介绍： The Key to Critical Self-Awareness批判性自我意识的关键
The ancient-Greek commandment Know thyself turns out to be a great modern way to become happier, more empathetic, and more successful.
古希腊诫命 Know thyself 被证明是变得更快乐、更有同理心和更成功的现代伟大方式。
Know thyself is the most famous maxim of ...

介绍： The Key to Critical Self-Awareness批判性自我意识的关键
The ancient-Greek commandment Know thyself turns out to be a great modern way to become happier, more empathetic, and more successful.
古希腊诫命 Know thyself 被证明是变得更快乐、更有同理心和更成功的现代伟大方式。
Know thyself is the most famous maxim of Greek philosophy, carved into stone on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Why? you might ask. The greatest philosophers and writers throughout history are more likely to tell you why not, so foundational is the idea of self-knowledge to a meaningful existence. In his tragedy Thyestes, the Stoic philosopher Seneca writes, “Death lies heavily on him / Who, though to all the world well known, / Is stranger to himself alone.” And as Shakespeare asserts in his comedy As You Like It, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man / knows himself to be a fool.”
认识自己是希腊哲学最著名的格言，刻在德尔斐的阿波罗神庙的石头上。为什么？你可能会问。历史上最伟大的哲学家和作家更有可能告诉你为什么不，因此自我认识的理念是有意义的存在的基础。斯多葛派哲学家塞内卡在他的悲剧《泰耶斯特斯》中写道，“死亡沉重地落在他身上/他虽然为全世界所熟知，/但只有他自己是陌生的。正如莎士比亚在他的喜剧《如你所愿》中所断言的那样，“愚人认为自己很聪明，但智者/知道自己是个愚蠢的人。
What exactly does it mean to know yourself? For neuroscientists, the answer is straightforward enough: Self-knowledge is the combination of two forms of information, direct appraisals (your own self-beliefs) and reflected appraisals (your perception of how others view you). The first generally employs the parts of the brain associated with a first-person perspective, such as the posterior cingulate; the second with regions associated with emotion and memory, such as the insula, orbitofrontal, and temporal cortex.
认识自己到底意味着什么？对于神经科学家来说，答案很简单：自我认识是两种形式的信息的组合，直接评价（你自己的自我信念）和反映评价（你对别人如何看待你的看法）。第一种通常使用与第一人称视角相关的大脑部分，例如后扣带回;第二个与情绪和记忆相关的区域，例如岛叶、眶额叶和颞叶皮层。
This technical definition of self-knowledge concerns only the mechanisms involved and does not say anything about the quality of the information: In effect, if you think you’re a rooster and believe others see you as one too, that counts as self-knowledge. I strongly suspect that the thinkers at Delphi had a bit more in mind than this; they no doubt meant “Know thyself accurately.” That is a much taller order, requiring a huge quantity of truthful information about your interior states—attitudes, beliefs, emotions, traits, motives—over time, in all three of its phases: present, past, and future. Accurate self-knowledge also means avoiding mistakes and correcting illusions, being completely honest with yourself, possessing a reliable memory, and predicting how you will feel and react in the future.
这个自我知识的技术定义只涉及所涉及的机制，并没有说明信息的质量：实际上，如果你认为你是一只公鸡，并且相信别人也把你看作一只公鸡，那也算作自我认识。我强烈怀疑 Delphi 的思想家们的想法远不止于此;他们无疑意味着 “准确地认识你自己”。这是一个更高的要求，需要大量关于你的内在状态的真实信息——态度、信仰、情绪、特征、动机——随着时间的推移，在所有三个阶段：现在、过去和未来。准确的自我认识还意味着避免错误和纠正幻想，对自己完全诚实，拥有可靠的记忆力，并预测你将来的感受和反应。
By this impossibly exacting standard, you don’t know yourself perfectly, and I don’t know myself either. As a matter of fact, we probably all overestimate our capacity for accurate self-knowledge. Many studies have shown how flawed people’s self-assessments are. Psychological experiments have revealed that ratings of one’s own skill and performance are “moderate to meager” in accuracy and are generally less sound than external evaluations. Similarly, scholars have demonstrated that we can’t even predict our future behavior better than others can predict it for us. Cock-a-doodle-do, you’re not who you think you are.
