Unraveling user personas and their identity

What exactly are we?

We all have these little voices in our head, that we instinctively and inherently know are Ourselves. This voice (hopefully not a ghost or demon of some kind) is responsible for our daily conduct. We listen to this voice even if we don’t want to, it’s the same voice with which you’re reading this article (if you’re reading it in your mind that is, otherwise it’s just literally your voice). This voice, how it behaves, what it tells us to do, when it tells us to do something, how it says something should be done? All these questions determine to a great extent the kind of person we are.

The voice in our heads is what we are. We are inseparable from this voice not by choice or our own volition, but it is so by nature’s grand design. This voice is omnipresent, and more importantly so, really messed up sometimes. However this voice is what guides us through life and as we change so does the voice in our heads. As we grow into a different person, it’s not us who has grown into someone else, it was primarily the voice in our heads and we simply followed suit. We don’t do something off the norm, we just do whatever the voice in our head tells us to (and they called my grandma possessed, when she said this out loud). We are just blobs of flesh and bones and this voice is nothing other than our own conscience or rather as I like to call it, Conscious.

That’s all that it is, it is our conscious brain at work. Think of it this way, your conscious brain, rather, your brain has learned to work through the medium of a language, which in most people’s cases is their mother tongue. All in all this voice/conscious brain/ demons in our mind is what ends up building us for who we are. This voice builds up our character, how we behave, when we do something, what we do, which flavor ice cream we like, which car we fancy, what we like to do when we get bored, how we deal with the whole range of emotions there is, anger, fear, awe, and love is all synthesized by this voice and that ultimately, inevitably so, ends up constructing our character. Our character (the real one) is who we are, and to a great degree we all know who or what we are.

Sure, sometimes we ourselves are perplexed by this question, as in, when we end up doing something utterly stupid, like putting off an assignment that you had to do to the very last minute, or when we talk to ourselves for more than 6 hours straight and still not arrive at any conclusions over the topic of concern, or when we end up pushing our loved ones away in fits of rage and then wonder as to why we ever did that.

These are all instances that may put our faith over how well we know ourselves in jeopardy, however even in the most complicated, sophisticated and messed up moments of not knowing who or what we are, we still do in the general sense have somewhat of an idea of what we may be, we may not end up liking who we find ourselves to be, but we do know somewhere deep in our gut as to who we all are. And that’s what builds character, knowing oneself is what gets you acquainted to the kind of character you are. The true, original and most YOU, you can be.

Where did personas come from?

However, that is just our characters, or as some people say synonymously “personality”. And believe me as complicated as this may sound, all this stuff was the most simple it could ever be up to this point, because now we address another question. What if we look into ourselves, really deep and really hard selves, which is by the way, a super rare occurrence, and we don’t like our true selves? What then? And that’s exactly where personas come in.

You see personas aren’t who we are, it’s simply who we portray ourselves to be. It’s simply what other people think about us. A persona is a judgment that other people make about us, however this judgment is greatly influenced by our behavior towards the person forming the judgment. If we are kind to them, they’ll assume us to have a benevolent persona, if we’re rude to them, they’ll assume us to have a malevolent one. Most of the stuff that revolves around personas is arrived upon solely on the basis of assumptions, we assume a certain celebrity to have a quirky persona having never actually met the person in reality, we may form a mental image of their character which may or may not be consistent with reality. Which is where this whole ordeal involving the voice in our heads, our character, our personality and our persona, becomes tricky to navigate through.

The problem with personas

You see, since personas are founded primarily upon assumptions rather than observations, it becomes very easy for someone to hide or shadow their true selves and come off as someone who they aren’t in reality. And we all do this from time to time, we all are victims of situations where we didn’t want to expose our true selves, so we put on a mask of sorts and start behaving as someone who we simply are not. This, all the while saving us the hassle of being true to ourselves (which kinda shouldn’t be a hassle in the first place) ends up being a double edged sword. As in, we end up having to maintain multiple personas in multiple places, which, I don’t know about you, but it sounds pretty hassle-some to me. So, a lot of people do this activity of maintaining false or inaccurate personas and that for us, is bad news. Because if we want to know what people like and dislike, then we simply can’t let false personas fool us. We have to come up with a way of making sure that the inference we get from most people is an honest one. And in order to do this we have to get these false personas out of the way as they do nothing other than give us false, inaccurate, unreliable data. So, how do we do that?

Approach 1

Well one way would be to stick around a person long enough that they have no other option but to warm up to you eventually. However, this approach is way too time taking and impractical to apply when knowing the opinions of masses is concerned. Because we simply cannot invest our time or majority of it on individual people one after the other to gain a proper consensus. This approach all the while being the best one to opt to achieve accuracy in knowing the person behind the persona, isn’t very pragmatic.

Approach 2

So what’s left to do is the second approach, now before we dive into the second approach of knowing the person behind the persona. You see personas or their contrast from someone’s actual character or liking, isn’t discovered by the means of force. Sure, if you look it up on the internet it does say that to truly know someone, all that you have to do are the following:

• Gather information about the person in concern

• Identify core traits and values

• Understand motivations and conflicts

• Examine key experiences

• Interpret past actions and decisions

• Create hypotheses and theories

• Validate and refine

These objectives may seem straightforward, but to anyone who’s ever taken the trouble to actually get to know someone, they may know or recognize right away that this list of tasks isn’t as simple as it looks, no matter how much we wish it would be, it’s simply not that straightforward to get to the person’s heart and honest opinion.

Approach 3

Now, we are in a bit of a pickle, you see the nature of work that we’re dealing with may require us to garner honest opinions, but there simply seems to be no efficient way of doing so without investing unrealistic amounts of time, which we obviously can’t afford. In this situation we need to adopt a much more radical approach, one that fits our priorities and gets the job done as well (most of the time). You see people as a matter of fact themselves don’t really want to maintain these personas. They’d rather be in their own skin all the time, however they end up developing and maintaining personas only because they feel a certain mild sense of hostility to their true selves in the current environment. They may feel that their true selves are unwelcome or simply not sought after. And that’s what our radical approach takes advantage of. In this final approach of decoding the story or person behind the persona, we simply try our best to make the person feel at home, by not being the least bit judgemental about their true selves (if we’re lucky enough to get there). By making sure that the person knows, that no matter what their opinions are and however absurd or unheard of they may be, the person’s opinion or the act of sharing it is whole heartedly appreciated. This approach takes time to stabilize, however it works best for our case. Yet another, encouraging activity we can do is that we can learn to be honest in our own opinions. Remember, man evolved from monkeys and you know what they say about “monkey see monkey do”. We can inspire others to abandon their false personas by showing them our true selves. We need to take the same risks when it comes to exposing our true selves.

Now mind you the last approach is unconventional and may sound crazy, but it’s what works best in the long term. We need to get rid of this sense of hostility that people experience when they do decide to share their honest opinions. Only by doing so will we be able to consistently decode personas, over a rational period of time. The other two approaches, although precise don’t really allow us to achieve our objective, which is to get the maximum number of opinions in the shortest period of time.