Realness is a core feature of authenticity. Christopher J. Hopwooda et al. Journal of Research in Personality, March 13 2021, 104086. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2021.104086
Highlights
• Authenticity is a multidimensional process with costs and benefits.
• Authenticity processes have been obscured in recent research.
• Realness is a tractable, measurable, and core component of authenticity.
• Being real is adaptive but not always agreeable.
Abstract: We established realness as the relatively stable tendency to act on the outside the way one feels on the inside, without regard for proximal personal or social consequences. In nine studies, we showed that realness is a) a core feature of individual differences in authenticity, b) generally adaptive but largely unrelated to agreeableness, c) highly stable, d) reliably observable in dyadic behavior, and e) predictive of responses to situations with potential for personal or social costs. Informants both perceive agreeable motives in real behavior and recognize that being real can be disagreeable. We concluded that realness represents an important individual difference construct that is foundational for authentic social behavior, and that being real comes with both costs and benefits.
Keywords: authenticitytransparencyrealnesscongruencepersonality
18. Discussion
At the moment, the world is awash in “fake news”, citizens are routinely manipulated by politicians who do not mean what they say, and social media platforms incentivize virtue signaling and punish straightforwardness. Although being “yourself” is often extolled in modern society, it comes with social risks. It is these moments of social risk that provide perhaps the most valid test of whether a person is actually being real: a person who is only real when it pays off is not really real at all.
This complexity is emphasized in classical psychological theories about authenticity and related concepts (congruence, genuineness, transparency), yet contemporary research uses measures that are strongly related to agreeableness, and which tend to mix content that is central to authentic behavior with content that is more peripheral. We sought to identify, distinguish, and validate the tendency to be real, the core individual difference variable underlying authentic personality processes, which we define as doing on the outside what one feels on the inside regardless of the proximal social consequences.
Realness may be a particularly important individual difference variable within certain domains of social behavior. For instance, being real may be both harmful and beneficial for politicians, but for citizens, it is a key characteristic of trust (Rosenblum et al., 2019). As such, both actual demonstrations and (potentially inaccurate) perceptions of realness are nearly always an important consideration in the political sphere. Related, standing up to or criticizing powerful people and institutions to promote social justice is socially risky, by definition. People who have been made famous for doing so (e.g., Joan of Arc, Sitting Bull, Colin Kaepernick, Thomas Paine, Rosa Parks, William Tell, Henry David Thoreau) strike us as prototypically real – and they have historically experienced both the costs and benefits of this trait. To the degree that being real is an important ingredient for making the world a better place, understanding and promoting realness at the individual level may contribute to a more just society. At the same time, people who both hold and express hateful, racist, and divisive beliefs are also being real. As such, the social value of realness may depend on the health of those inner qualities that support it, such as self-awareness and capacity for reflection.
Realness may be particularly important in close relationships, such as psychotherapy, romance, or parenting. Indeed, we would hypothesize that, all things equal, most people would rather have a close relationship with someone who is real than with someone who is not. Again, however, we would expect that realness would be particularly valued in close relationships when it is supported by internal capacities for empathy and personal reflection. This notion is captured by the idea that people generally prefer a friend whose “heart is in the right place”.
These speculations point the way to future research that will benefit from our generation of a unidimensional model of realness. In these studies, realness was relatively stable, observable, predictive of contextualized social behavior, positively associated with adaptive functioning, and largely unrelated to concerns about being agreeable vs. antagonistic, as predicted. These results have implications for understanding individual differences in an important pattern of social behavior and may help clarify disconnections between classical theories and contemporary research on authenticity.
18.1. Realness and Authenticity
Authenticity has captured the attention of theorists and researchers for decades, but it is a highly complex construct that has proven difficult to study and around which no scholarly consensus has emerged (Hicks et al., 2019). The authenticity literature is somewhat disjointed, with measures that are similar but not identical, and in which theory and research have parted ways in important respects (Baumeister, 2019). Moreover, our results suggest that existing measures deviate from classical theories about authenticity in being strongly related to agreeable personality characteristics.
