The Self You Think You Chose

You can decide to taste coffee without deciding whether the first mouthful will be pleasant. You can put on a piece of music and find that it holds your attention, or that you want it to stop. There is room for intention in arranging the encounter, while the response may arrive before you have had much opportunity to direct it. Only afterwards do you begin describing what happened: I liked that, I found it irritating, I would like to try it again.

Some self-knowledge develops in this order. An encounter produces a response, the response is noticed, and it becomes part of what the person says about themselves. The description may feel settled even though the experience was local. Enjoying one piece of music can become an interest in a genre; finding one social setting exhausting can become a claim about the kind of person one is. Each extension requires more evidence than the first encounter supplied.

When someone suggests an unfamiliar activity and says that you might enjoy it, they may have reasons for the prediction. They know other things you like, or recognise a feature of the activity that could appeal to you. You may have similar grounds for expecting to dislike it. Trying it can add information that those comparisons leave uncertain. Sometimes the response is unsurprising; sometimes it exposes a difference between what you expected to want and what actually held your attention.

It would be too simple to treat every such encounter as revealing a preference that had been waiting unchanged inside you. Familiarity can alter what an experience is like. Learning to hear something in music that you previously missed can change what you enjoy about it. You might deliberately give the work more attention, return to it, or learn enough to make distinctions that were previously unavailable. The eventual preference can therefore reflect both an initial response and a history in which you participated.

The distinction between responding and observing a response is still useful. I can notice that an activity leaves me curious, that I resist starting another one, or that a setting repeatedly exhausts me. These observations give me something to investigate. They do not require a separate observer standing outside the person having the experience. Reflecting, remembering and responding are activities of the same person, and the attention given to a response can influence what happens on the next occasion.

Saying 'I like this' usually reports a preference. It need not claim that I created it. The preference can be mine because it is one I experience, even when I cannot explain how it developed. Authorship asks a further question about its origins, while responsibility concerns, among other things, how I respond to it. Keeping those questions apart lets me acknowledge a reaction without pretending either that I deliberately produced it or that it has no bearing on my choices.

There is considerable room for agency after the first response. I can return to an activity, give it a different kind of attention or decide that pursuing it has costs I am unwilling to accept. Those decisions can change what I encounter and learn, though they cannot guarantee the feeling I would prefer to have. Some of the choices may eventually alter the preference itself. Others may concern how to live with a preference that remains much the same.

The opportunities for that process are uneven. An interest may remain undeveloped because someone has never encountered the activity, lacked the time to practise it or had little encouragement to continue. A familiar activity may occupy more of their identity because it has repeatedly been available and rewarded. Looking at those conditions can help distinguish a capacity that has been tested from one about which there is still little information. It cannot establish what the person would have become along every path they did not take.

Recognising an unbidden response can reduce the pressure to experience only what fits an idealised self. Finding something dull or unexpectedly enjoyable need not become an immediate verdict on one's worth. There is still work to do when a preference affects how other people are treated or which responsibilities are accepted. The fact that a response arrived without a deliberate decision leaves open whether to endorse it, encourage it or act on it.

The resulting account of the self remains revisable. Repetition can reveal a pattern, but the same circumstances may also be producing the same response, and memory can favour the experiences that fit an established description. A useful question is how far a conclusion extends: across different settings, only under certain demands, or mainly during a particular period. The person may also change while trying to answer it. Self-discovery involves attending to what experience reveals and allowing later experience to alter the account, including the preferences and choices that once made it seem complete.

Further reading: Robert B. Zajonc (1968), Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.