things we might do that reflect the darker (but normal)
side of our personality. During a typical day, we spend quite a lot of
mental and emotional energy building up and enhancing the positive
or bright side of our private self and minimizing or controlling
the dark side. In fact, to preserve our internal emotional balance and
to avoid excessive anxiety, we need to believe that our positive selfevaluations
are accurate, and we will invest energy in fighting
doubts as they arise.

The goal for much of the therapy, coaching, and counseling that
people seek is to resolve the internal psychological conflicts between
the bright and dark sides of the personality. Well-developed and researched
psychological tests can help shed some light on our hidden
traits. A competent mental health professional can facilitate exploring
these parts of the psyche, while providing insights that help us
integrate the parts into a unified whole. As long as our self-image is
mostly positive, and we can accept the less positive side of ourselves
as a normal part of being human, we will value our individual “self”
and conclude that we are okay people. Feeling all right about oneself
comes across as self-confidence and inner strength, two traits valued
in our society.

Your public self, or persona, on the other hand, is how you want
those around you to see “you.” Your persona is a subset of your private
self—a carefully edited version, to be sure, of your private personality
that you reveal to others in order to influence how they see
(and judge) you. Anyone who has ever tried to make a positive impression
on another—perhaps on a date or during a job interview—
understands how difficult it can be to maximize the positives and
minimize the negatives of your personality. Despite our best efforts
to control what we reveal to others, we do unintentionally reveal private
personality traits to others on occasion, but, overall, our persona
reflects the personality we want others to see.

This brings us to the third view of personality; how others view
and describe us. This is the reputation others assign to us based on
what they see, hear, and experience when interacting with us. Unfortunately,
despite our best efforts to present a positive persona, people
will form their own opinions, both correct and mistaken, based on
what we do, how we look, the clothes we choose to wear, and
whether they agree with our values and beliefs as filtered through
their own biases, stereotypes, likes, and dislikes. The filters other people
use to evaluate us can, to varying degrees, distort the picture folks
get of who we really are.

The problem is that all of us form first impressions of others
very quickly, perhaps during the first seconds of meeting someone
for the first time. Once formed, people solidify their first impressions
by filtering out new information that contradicts their early impressions,
and preferentially let in information that is supportive. The
people we like right off become even more likable, and those we
don’t care for remain so. For example, you may feel an affinity for
those of a similar religion or political party and generalize this to
other aspects of their makeup. Feeling affinity for someone makes us
more accepting of the things we like about him or her, and more forgiving
of those things that we might dislike. Consistency between a
person’s words and deeds also plays an important role in reinforcing
his or her reputation. Consistency leads us to see people as honest—
even if we don’t totally agree with their views—while inconsistencies
we notice may leave us wondering about them. All of these filtered
perceptions can cause problems, of course, if we misjudged the persona
of a person when forming a first impression.

To summarize our model of personality so far: We have a private
self made up of positive traits we value and want others to appreciate,
and a collection of negative traits and characteristics we prefer to
keep to ourselves. When we interact with others, we present a carefully
crafted persona or public self comprised of a selection of traits
and characteristics from our private self that we want others to see.
Sometimes we may exaggerate a few of our positives just to make an
impression or to exert influence on others. Occasionally, material
from our private, dark side slips into the public view without our being
aware; at other times, we may be aware of traits that slip through,
and we feel embarrassed or guilty. Finally, our reputation is the “personality”
by which others come to know us. Ideally, our reputations accurately reflect the psychological traits we want to show, but, infact, observers filter what we present through their personal biases,prejudices, and preconceptions. This may cause them to form an incorrect
impression of our personality.

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Fortsättning.....

Your reputation may not coincide with the public self you are
trying to project, or the internal personality you personally experience.
In an ideal world, all three views of the personality would line
up. We would be happy with our private self, feel comfortable revealing
it through our persona, and feel safe in the knowledge that those
with whom we interact come to know us for who we truly are. But
the world is not such a perfect place and people are not perfect beings.
The best that we can hope for in most social situations is that
our persona reflects the things we want to share with others, and that
observers are open-minded enough that their attributions about us
and our resulting reputation are accurate.
Sales representatives, human resources staff, and other professionals
who spend much time interacting with people become good
at judging personality traits and characteristics. Psychologists and
psychiatrists, of course, are trained in doing personality assessments
and can usually see a bit more of the underlying personality dynamics.
So do poker players looking for “tells” leaked by other players.
But to their credit, psychopaths have the deserved reputation of being
good judges of the personalities of others—perhaps because they
work hard at it—and have the uncanny ability to project the most effective
persona, depending on the situation, to get what they want.
How do they do it? To psychopaths, your face, words, and body language
are your autobiography, printed in large type.