Did You Wear the Juice Today? McArthur Wheeler and Self-Awareness — The Re-engineered You

16 min readDec 23, 2020

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into a bank with a gun. He waved it at the tellers and demanded money. The strange part was McArthur wasn’t wearing a mask. He wasn’t trying to avoid the cameras. In fact, he looked at one, and he smiled. Strangely, McArthur seemed to have trouble seeing too. He kept blinking and turning his head. Later he told the police that he could barely see, and his eyes stung from the lemon juice he smeared all over his face. At the time, McArthur believed that this juice would make his face invisible to cameras. If you liked watching Pittsburgh news 25 years ago, or if you’re a fan of dumb criminals in general, that you might know where this is going.

Someone had told McArthur that lemon juice, once used to write invisible letters, could work against surveillance cameras. McArthur tested this for himself by smearing his face with juice and taking a selfie with a Polaroid camera. Either the camera or the user malfunctioned because a Polaroid came out blank, confirming that McArthur’s disguise was genuine. McArthur robbed not one but two Pittsburgh banks, and all while smeared with lemon juice because he was so confident. His surveillance images were up on the 11 o’clock news, and before midnight, the police were knocking on his door. During his arrest and to the ride to the station, McArthur mumbled one sentence over and over, “But I wore the juice…”

Know thyself was one of the first three Maxim’s described in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, and it was a significant theme in the 1999 Blockbuster, The Matrix. But if knowing yourself is so important, how come so many politicians, entrepreneurs, and successful CEOs seem to have no clue how they appear from the outside? What if I told you we couldn’t know how we appear from the outside? What if I told you we could never know how strangers, bosses, and loved ones perceive us? We can never be sure how smart we appear, how beautiful we look, or how confident we really sound. However, with time and emotional maturity, we can come pretty close by practicing self-perception and striving to see our blind spots. So, that’s today’s subject: self-awareness. And how to identify our blind spots, those spots where strangers might have a better clue about us than we do ourselves.

Myth 1: What is self-awareness, and what if I don’t care how other people see me? What if I’m living my best life and judgment doesn’t bother me?

For starters, let’s go over what the Dunning-Kruger effect is. It’s named after two scientists after they heard about our bank robber McArthur. It’s a cognitive bias, and this protects us from being naive. It protects us from reality. Now, we all have that grandfather, that stubborn older person in our family who will say something and swear that it’s the law, but they are way out in the left field. They’re not even close, but they believe it’s right. They get stuck on it. That is a prime example. It makes us feel safe with what we think and makes us feel good internally to not be clueless about something.

During the Dunning-Kruger effect study, they did this test for mechanical engineers in a big company, and over 50% of these engineers thought that they were in the top 5% of the engineers in that company. Now this works in the opposite too. The people who were actually in the top 5% of the company ranked themselves at a lot lower level, even though they had the evidence they were at the top.

Now, there is a Psychology Theory called the Self-Perception Theory, and it was brought up in the late 1960s by Daryl Bem. He proposed the notion that you could analyze your own behavior as if you’re looking at somebody else, like that video game The Sims. Ideally, I might be able to observe my own actions as if I were a third person stepping outside yourself. That’s virtually the self-perception theory in a nutshell. Going back to self-perception in general, how much can we recognize our own behavior? Like our bank robber, are we under the Dunning-Kruger effect, or are we as competent as we think we are? Furthermore, how does that affect our behavior?

So first, we’ll start with the idea that we don’t care what others think about us. You people on Facebook, especially younger people, claim they don’t care what you think about them. However, we believe they deeply care. I went to Psychology Today for this, and it’s all about self-perception and meta perceptions. It’s the idea that social anxiety is really just the innate response to the threat of exclusion. Meaning you want to belong, and you want to be in the tribe. People who think they don’t care what others think are just distancing themselves because they don’t want to be excluded in the end. They want to be picked for the Kickball team of life.

Another thing that I picked up on in this article was it said, “We can never be a fly on the wall of our own personality dissections. We are left to rely on the accuracy of what psychologists call meta -perceptions the idea we have about others and their ideas about us.” To break that down, I think that means we meet enough people who tell us how competent we are, and then we eventually form a picture. For example, if one person comes up to you and says you’re a great salesman, that would have some meaning. It would be an excellent compliment to you, and your behavior will start to change to fit that mold.

