Shining the light on private self-consciousness: a response to Silvia (1999)

A response to Silvia's (1999) critique of Creed and Funder's (1998) formulation of two types of private self-consciousness is presented. The current paper attempts to address some of the relevant concerns: (i) the multidimensional nature of the private self-consciousness scale is recognized as a problem which needs to be addressed (and which in part motivated our own research); (ii) the paradoxical effects of self-attention are more than a psychometric phenomenon and have been foreshadowed in laymen's, philosophers' and research psychologists' views of the construct; (iii) the trivialization of self-report scales as only able to describe themselves would render relatively meaningless most of the empirical data about personality gathered to date; and (iv) the criticism of the Aristotelian mode of research as merely accounting for variance fails to acknowledge that a certain amount of descriptive light must be shed on a phenomenon lest future theoretical questions remain not only unanswered, but unraised.