Theoretical views and research surrounding the concept of self-knowledge have eschewed a causal-process model of self-knowledge. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find a theoretical treatment of the acquisition of or access to self-knowledge. Rather than asking such questions as "How does the social milieu become incorporated into one's self-knowledge?" or "What prompts a person to have greater cognitive access to the self?", the dominant approach to the self-knowledge issue begins, and ends, with the setting up of criteria by which the observer ostensibly can recognize the "self-knower." The empirical work reported here demonstrates that self-knowledge, autonomy, and related person descriptors are imputed to a target person by the observer to the extent that the target is similar to the observer and predictable for the observer. The implication of this demonstration is that the imputation of self-knowledge to a target person is governed, at least in part, by a halo effect - to the exclusion of a causal analysis of the underlying cognitive basis of self-knowledge. It is argued further that certain schools of thought that have influenced clinical psychology place the therapist in the position of being subject to the halo effect, whereby one imputes self-knowledge to patients on the basis of perceptions mediated by the halo effect.
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