Social Psych Exam 3

Social Cognitive View

The self is the schema. You have more experience with yourself than anything in the world and we have been receiving feedback our whole lives and it all goes in our schemas.

Self-Reference Effect

We process information if it involves the self, what we tend to

EX: cocktail party phenomenon (if you hear your name and it automatically grabs your attention)

Possible Selves (Markus)

Mental representations of ourselves in the future and deals with positive/negative aspects of future selves (usually think of your future now as being in a certain career, with a specific person, what house, and what your family might look like) 

• Research shows that positive is what motivates us now (ex: doesn't go out because they need to do good on psych exam for career) and negative can be fears you have in the future (ex: having to live at parent’s house because of financials, working at a job you hate, sickness in the immediate family)

• One of his students looked at juvenile delinquents who were trying to avoid spending their adult years out of prison. He found that it was not sufficient looking at negatives, but those who had positive selves were motivated to work towards a better life

Self-Esteem

Your feeling about yourself (ex: I feel like a worthwhile individual vs someone with low who might not endorse that)

• Self concept is a related term but it is more of a cognitive conception of yourself

James (1890) —> SE = Success/Pretensions

Pretensions: (they are yours and can’t be centered around parents)

• This model acknowledges that each of us gain self esteem in different ways and we are successful in areas we think are important; if you are successful, you will have high self esteem and vice versa

  • EX: college life, you have a certain importance to doing well academically, but not everyone has that same importance attached to their identity as a person may be wrapped up in certain things such as academic achievement, good friendships, service, athletics

  • EX: my pretension is playing college volleyball and I find it important to do well

• Two ways we can raise self esteem

  • 1. Increase success (studying harder or smarter)

  • 2. Altering/changing pretensions (changing majors, doing something we are more interested in)

• We are good at enhancing our self esteem by this model

Purpose of SE? —> Terror Management Theory

Terror of knowing you are going to die one day

• Gang members have higher self esteem than college students because they may be willing to be violent or do things illegal, when these things are not consistent with society as a whole. The things that gain self esteem in gangs, their pretensions are built around a different cultural worldview, a narrow one

• Purpose of SE: to buffer us from death anxiety, our SE has mechanisms to protect us from this tear

  • Humans are aware that death is inevitable

  • Creates potential for debilitating terror: but it doesn’t because self-esteem steps in and keeps our mind occupied

  • Gain esteem through our cultural worldview: slight discomfort when thinking about death 

    • Cultural worldviews: humanly created, shared beliefs/religious beliefs that provide individuals with the sense they are valuable members of an enduring and meaningful universe

    • Provide us with

      • Accounts of the origin of the universe

      • Prescriptions for behavior: pretensions come from cultural worldview, what are good behaviors? Is it being a kind person or getting good grades

      • Explanations of what happens after death: either be literal (soul and the afterlife such as heaven) or symbolic (enduring accomplishments and identifications like monuments or a building named after them)

      • Mortality and salient: in a study, make people think about their own death (experimental group) and have a control group is thinking about something different like their favorite food

        • Block of wood, nail, crucifix in the study using Christian students, took them longer to complete the task as hitting the nail with the crucifix may damage their cultural worldview; mesh American flag, dyed sand, and object, took them longer to sift the sand through the flag which is symbolic to Americans

Aggression

• SE and aggression: self regulation that leads to self esteem, avoid doing the stupid things that will get you in trouble, harness your energy

• Myth that low self esteem = aggression, and with his research he found that high self-esteem causes aggression but not High SE in general

• HSE, LSE, and STABILITY (stable vs unstable): what is your SE based on (reality vs self manufactured)

• Threatened egotism with aggression: high self esteem but unstable who act aggressive, not based on reality; it is kind of like high SE that is a house of cards (easy to knock down); SE is easily threatened so they respond with aggression. We can think of the gang members in this situation, bullies, spouse abusers, narcissists

Looking Glass Self (Cooley)

