Self Knowledge

Self Knowledge

Introduction

• This week's topic is self-knowledge, focusing on how individuals come to know themselves.
• Three primary methods of self-knowledge:
  • Introspection
  • Observing our own behavior
  • Using others as a reference tool

Self Awareness and Self-Concept

• Self-awareness: The act of thinking about ourselves or introspection.
• Self-concept: The content of the self; knowledge about who we are, our sense of self. Self-construal (independent or interdependent) fits under self-concept.
• Analogy: If self-concept is a book about ourselves, self-awareness is ourselves reading and writing that book.
• This lecture addresses how people know the contents of their self and the impact this has on them.

Introspection

• Definition: Looking inward to examine information about your thoughts, feelings, and motives.
• Research indicates people don't spend much time thinking about themselves.

Experience Sampling Method Study

• Participants: 107 individuals from five companies in Metropolitan Chicago.
• Method: Experience sampling, using pagers to study real-time activities, thoughts, and feelings.
• Procedure:
  • Participants carried pagers for eight days.
  • Pagers beeped randomly between 7:30 AM and 10:30 PM (7-9 times per day).
  • Participants answered questions about what they were thinking, doing, and why (voluntary vs. obligatory).
  • Participants rated their affect or happiness on a seven-point scale.
• Findings:
  • Participants didn't think about themselves often compared to work, leisure, or chores.
  • Thinking about themselves correlated with lower happiness.
  • Voluntary activities + self-thoughts = negative affect; obligatory activities did not necessarily cause negative affect.

Self Awareness Theory

• Thinking about ourselves causes us to evaluate our current behavior against internal standards and values, turning us into judgmental observers of ourselves.
• Negative feelings arise when we remember the kind of person we want to be and realize we are falling short (example: watching Netflix instead of studying).
• Study: Women exercising in front of a mirror enjoyed it less because it highlighted their desire to be healthy versus their current state.
• Self-awareness can be positive if we are meeting or exceeding our standards (example: getting a high distinction on an essay).

Adapting to Success

• Standards often rise to surpass our success, leading to negative discrepancy between our ideal and current selves.
• According to Carver, if we believe we can reduce the discrepancy, our affect will be positive. If not, our affect will be negative.
• Example: A smoker who glimpses themselves smoking may only feel negative if they believe they cannot quit.
• Flowchart:
  • Self-focusing cue $\rightarrow$ Self-awareness $\rightarrow$ Comparison to internal standards.
  • Match: Everything is fine.
  • Mismatch: Can behavior be changed?
    • Yes: Positive feelings.
    • No: Negative feelings $\rightarrow$ Attempt to stop self-awareness (distraction, drugs, etc.).

Impact of Introspection on Behavior

• Introspection/self-awareness can modify behavior.

Cheating experiment

• Diner and Walbum's Study:
  • Participants: 28 introductory psychology students.
  • Task: Cognitive complexity test (unscrambling puzzles) with a five-minute time limit. Experimenter left the room, allowing for potential cheating.
  • Conditions: Self-aware (mirror and recording of self-description) vs. control (no mirror, recording of someone else).
  • Results: Participants in the self-aware condition cheated less than those in the control condition (1/14 vs. 10/14).
  • Participants in the self-aware condition gave an average of 0.5 extra answers, whereas participants in the control condition gave almost 3 extra answers.

Abusive Comment experiment

• Son and colleagues (recent):
  • Examined self-awareness' effect on abusive online comments.
  • Participants: South Korean undergraduate students (Study 1: 79, Study 2: 84).
  • Procedure: Participants read a news article with abusive comments.
  • Independent variable: Self-awareness (video of themselves via webcam) and screen size, Social Norms (pro or anti abusive comments)
  • Dependent variables: Agreement with comments and willingness to write similar comments.
  • Results:
    • Self-awareness reduced agreement and willingness to write abusive comments.
    • Social norms influenced willingness when self-awareness was low. High self-awareness led to moral behavior irrespective of social norms.

Real-World Application

• Supermarket self-serve checkouts with front-facing cameras.
• Attempt to increase self-awareness and reduce stealing.
• Is it self-awareness or just knowing that you are being filmed by the super market?

