On "Masking" Your True Personality
On "Masking" Your True Personality
Can wearing a metaphorical "mask" change your personality? And is that a bad thing? Another reader question, answered!
Reader James Pothen writes in with an interesting question: “How does personality interplay with masks?”
“I'm thinking of superheroes as one example: Batman lets Bruce Wayne express his rage, Spider-Man lets nebbish Peter Parker be a quippy gymnast. But I've also heard that masks are a way for some people to become someone or something else.”
This one is tricky because in some fields, “masking” is generally considered to be a bad thing. Masking is perhaps most closely associated with “autistic masking,” or the practice in which autistic people suppress their natural behaviors in order to appear more neurotypical. This might look like a temporary reduction in repetitive movements or fake nodding-and-smiling during a social interaction. It’s generally thought that while masking can be effective for autistic people for short periods of time, in the long term it’s exhausting and can be traumatic.
The same is true of “emotional labor”—the insistence that, say, customer-service people maintain a friendly smile even while being reamed out by a customer. The smile is a form of mask, but it takes a toll in the form of higher blood pressure and lower well-being.
In other words, when other people expect us to mask—even if those are vague societal expectations—the result can be unsatisfying and even unhealthy.
But if you take a broader view of what it means to wear a “mask,” it can mean to temporarily act outside your nature. And that can be beneficial—as long as you’re doing it of your own volition, and you know when it’s time to take off the mask.
If you think about it, we all wear various masks every day that are meant to convey something about us, or to make us feel a certain way, that may or may not be 100 percent “true.” Wearing makeup, a type of mask, appears to increase self-esteem, for example. Though “self esteem” isn’t part of personality, per se, feeling good about yourself is an element of the trait of emotional stability, the opposite of neuroticism. Few women actually wake up looking how they look with makeup on, but by the same token, few would consider makeup to be a “fake” self. It’s just a slightly more polished self to present to the world.
To recap, the five personality traits are:
Openness to experience — you enjoy novelty, art, and new ideas
Conscientiousness — you’re timely, tidy, and organized
Extroversion — YAAS queen!
Agreeableness — you just want everyone to get along
Neuroticism — you’re anxious and depressed. (The opposite is emotional stability)
Similarly, the (somewhat embattled) concept of “enclothed cognition” suggests that our personalities change based on what we’re wearing: In one study, people who wore nurse’s clothes felt more empathetic. People who wear athleisure report feeling more fitnessy, for lack of a better word. Both of these are maybe closer to costumes than masks, but like masks, they change the way we feel and behave.
In both cases, people don something to feel a certain way, which is different from how they’d feel in their pajamas with just a swipe of Blistex. This is technically a “mask,” but it’s an effective one. You might not encase bad guys in a spider web with it on, but you can crush that pilates class or that work presentation or what have you.
What’s more, the prominent personality researcher Brian Little believes that you can do a version of this without actually changing your physical appearance. Little writes that we can temporarily act out of character—he calls this using “free traits”—in order to pursue important personal projects. A big softie might get very disagreeable when they’re fighting a hospital over a surprise bill for their kid’s medical treatment. Or you could be an introvert who has to glad-hand your way around a big corporate retreat in order to advance your career. You’re doing something that feels unnatural—for a reason.
Little feels that acting against your true nature—engaging in “free trait” behavior”—for too long can be tiring, and can lead to burnout. Because of that, he suggests people retreat occasionally to “restorative niches,” or environments in which they can be their true selves for a few hours. For a fake-extrovert, this would mean getting the proverbial “quiet time to yourself to recharge.” Batman usually goes home to the bat cave after a long night of crime-fighting.
Sometimes, though, these “free traits” can become a part of your real personality—this is the topic of my book. You can go from being really depressed (or neurotic) to feeling optimistic. You can go from being disorganized to being neat (or conscientious.) You can change your personality—and I guess, yeah, that’s a bit like wearing a mask you never take off.
The idea of that bothers me less than it might some other people, though. Most people have other goals beyond pure authenticity. We want to be seen a certain way, even if that means behaving unnaturally at times. If you think about it, we don’t really say whatever we want—or whatever comes “natural”—to our bosses, friends, or family. In most cases, we adjust what we say and do for different situations. That’s not fakery, that’s life!
Spiderman would have never been able to go about his daring capers without his mask on. (For one thing, we would have gotten pictures of Spiderman long ago.) And it’s not possible for most people to function without acting out of character at least some of the time. Masks can affect our personalities, and that can be a good thing, as long as you’re putting the mask on willingly and for a purpose.
Further reading: Who Are You, Really? by Brian Little
Further further reading: The Mercenary, the new book by my friend Jeff Stern. Not about personality, but no one spins a yarn quite like Jeff does.
A note: I’m going to try to answer more reader questions about personality in this Substack, so please email me at olga.khazan@gmail.com, or comment below, or tweet at me, or stand outside my window holding up a boombox, if you have a personality curiosity you’d like me to look into!