按照这个不可能的严格标准，你并不完全了解自己，我也不完全了解我自己。事实上，我们可能都高估了我们准确自我认识的能力。许多研究表明，人们的自我评估有多么有缺陷。心理学实验表明，对自己的技能和表现的评价在准确性上是“中等到微不足道的”，通常不如外部评价可靠。同样，学者们已经证明，我们甚至无法比其他人更好地预测我们的未来行为。Cock-a-doodle-do，你不是你认为的那个人。
One reason we know ourselves so poorly is that we’re prone to major cognitive errors about what we see happening in our lives. Researchers have found that humans are vulnerable to gross omissions, to the extent that we miss seeing our problems, mistakes, and opportunities. We exist, you might say, in a fog of meta-ignorance: Not only do we not know ourselves; we don’t know we don’t know ourselves.
我们对自己如此了解的一个原因是，我们很容易对生活中发生的事情产生重大的认知错误。研究人员发现，人类很容易出现严重的遗漏，以至于我们错过了看到我们的问题、错误和机会。你可能会说，我们生活在元无知的迷雾中：我们不仅不了解自己;我们不知道，我们不知道自己。
Many things in our lives go unnoticed because we lack language for them and don’t understand them. This is called hypocognition—meaning a deficit of cognition (as opposed to hypercognition). In studies exploring this phenomenon, British participants were more likely to notice cheese than Asian dumplings in their daily lives, while Chinese participants noticed the reverse. A less trivial instance than foodstuffs might involve the way some trauma affects your daily life and who you are, but you are unable to recognize its impact because you have no knowledge about the effects of trauma. (That said, having this knowledge can lead to pitfalls, because learning about trauma can cause a person to incorrectly identify its cause and origin.)
我们生活中的许多事情都没有被注意到，因为我们缺乏语言，也不理解它们。这称为认知减退——意思是认知缺陷（与认知过度相反）。在探索这一现象的研究中，英国参与者在日常生活中更有可能注意到奶酪而不是亚洲饺子，而中国参与者则注意到相反的情况。一个比食物更微不足道的例子可能涉及一些创伤如何影响您的日常生活和您是谁，但您无法认识到它的影响，因为您不了解创伤的影响。（也就是说，拥有这些知识可能会导致陷阱，因为了解创伤会导致一个人错误地识别其原因和起源。
Much of our self-knowledge deficit comes from the willful ignorance—dishonesty, really—that we indulge to protect our self-esteem. For more than a century, psychologists have observed the human tendency to use motivated reasoning to reassure ourselves that our opinions are right, to rationalize bad choices, to ignore information that reflects critically on us, and generally to maintain positive illusions and find ways to avoid facing reality-based negative emotions. So integral to our being are these traits that collectively they have been called our “psychological immune system.” This characteristic rationalizing is almost certainly based in our biology; neuroscientists have shown that people presented with critical evaluations of themselves display signs of stimulus in the brain’s limbic regions associated with threat perception.
我们的自我认知缺陷大部分来自故意的无知——真的是不诚实——我们沉迷于保护我们的自尊。一个多世纪以来，心理学家观察到人类倾向于使用动机推理来安慰自己，我们的观点是正确的，将错误的选择合理化，忽视对我们产生批判性影响的信息，通常保持积极的幻觉并找到避免面对基于现实的负面情绪的方法。这些特征是我们存在不可或缺的一部分，以至于它们被统称为我们的“心理免疫系统”。这种特征的合理化几乎可以肯定是基于我们的生物学;神经科学家已经表明，对自己进行批判性评价的人在与威胁感知相关的大脑边缘区域表现出刺激迹象。
This human capacity to maintain ignorance in the face of potentially negative self-knowledge might make you more comfortable in the short term. But as is true of so much human craving for comfort, it leads to many missed opportunities for greater well-being and success in the long run. Research has shown that more honest self-awareness—of both positive and negative information—improves self-development because you know what to improve. This enables better personal decision making rooted in accurate information, especially when striving toward goals. And experiments in the workplace have demonstrated that good self-awareness enhances job contentment, enthusiasm, and communication. 
这种在面对潜在的负面自我认识时保持无知的人类能力可能会让你在短期内更舒服。但是，正如人类对舒适的渴望一样，从长远来看，这会导致许多人错过获得更大幸福感和成功的机会。研究表明，更诚实的自我意识——无论是正面的还是负面的——都能促进自我发展，因为你知道要改进什么。这使得基于准确信息的个人决策变得更好，尤其是在努力实现目标时。工作场所的实验表明，良好的自我意识可以提高工作满意度、热情和沟通能力。