Other people’s reactions to us have an impact on how we feel about ourselves

• Looking glass = mirrors, our views of ourselves are based on other’s reactions to ourselves

  • EX: changing style and people don’t like it or cutting your hair short; you found out someone has a crush on you and you feel cute now

Multiple Selves

We have multiple sides or aspects to ourselves, we don’t present ourselves the same way in every situation with groups of people, it depends on the context and what is appropriate in the situation

• Working Self-Concept (accessibility): activated in the moment such as academic you, sports you 

  • Working memory, that is active in a given moment

    • ex: student you is at the forefront, but that is not the only thing you are)

Social Comparison

We actively compare ourselves to others, the aspect of yourself that comes our in different context, its that which makes you unique and makes you different from others (ex: describe yourself) (ex: we want to side eye someone’s exam to compare ours to theirs) desire for information

• Downward social comparison: we compare ourselves to someone lesser or someone we are better off than, it is a short term self-esteem booster, more contemporary perspective is motivational (exam example)

• Upward contrast: Looking at someone or comparing yourself to someone who is better than you = lessens your self-esteem

• Upward/downward assimilation: contrast is easy as you are contracting your performance, but assimilation is when you are focusing on similarity to someone

  • BIRGing: Basking In the Reflected Glory of others, ing is the process of doing that. This means like a halo affect, other people’s accomplishments might spill into you and who you are, riding the coattails of someone else (ex: name dropping; my brother is in a firefighting academy and you feel proud of your family and the awards he gets; IU wins, students wear more gear vs if the bball team loses)

  • Downward assimilation: along with being a firefighter, what if my brother sold drugs, I would be embarrassed for our family and if people see me and my family for what my brother did

  • Assimilation is cognitively easier than contrast, contrast is more controlled

Spontaneous Self-Concept

Describing yourself and someone says they are French = this may distinguish you from the class; the aspect of yourself that is accessible makes you unique

• EX: study with children and red haired kids would describe themselves with their hair than brown and blonde haired individuals as it is less common to have colored hair

Self-Evaluation Maintenance

How we maintain positive self evaluations when we compare ourselves to close others, applies to relationships of siblings, dating, marriage, family, friends

• Systemic model: works like a system, if there is movement on one point it shows up somewhere else, closed loop

  • Performance relative to other person, closeness how psychological close you feel to that person, relevance to one’s identity or self-concept

  • EX: If I outperform Adam in GPA, Adam might want to stay in and not hang if I did better for him to protect his closeness. He wants to distance as I was high in performance and relevance 

  • EX: Football was important to Max and when he was better than his brother, he was close to him. When his brother got better, he distanced as it was weird. If he doesn’t want to distance and gets sick of it, he needs to change relevance of football from high to low and if you are outperformed in a domain that is not relevant, you can engage in reflection (assimilation or BIRGing)

• Start with relevance, if it is relevant to you, you are locked into what contrasting you with the other person, the person that gets outperformed is to distance and vice versa,  they could always change their low to high or high to low relevance to feel better (high achieving first child vs having to follow that; just like Grant and I)

Boosting Self-Esteem

The above average effect: if you ask students on campus, most people are going to say they are above average, which is statistically impossible. People see being average as a negative thing. To a certain extent, you have surrounded yourself by people who are smart or above average 

SE = Success/Pretensions

• Increase Success: work hard and figure out how to be successful

• Change/alter/adjust pretensions: align pretensions switch our strengths or the things that interest us, set ourselves up for this success

  • Downward Social Comparison (also Mythical DSC): comparing ourselves to people who are better off than. Mythical is if a DSC is not available, we will create one

    • EX: looking at people battling cancer and the hypothesis was that people would actually seek out those who were worse off or struggling more than they were. Found that myth of husbands leaving wives with cancer

• Group Membership: humans are social animals and so other people are important for our SE, just being accepted in a group is good for SE. Having friends and joining a club/team are boosters. 