Based on our literature review, we concluded that this was a result of two main factors. The first was that existing measures seem to capture some non-specific social desirability variance that contributes to discriminant validity issues with respect to agreeableness-related traits and behaviors. The second was the effort to account for multiple internal and external features that give rise to authentic behavior, even if they are supportive but not essential. We understand authenticity as a relatively complex, multi-component, within-person process involving dynamic connections between internal states and external behavior. Many of the existing authenticity measures were based on theories that explicitly referenced such dynamic, multi-component, within-person processes. These processes included some features that seem central to authenticity (behavioral expressions of inner states), as well as other features that may support authentic behavior but in a somewhat non-specific way (e.g., self-awareness).
To be clear, we think that studying authenticity and all of the processes that support it is an important endeavor for social scientists. However, we concluded that, rather than trying to capture all of the features involved in complex within-person authenticity dynamics using measures designed to detect between-person differences, it would be better to begin by isolating a core between-person variable that is central to authentic behavior. A firm model of individual differences in realness can help facilitate authenticity research by distinguishing those individuals most likely to be real in a given situation, and by providing a variable that can be used to study the within-person contours of real behavior across time and situations.
We found that realness content was present in existing multidimensional measures of authenticity, but that it was also obscured in measures with scales that focused on either internal characteristics such as capacities for personal awareness, accurate perception, and reflective function, or external characteristics involving explicit social behavior. While such characteristics, in combination, may support authenticity, it is not being aware or behaving in a certain way in isolation that provides evidence that someone is authentic – it is the correspondence between these inner and outer states. This correspondence could be labeled congruence or transparency, terms which directly indicate the connection between inner and outer states. However, the second obscuring factor was that item content on existing measures tended to have a strong positive valence. A consequence of this positive valence is that authenticity measures tend to be strongly correlated with agreeable traits. However, as described in detail above, this pattern of correlation departs significantly from classical theories of authenticity. An authentic person should be so whether or not there are potential negative consequences. In fact, situations in which the potential for negative consequences are present provide the truest tests of authenticity. We refer to this tendency to be transparent or congruent without regard for social consequences as realness. By realness, we simply mean that when a person reveals everything they think, feel, and want on the inside to others in a way that is direct and straightforward, they are being real; when they conceal such features, they are being fake.
To be clear, realness does not solve all of the problems with authenticity. A significant hurdle is that the validity of realness scores depends on the rater having a valid account of inner states. Generally speaking, the self is the best source of information about inner states, although individuals may have not accurately report them for a variety of reasons. Observers and informants, in contrast, may not share all of the self’s blind spots, but they also do not have direct access to the target’s inner states. It may be possible to create experimental approaches to test the relevance of self-insight to some degree (e.g., by manipulating inner states directly via priming techniques), which would be an important direction for future work.
One specific way in which realness may be different from authenticity occurs when a person has two motives. For instance, a person may disapprove of someone else’s behavior but also value social harmony, and expect that expressing that disapproval would create disharmony. It is not clear whether expressing disapproval or not would be the most authentic behavior in this situation. However, the most real response would be to both express disapproval and also express the desire to maintain social harmony. To the extent that either of these inner states or motives are concealed, the response is not real (but still could potentially be authentic in at least some sense). Future work focused on the how people express themselves when their motives conflict would be informative about both realness and the broader concept of authenticity.
18.2. Correlates of Individual Differences in Realness
We found that individual differences in realness were strongly related to variation in existing measures of authenticity and correlated with high levels of extraversion, openness, conscientiousness, honesty, dominance, internal locus of control, and interpersonal competence. Realness was negatively associated with neuroticism, a range of maladaptive personality characteristics, interpersonal problems, self-monitoring, and fear of negative evaluation; and it was largely unrelated to agreeableness, although the pattern of results was complicated, as we will discuss in more detail below. Overall, this pattern of correlations suggests that people who are more real tend to have more adaptive personalities. This is consistent with classic theories that postulate that realness is an outgrowth of psychological maturity (e.g., Horney, 1951; Maslow, 1968). However, as discussed above, this may depend on the level of health of inner characteristics such as self-awareness and capacity for reflection and emotion regulation. In other words, it may be the case that realness is adaptive among healthy, prosocially motivated individuals, whereas it is maladaptive or even pernicious among people who are less well-developed or antisocial. Indeed, we note that children are often seen as characteristically “real”, despite not having developed personalities. Given that both classical theory and our data imply but do not prove that realness is an outcome of healthy maturation, genetically-informed developmental data would be useful for better understanding the sources of individual differences in the construct (Wagner et al., 2020), and future research should seek to distinguish being real from the healthy inner capacities that support personal and interpersonal adaptation.
