Learn more about personaldevelopment with this collection
How to create a positive work environment
Conflict resolution strategies
Effective communication in the workplace
The true self is what people believe is their essence. It's the core of what makes you you; if it was taken away, you would no longer be you anymore. People believe that their true self is the parts of them that are fundamentally morally good.
But it almost certainly doesn't exist. What we know from neuroscience and psychology doesn't provide evidence for a separate and persisting morally good true self buried deep within.
39
246 reads
MORE IDEAS ON THIS
There might not be a satisfying answer but it doesn't really matter because of the impact it has on us.
We are in the Age of Authenticity, where ‘be yourself’ is the defining advice in life, love and career.”
John Locke, the English philosopher, thought that the most important compone...
38
157 reads
It could be because it's beneficial for well-being and cooperation, but it could just be how we think about everything. We have a tendency to reflect on a thing's positive traits; this is called
36
110 reads
Though we all believe in a morally good true self, our definition of what's moral varies—and we define the “morally good” part of our true selves based on our own values.
Even when we strongly disagree with someone, it doesn't necessarily conflict with a belief in the true self, since the ...
33
143 reads
People attribute positive traits to the true self, and negative traits to something else. And while we usually think about ourselves differently than others, we think that other people’s true selves are morally good too.
37
147 reads
A study found that when subjects were asked to think about criminal offenders, people were more willing to say that a person’s true self is morally bad.
The more people think that a person’s true self is morally bad, the more they support retributive punishment. The idea that the true self...
31
121 reads
If having a morally good true self is core to our identity, then acting immorally isn’t just doing the wrong thing—it threatens our sense of identity and causes a lot of distress.
In response, some people might respond to the distress by denying that they're acting immorally and getting de...
32
63 reads
A belief in the morally good self can give a person hope to keep trying in poor circumstances.
Alternatively, it could be fuel for a kind of existential crisis if your life doesn’t match up to your “true self.”
More pressure to "be yourself" or "find yourself" can add to that stress—...
35
64 reads
We can start with the idea that people “have some essential drive to be morally good, while emphasizing that work needs to be done to realize that with some reliability in practice.”
Acknowledging our belief in a good true self can be a way to appreciate our capacity for goodness. Then, we ...
32
59 reads
Related collections
More like this
What we know from neuroscience and psychology, the true self doesn't exist. There is no evidence for a separate morally good true self deep within a person.
But the ides of a morally good true self still plays an important role, such as how we understand others' behaviour,...
When people are asked which actions are in alignmen...
People that believe that they have a morally good true self care about morality as core to their identity. If they then behave immorally, it threatens the sense of their identity.
People might respond to the threat by denying that they're acting immorally ...
Read & Learn
20x Faster
without
deepstash
with
deepstash
with
deepstash
Access to 200,000+ ideas
—
Access to the mobile app
—
Unlimited idea saving & library
—
—
Unlimited history
—
—
Unlimited listening to ideas
—
—
Downloading & offline access
—
—
Personalized recommendations
—
—
Supercharge your mind with one idea per day
Enter your email and spend 1 minute every day to learn something new.
I agree to receive email updates