Myth 2: Self-awareness might be important, but how much do I need? Is it enough that I can see my own potential, my own value at work?

There was a really good article by Harvard Business Review, and it talked about the value of self-awareness in business. According to Harvard Business Review, they put self-awareness into two categories: internal self-awareness, which is how clearly we see our own values, passions, and aspirations, and the other is extra self-awareness, which is understanding how other people view you. And now, here comes the fun part. They followed a study that tracked 467 adult workers across several Industries, and 99% of them reported working with at least one person who was successful, intelligent, qualified, and showed a lack of insight as to how they’re coming across. But according to the study, “In our nearly five-year research program on the subject, we’ve discovered that although 95% of people think they’re self-aware. only 10 to 15% actually are.” This means that one in three were wearing the juice as far as businesses go.

A meta-study from the Journal of Applied Psychology looked at coworkers and friends and how accurately they can assess your ability to work on a job or to complete tasks. This is based on five major traits:

Stability

Dependability

Friendliness

Outgoingness

Curiosity

After asking the people to rate the assertiveness of the person they met for 8 minutes, they were better at ranking them than the person themselves. For each one of those traits, the “strangers” are twice as likely to be accurate about you than you are for yourself. But when it came to anxieties, they themselves were more accurate than the strangers. In summary, we are good at predicting our anxieties but not good at predicting our competencies.

The very next thing they tested in the study was IQ and intelligence. With the IQ test and creativity tests, it turns out that friends and coworkers are far more accurate than we are at gauging how we’re going to score. However, emotional stability is an internal state. So, your friends don’t see it as vividly as you do, whereas assertiveness and IQ and creativity tests, other people will know a little bit better than we know ourselves. So, we go and get advice from friends and strangers, we need to actually follow it.

Myth 3. Finally, let’s get shallow. At least I know what I look like, how attractive I am. After all, we all have mirrors!

We know from our episode about Romantic Obsession that people generally have a good idea of what their desirability number is. But now we’re looking at how self-aware they are in physically spotting themselves in a lineup. Can you spot yourself in a lineup if I changed you with Photoshop just a tad? Can you spot yourself if I reverse your image on a mirror?

They did a study with Abe Lincoln Abraham Lincoln’s photo. The right way, he has a very strange-looking face, but if you look at it reversed, he’s striking and doesn’t look like the same person. The same thing happens to us. Have you had the experience of looking at a picture of you, and you’re like, why do I look off? It’s because it’s flipping the image from what we usually see in a mirror.

There’s another study I want to cover, which is by the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia Nicholas. They wanted to see if we were good at identifying ourselves after we have been modified with Photoshop. They used it to make a lineup of you. They found that a large number of people tended to look at the more attractively enhanced ones and say that’s the real me. This means we tend to put ourselves up and think we’re better than we really are.

They also found that this bias works for ourselves, but we don’t extend it to strangers. So, if we are picking out pictures of each other, we take the normal one. We pick out the ugly images of them and say, that’s what you look like. In summary, people like to say that the attractively enhanced photos are them, but they tend to believe that the normal ones are real for other people. So, when we ask the question, “Do we know our own attractiveness, even when self-perceptions are at play?” Not really. We’re focused on our better qualities on the best pictures of ourselves, and I’m guessing that goes down to our best body parts too.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the maximum “know thyself” may never be fully achievable. But hopefully, by identifying our blind spots, we’ve taken one step towards self-perception and building a better you. We may say we don’t care what others think of us, but science shows that we do. We care a lot, and we depend on others’ combined cues about us to form the Mosaic picture of ourselves that we operate on.

This picture, this self-perception model, will determine our leadership potential, our confidence, and our success rate in group efforts. If you think your coworkers don’t know how your personality will affect your job performance, think again. When it comes to stability, dependability, friendliness, cautiousness, and curiosity, your coworkers might be twice as accurate about your future performance. And your friends are more likely to predict your IQ scores better than you if you haven’t already taken the test.

Finally, it seems we’re all a little vain since, on average, were more likely to recognize beautified versions of ourselves quicker and assign them more importance over our normal plain selves. We may not be as self-deluded as McArthur, our lemon squeezy bank robber who inspired the Dunning-Kruger effect, but we all have blind spots. We all have gaps where our self-perception ends, and our biases begin. And on some level, we all wore the juice today.