Self-perception as a function of objective self-awareness and role-playing

When people are involved in role-playing games, they often get wrapped up in the game and subsequently their behaviors change. Some people are able to perceive that their behaviors change while others seemingly cannot. Objective self-awareness (OSA) refers to a state when a person is internally focused on the self as opposed to externally focused elsewhere and can be triggered by seeing oneself in a mirror. The current study examined the effects of objective self-awareness on the accuracy of self-perception after participating in a role-playing scenario. Participants were assigned a role to play in a decision-making scenario. Immediately following, participants took a self-perception survey asking about their behaviors during the experiment. Half of the participants took the survey in front of a mirror and half did not. The accuracy of participants’ self-perception was determined by independent judges who coded video-recordings of the participants during the role-playing scenario. It was predicted that the OSA participants would self-perceive more accurately, but the results were not significant.

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