A research-backed reason not to worry about what your peers think of you

Can you ever really know what your colleagues think about you? New research suggests there’s a good chance you already do.

In a meta-analysis led by Hyunji Kim, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, researchers from Canada and Australia found that across more than 150 studies in which subjects ranked themselves in personality tests and were rated by peers, the gaps between self- and peer-perceptions were not wide. This wasn’t the case when the subjects of a study were strangers, but it was as true for work colleagues as it was between friends.

We should see the results as good news, says Brian Connelly, a management professor at University of Toronto Scarborough and a co-author of the research, which was published in Psychological Science. “As a general, maybe even evolutionary mechanism, it’s important for us to have some sense of what we’re like and what people around us are like, so we can appropriately anticipate where we will succeed and where we’ll fail,” he explains.

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