Although we conceptualize realness as an individual difference construct, we also wish to emphasize that it is importantly different from the big five or analogous personality traits. Personality traits such as those in the big five indicate the tendency to behave in a certain way, relative to others, across time and situations. For instance, people who are high in extraversion are more extraverted than most other people in most situations. In contrast, realness is a contingent construct, in that it is only possible to test whether someone is real when social risk is present. As such, it is most telling to observe realness when the relevant costs are present. In an individual difference measure such as the RS, this can be specified in the items themselves. In observational or experimental work, this would have to be taken into account in other ways, such as the manipulation of scenarios so as to create social risk. This would be a fruitful avenue for future research because it would help inform the mechanics of real behavior, and help distinguish it from other kinds of traits.
18.3. Realness and conceptually similar constructs
Some of the modest correlations between realness and conceptually similar constructs are important for understanding the difference between realness and other aspects of authenticity. For example, honesty as conceptualized on the HEXACO is a relatively instrumental trait with significant positive valence (e.g., If I knew that I could never get caught, I would be willing to steal a million dollars (reverse), I wouldn't use flattery to get a raise or a promotion at work, even if I thought it would succeed). In contrast, the social costs of realness are embedded in the items of the RS, which also focus on being real for its own sake, as opposed to the instrumental utility of the alternative. To be concrete, HEXACO honesty might be better at capturing the tendency (not) to use subterfuge in order to get something or impress someone, RS realness might be better at capturing the tendency to act according to inner experience regardless of personal or social consequences. It would be useful for future research to examine a wider range of correlates than in this study, to further elaborate the nomological net of realness.
Self-monitoring is another conceptually similar but somewhat broader and empirically distinct construct. Self-monitoring focuses on behavioral expression, and particularly non-verbal expressions (Snyder, 1974). Moreover, it the absence of self-monitoring can function to be either real or non-real. For instance, according to Snyder (1974), one of “the goals of self-monitoring may be to communicate accurately one's true emotional state”. In other words, for a person who is characteristically deceptive or fake, an absence of self-monitoring would tend to contribute to being less real. Overall, we see self-monitoring as capturing some aspects of being real in the sense that the absence of self-monitoring is thought to produce a tight, non-reflected connection between internal states and outward behavior, but that the concept also some of the internal features depicted in Figure 1, and may not necessarily be associated with being real in any particular situation. The relatively modest correlation between realness and self-monitoring in study 3 is consistent with this interpretation.
Disinhibition, a third conceptually similar construct, is a broad trait involving impulsive behavior. It tends to be associated with negative outcomes such as externalizing psychopathology (Patrick et al., 2013), and tends to decrease normatively with age (Vaidya, Latzman, Markon, & Watson, 2010). There is a similarity between being real and being disinhibited, because both of these concepts involve a connection between inner states and behavioral expression. However, disinhibition is broader and more maladaptive, and thought to reflect a kind of psychological immaturity or underdevelopment. For instance, whereas disinhibition is a strong predictor of substance use (Iacono, Malone, & McGue, 2008), we would not expect realness to be related to substance use. Instead, we would expect people who are real to use substances if they feel like them, and not use substances if they don’t, whereas we would expect disinhibited people to experience an urge to use substances that they find difficult to control. Disinhibition has been conceptualized as low conscientiousness (Clark & Watson, 2008); in this study the RS was consistently albeit modestly negatively correlated with conscientiousness, supporting the empirical distinction between realness and disinhibition.
18.4. Realness and Agreeableness
One of the main motivations for this research was our observation that classical theories of authenticity emphasized the potentially disagreeable aspects of realness (e.g., Maslow, 1968) whereas existing measures of authenticity had uniformly positive correlations with individual differences in agreeable behavior (e.g., Pinto et al., 2012). We concluded that this discrepancy may be due, at least in part, to social desirability. Generally speaking, authenticity and agreeableness are both positive characteristics, and thus items designed to assess them might contain non-specific positive valence, creating a correlation between the two constructs (Baumeister, 2019; Jongman-Sereno & Leary, 2016).