• Ingroup Bias (Favoritism): Thinking your group is better than, we identity with people and things in our group 

• Outgroup Bias (Denigrate Outgroup): going an extra step and actively putting down the outgroup. So it is not just thinking your group is better, but really criticizing the outgroup (in group is usually sufficient and more likely to occur) (ex: politics)

• BIRGING

• Self-Affirmation (Steele): resilience of our SE = how we deal with negative feedback, soften the blow. Temporarily boosting SE (ex: you did very bad on the exam and walking to class on Monday, you think about a good score you got on your essay to help you feel better; going to the mall before expected poor feedback; filling out a values list, writing an essay about a great accomplishment). If people feel good about themselves/self-affirm, they may not experience much cognitive dissonance.

• Self-Serving Bias: taking credit for success, denying blame for failure; low SE might think “I failed bc i’m stupid, I passed I got lucky”; high SE “I got an A bc I am smart, I failed bc of the bad teaching/professor”

• Guilt is effective for getting what you want

Self-Enhancement

Default for people with high to moderate self esteem (their self-enhancement is their self-verification), we enhance the view on ourselves, type of feedback people receive about themselves when given a choice

• EX: people write essay and was assessed by clinical psychologists where 2 differed on your feedback = you want to meet with the positive feedback psychologist); seek information that enhances view of yourself. 

Self-Verification

We seek information that verifies what we already believe about ourselves, we seek accurate information, applies to people with negative self-concepts

• Study: horse ranch in Texas; filled out SE scale rating themselves, partner rate that person; DV was commitment to the relationship between married couples. If the person has a positive self-concept, their commitment will be higher if they gave positive feedback; people with negative self concepts respond better when partner says something negative as well (as they reject compliments) they want to verify their negative self view)

• If you have a positive self image, seeking and enhancing information is going to verify that, if you have low self esteem you may seek negative feedback

Self-Improvement

Can be general (ex: want to be a better human) or in a specific domain (ex: improve ability to use Ai or improve athletic performance)

• If you want self-improvement, you want someone a little better than you to teach you how to improve or compare yourself to get to that point yourself

Self-Efficacy

A constellation of beliefs and feelings about your ability to do what it takes to get the job done (do you believe you have what it takes to be successful?). Part of this is confidence and feelings of control

• Ex: Beginning of semester and you get the course syllabus and you have that dreaded 30 pg essay, you tell yourself “this semester will be different” and get up every Saturday to chip away at the paper. There will be thoughts of “I can do it (high-efficacy)” or “I will definitely be procrastinating like usual (low efficacy; lower feelings of control, low confidence)” OR example with having a workout/diet schedule OR New Year’s Resolution

• Visualization is important to self-efficacy: can be effective in athletic performance/learning new skills; mirror neurons = specialized class of neurons which job is to mimic, when visualizing, these neurons are firing and are set up to performance consistent to this visualization; children mimic adults with these neurons

Self-Monitoring

Individual differences in impression management (IM: how we manage the impressions people have of us)

• Individuals differences in impression management: 

  • High self monitors = high concern with IM and tend to be good at reading situations and adjust style to be appropriate for situation; regulate their behavior based on situational cues; “social chameleons” and flexible; confidence that they can leave a good impression, present themselves in way that is appropriate; usually the leaders of the group with the ability to adapt; sales people, politicians; more likely to have situational dates

  • Low self monitors = low concern with IM and that is is not on their radar; regulate behavior based on internal standards; show more cross-situational consistency; higher correlation between their attitudes and behavior; “To thine own self be true”, leaving good impressions may not be on their radar as well

Self-Monitoring and Shyness

• No, shy people have more in common with high self monitors than low because they both share the same view with IM. They differ in the fact that shy people tend to be lower in social self confidence, so they don’t have this confidence to leave a good impression

Prejudice

Discrimination

Respect

7 Relatively Subtle Forms of Discrimination

Direct Intergroup Conflict Theory

Social Learning Theory

Personality Theory

Social Categorization

Implicit Theories (Association and Activation)

Dual-Process Theory