What does Little Map believe about "knowing yourself"?

Long-term studies find two things at once. First, your rank among people your age becomes more fixed from childhood to adulthood, levelling off around early adulthood (Bleidorn et al., 2022). Second, most people become steadier in mood, more conscientious, and easier to get along with as they age (Roberts et al., 2006). These are averages, and everyone moves at their own pace.

Like a group climbing a mountain: the order among them rarely changes, but the whole group is going up.

People can also change on purpose, a little. In one study, college students set goals like "become more outgoing," and after sixteen weeks their self-reported scores rose slightly (Hudson & Fraley, 2015). A later study found the scores moved only for those who actually did the matching behaviors (Hudson et al., 2019). These studies used self-report questionnaires, and how long the change lasts is still being studied.

A meta-analysis of fifty years of twin studies found that, on average, about half of the differences between people across many traits can be explained by differences in genes (Polderman et al., 2015). For personality traits the figure is about 40 percent (Vukasović & Bratko, 2015).

That number is often misread as "half of you is inborn." It describes how much of the variation across a group is linked to genes. It can't be turned into a percentage for one person, and it doesn't mean a trait can't change (Visscher et al., 2008). Height is highly heritable, yet over the past century better nutrition and living conditions raised the average height of whole generations in many countries (NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, 2016).

Genes and environment also pull on each other. An active child, for example, is more often taken to play sports, and sports make the child more active still (Plomin et al., 1977). Some abilities are especially open to experience at certain ages (Knudsen, 2004), but the capacity to change lasts a lifetime, only in different forms (Baltes, 1987).

So Little Map doesn't ask "what were you born as." It asks where you are lately, and where you want to go.

Most research finds that personality scores are continuous: most people land in the middle, and there is no natural dividing line (Haslam et al., 2012). So someone who scores right next to the line can easily switch to the other type on a retake (Pittenger, 2005), even though they've hardly changed. You can try this yourself in "Types and spectrums."

Traits and states are two distances for looking at the same person. In one study, people reported their current state several times a day. Over a few weeks, the ups and downs within one person were as large as the differences between people, or larger, yet each person's center stayed steady (Fleeson, 2001). The small chart below shows this.

Most Little Map maps use the "ruler" and "lately": you get a spot on a ruler, and the question is about you lately.

Psychology splits a questionnaire answer into a steadier trait and a state that shifts with time and situation (Steyer et al., 1999). Most Little Map maps ask about the last two weeks, this stage, or this relationship, so coming back after a while makes sense.

If two answers differ, you may have changed, or it may be those few days' mood, what happened in your life, or being more familiar with the questions the second time. So footprints put the two answers side by side and the reason is yours to find. We won't tell you "you improved."

Does exploring again help? It may, and we're testing that. Research points in a direction; it isn't a guarantee. Monitoring your progress toward a goal is linked to reaching it more often (Harkin et al., 2016). And one correlational study found that people who reflect on themselves often aren't necessarily better off; what goes with everyday adjustment is understanding your own thoughts and feelings (Grant et al., 2002). That's why every map ends with one small action, so once you understand something, there's one thing to try.

Two words first. Reliability: the same ruler gives about the same reading twice. Validity: the ruler measures what it says it measures.

Little Map's questions are based on published theories and scales, some translated, most adapted. After translation or adaptation, the original scale's reliability and validity from English studies don't carry over automatically (Putnick & Bornstein, 2016). The Self-compassion map, for instance, uses a licensed scale from Neff, and the Chinese version is our own translation, not yet validated, with no average scores to compare against.

Whether a questionnaire is good enough also depends on what it is used for. Helping yourself sort out your thoughts and deciding whether to hire someone need very different evidence (Kane, 2013). Little Map only does the first.

In 2015, over two hundred researchers redid a hundred psychology studies, and only about a third got the same significant result, with effects about half the original size on average (Open Science Collaboration, 2015).

That began to change the field: more researchers share their plans before collecting data, and share the data afterward so others can check.

Most psychology participants come from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic societies, a group researchers call WEIRD (Henrich et al., 2010).

The same idea can look different in different cultures. Filial piety, for example, carries its own weight in Chinese families, and applying Western parent-child research as-is can easily miss something important. Bringing research to Taiwan means adjusting it to life and culture in Taiwan, which is called cultural adaptation.

Take the same item, "I say how I feel." Answering "very much like me" can mean different things in different cultures. Researchers first check whether the two language versions measure the same thing; this is called measurement invariance (Putnick & Bornstein, 2016).

The International Test Commission has published guidelines for translating and adapting tests: beyond getting the words right, you check whether the content fits the culture and whether people understand it the same way (International Test Commission, 2018).

In 1949 the psychologist Forer published a classroom demonstration. He gave students a "personalized" personality profile, and they rated its accuracy 4.26 out of 5 on average. In fact, everyone had received the same profile (Forer, 1949).

Most of the profile was made of sentences that fit almost anyone, such as "at times you are extroverted, at other times introverted."