Comparisons of validity correlations from self, informant, and peer-nomination data were used to disentangle social desirability effects. The self-report correlation between realness and agreeableness was negligible. The correlation between informant-rated realness and informant-rated agreeableness was positive, which may suggest that informants would generally prefer their friends to be real. This interpretation is consistent with assertions by theorists like Rogers (1961) regarding the interpersonal importance of being real. However, when given a forced choice between a real and a polite friend, both of whom the rater likes, informants rated the polite friend as substantially more agreeable than the real friend. This pattern can be summarized as follows: people who are more real do not tend to see themselves as more agreeable, but people tend to see realness in their friends as more agreeable than otherwise, while also recognizing that it is less agreeable to be real than to be polite.
Longitudinal and experimental work would be useful for further disentangling realness from disagreeableness, from the perspective of both the self and others. Further refinement of the measurement of these constructs may also be useful. Specifically, it may be that realness is experienced as warm or communal in a deep sense, even if it is not agreeable in the more superficial sense. Colloquially, people often experience gratitude when others are “real” with them, presumably because they attribute that realness to some kind of deep or lasting concern. Given the possibility that perceived agreeableness and realness reflect different levels of psychological functioning, it may not make sense to measure them with the same kinds of tools (Leary, 1957), and it may be profitable to develop techniques that distinguish deeper, motivational aspects of behavior from more visible, superficial aspects.
18.5. Realness, Context, and States
One interesting finding from recent research is that people tend to report feeling more authentic when they are their best selves, not their most typical selves, in social situations (Beer and Harris, 2019, Fleeson and Wilt, 2010). This speaks to the valence effect discussed above – people want to believe they are their best selves deep inside, which includes being authentic (Hicks, Schlegel, & Newman, 2019), and there is a fairly consensual model of what the best self is (Bleidorn et al., 2019). This may help explain why ratings of authenticity and ratings of adaptive personality traits, including agreeableness, converge at a very general level.
But a different and perhaps more interesting behavioral question is, in the moment when the crisis strikes, are you real (Sedkides et al., 2019)? Being real in this sense is not the same thing as behaving according to one’s typical trait levels, being the same way across all situations, or being the best version of yourself. As inner feelings may change dramatically across situations or roles, then behavior must correspondingly change, given that realness is defined by the congruence between inner and outer states. Realness is consistency with how one feels in a given moment, which itself might change across situations, and which may deviate from typical traits. A related question is, what if a person has an internal conflict and their behavior only corresponds to one side of that conflict? We would argue that this would be only partly real, and to be fully real, one should outwardly express both aspects of their internal conflict.
Longitudinal and contextualized, multi-method data are needed to test these kinds of hypotheses. We did not consider contextual factors such as relationship closeness or hierarchy (Chen, 2019), the match between internal and external states (Eastwick, Finkel, & Simpson, 2019), relationship dynamics (Finkel, 2019), internal conflict (Strack & Deutsch, 2004), or the level of support in the environment (Ryan & Ryan, 2019) affect realness. We anticipate that, like other traits, realness will be strongly impacted by both individual differences and situational dynamics. In this set of studies, we focused on individual differences and learned very little about situational dynamics. By generating a valid measure of realness that can be administered as a self-report, informant-report or behavioral observation tool, we have we have provided a method for capturing this core feature of authentic behavior and set the stage for work on the manifestation and dynamics of realness states in actual social contexts.
18.6. Limits to Generalizability
These studies were conducted exclusively in WEIRD samples in two countries. It would be important to examine how well the concept of realness generalizes to other cultures in terms of content validity, measurement invariance, and patterns of correlation before generalizing these results to people, in general. Even within these countries, efforts were not specifically made to examine how realness functions across important sub-segments of the population (e.g., different ethnicities or social classes). This is a related and important area for future work. It seems plausible that, within WEIRD countries, people with different backgrounds are more likely to exhibit realness than others. For instance, it may be that people with more historical or personal privilege experience relatively less social risk in being real than people from underrepresented or underprivileged groups. Extending from this idea is the possibility that certain known groups might be particularly high (e.g., counselors) or low (e.g., thieves) in realness. Studies sampling such groups would provide a novel means of validating and studying realness.
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