From A. Maslow’s book «Motivation and Personality»
The first thing you pay attention to when communicating with a self-actualized person is his amazing ability to recognize the slightest manifestation of lies, falsehood or insincerity. These people’s estimates are remarkably accurate. An informal experiment with college students revealed one distinct trend: students who scored high on the Basic Safety Test (i.e., healthy students) rated their instructors much more accurately and accurately than students who scored poorly on the Basic Safety Test. this test.
As my research progressed, I became more and more convinced that this kind of efficiency of perception, found at first only in the field of relationships with people, needs to be understood much more broadly. It extends to very many aspects of reality — almost all that we have explored. Painting, music, intellectual and scientific problems, political and social events — in any sphere of life, these people were able to instantly discern the hidden essence of phenomena that usually went unnoticed by other people. Their predictions, no matter what areas of life they touched and no matter how meager facts they relied on, very often turned out to be correct. We tend to understand this in such a way that an actualized person starts his judgments from facts, and not from personal pessimistic or optimistic attitudes, desires, fears, hopes and anxieties.
At first I called this property «good taste» or «sanity», realizing the inaccuracy of these terms. But gradually I had more and more reasons (I will discuss some of them below) to talk not so much about taste as about perception, and in the end I came to the conclusion that this characteristic would be more correctly called “ability to perceive facts” ( as opposed to a tendency to perceive the world through the prism of established and generally accepted opinions or ideas). I hope that this conclusion of mine, or rather my assumption, will someday find experimental confirmation.
After all, if we manage to prove this, then the consequences that the recognition of this fact will entail will be truly revolutionary. The English psychoanalyst Money-Kyrl has already stated that a neurotic is not just an ineffective person, he is an absolutely ineffective person. We can say this, if only because the neurotic cannot perceive reality as clearly and effectively as a healthy person perceives it. The neurotic is sick not only emotionally — he is sick cognitively!