Why Have Differing Public and Internal Characters?
There are three core reasons to not use your internal character as your external character.
- Your Public and Internal Characters are Not the Same Type of Thing
Your internal character is primarily used as a cheat sheet for your brain. Your internal self-image helps you decide how to react emotionally to stimuli and what information to dismiss without careful analysis. In contrast, your public character is what other people use to categorize you within their heads and determine what place you should have in their lives.
Asking why you cannot just use your internal character as your public character is like asking why Microsoft doesn’t just write word processing application code on the box in which Microsoft Wordis sold. While the code is Microsoft Word, it is not helpful to others to see the code when deciding how to use Microsoft Word in their lives. When selecting word processing software, people prefer to see pictures of word document editing interfaces and their features, which better communicate the way they interface with Microsoft Word.
- Most People Lack Time the Understand Your Inner Character
It is narcissistic to assume people will (and should) invest the immense time and mental processing power needed to understand the inner you. You are an intricate, nuanced person. It would take someone years to comprehend you in all your beautiful complexity and yet the vast majority of people you will ever meet in your life will expend less than an hour of concerted focus getting to know and understand you. By insisting on displaying the “real you” in public, you are essentially demanding that people make an immense investment of time, thought, and emotion to understand you.
If we use the Microsoft Word analogy, this would be like a Microsoft employee arguing that if people “really cared about the product” they would take the time to read the code and understand it, when all the customer really cares about is how that product relates to them and what role it will serve in their lives, which is what the product’s box art and advertisements convey.
If you present a well-crafted public persona (rather than your inner model of self), rest assured that some people will still come to know the “real you.” It is reasonable to expect people like your spouse and closest friends to get to know your more nuanced inner self. Having a nicely packaged public persona does not prevent these people from getting to know the “real you.” In fact, a well-constructed public persona may expand the audience of people who take the time to get to know the real you by enticing more people to want to know you better.
- Internal Self-images Come Across as Forgettable and Bland in Public
Trying to publicly present your inner model of self will make you come across as bland and forgettable. When you attempt to portray the inner “you” in public, all people will be able to process in the five minutes (and that’s being very generous) they spend thinking about you will not appear very different from anyone else trying to portray their inner selves (as opposed to a specially crafted public persona). Most normal, well-adjusted people in any given culture trying to show their “real selves” look 80% identical to everyone else trying to portray their real selves and thereby come off as bland.
Imagine that Microsoft Word and its competitors printed the source code for their respective word processing programs on their boxes. From the consumer’s perspective, they would all look about the same. Even if someone did take the time to try to understand the code, the boxes would still end up looking indistinguishable, as huge swaths of each program are likely to be quite similar. In much the same way, two people who live in the same culture will almost certainly have 80%+ overlap in terms of who they “really are.”
If instead of just publishing the source code on the box, software developers decided to publish a feature list, there would still be almost no differentiation between the various word processing software options—there would likely be at least 70%+ feature overlap (spell check, fonts, margins, etc.). This is the same with people. Even if you just try to give strangers a more easily digestible version of who you are, you will come off as very similar to anyone else who exists within your cultural context (e.g., you are a nice, clever, funny, loving person who is loyal to your friends and hardworking, but who likes to kick back and relax every now and then).
As with box art advertising word processing software, you need to focus on what is different about you. In the same way it would not make sense for Microsoft Word marketers to focus on spell check in advertisements and on box art (unless it had the best spell check feature in its class as reviewed by an independent study), it would not make sense for you to advertise how funny you think you are unless it is widely accepted that you are uniquely funny (e.g., you are a professional comedian).
However, this “box art” analogy only goes so far. While it does effectively illustrate that:
- The purpose of your public personality is to help people contextualize what place you have in their lives,
- That the vast majority of “the real you” will overlap with others in your peer group, and
- The way most people will distinguish you from others is by specifically highlighting the ways you differ from others, and these characteristics may be far from what you would consider to be your core personality traits.
The analogy does not appreciate the unique manner in which our brain processes individuals.
In everything from facial processing to speech, the way our brains process social interaction is vastly different from how we process generic stimuli, such as vision of a grassy field or the sound of traffic. Our brains use a series of ingrained pathways to take the enormously complex information about someone—collected over just few moments of exposure—and create a simple, realistically storable, mental model of who that person is. By appreciating how this is done, we can create public versions of ourselves that are easier for people to interact with.