Observing Our Own Behavior

• Self-Perception Theory: When our attitudes and feelings are uncertain, we infer them by observing our behavior and the situation it occurs in.
• We look outside of our internal world for answers, such as to our own behavior (e.g. "I listen to classical music; I guess I do like it").
• Behavior is more informative if it's voluntary versus forced.

Accuracy of Identifying Reasons For Behavior

• We are often inaccurate in identifying the reasons for our feelings and thoughts.
• Classic research (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) showed that individuals were generally inaccurate in detecting factors influencing their behavior.
  • Participants could not accurately specify what factors have been manipulated to produce a behavior.

Clothing Experiment

• Passersby evaluated articles of clothing (nightgowns or stockings).
• Most participants chose the item on the left, but none mentioned position as a factor.
• Even when directly asked, participants denied that position influenced their choice.

Teacher Interview experiment

• Participants watched an interview of a teacher in a warm or cold manner.
• Participants then rated how warm or cold they thought the teacher was.
• Participants also separately rated how much they liked the teacher's appearance, mannerisms, and accent.
• They found that the teacher was rated as being significantly more attractive in the warm condition than in the cold condition.
• However, when asked if the warmth of the teacher influenced their perception of the teachers appearance, mannerisms, and accent, they denied it.

Physiological Behavior

• Self-perception theory extends to physiological behavior (heart rate, sweating).
• Emotional reactions often cause physiological reactions, but the reverse can also occur.
• Using our body and behavior to tell us how we feel.

Misattribution of Arousal

• Multiple explanations for behavior/physiological reactions can lead to misidentified emotions.
• Example: Watching a scary movie with an attractive date making it difficult to know what is causing arousal.

Bridge Experiment

• Dutton and Aaron (1974):
  • Procedure: Approached males on a stable bridge (control) or a scary, swaying bridge (experimental).
  • Factor manipulated: Sex of the interviewer (male vs. female).
  • Procedure: Participants were asked to do a project and were handed a questionnaire to fill out while they were on the bridge.
  • Dependent variables: Sexual content of a written story and whether participants called the interviewer.
  • Results: Participants on the experimental bridge were more likely to include sexual details in their story and call the female interviewer.
  • Conclusion: Fear was misattributed to sexual attraction.
  • Researchers assumed the participants were attributing their physiological symptoms to attraction rather than to fear.

Manipulating Perception

• Researchers manipulate perceptions of physiological responses to change feelings (e.g., making someone think their heart rate is slower to reduce anxiety).

Voice Modulation experiment

• Costa and colleagues:
  • Procedure: Recruited 54 participants representing 27 young couples and had two conversation with each couple via Skype; one neutral and one conflict.
  • Independent variable: One partner's voice was modulated to sound calmer and their partner's voice was heard regularly.
  • Dependent variables: Emotions after conversation and heart rate.
  • Results: In the modulated voice condition, partner B reported lower anxiety after the conflict conversation when their voice was modulated to sound calmer.
  • Partner A also reported anxiety when their parters voice was modulated to sound calmer.
  • Heart rate was lower for both participants when one partner heard their own voice as calmer even though the other partner heard their voice as normal.

Using Other People

• Social psychology emphasizes that individuals are influenced by the presence of others.
• We learn about ourselves by comparing ourselves to others (e.g., generosity, running speed, eating habits).
• Social Comparison: Process of thinking about info about one or more other people in relation to the self.
• Social Comparison Theory: People learn about their abilities and attitudes by comparing themselves to others.

Questions about social comparison

• When do we engage in social comparison?
  • When there is no objective standard and when we care and/or are motivated about our performance in that domain
• Who do we compare ourselves to?
  • Upward social comparison
  • Downward social comparison
  • Lateral comparison
  • Comparing themselves to their past self, which is usually a downward comparison.
• Why do we compare ourselves to others?
• What is the impact of social comparison?

Motivation impacts of target

• Will's Theory of Downward Comparison
  • Says when there is threat to our self-concept, we seek to restore our self-esteem through downward comparison
  • People with chronically low self-esteem are particularly prone to downward comparisons.
  • The impact of downward comparisons may make people feel better about themselves.
• Theory by Collins called Construal Theory and Upward Social Comparisons
  • People compare themselves to people who are doing better than they are, or upward comparison targets.
  • Seek to improve themselves by comparing themselves against someone doing better than they are
  • One response is to contrast the self with other people.
    *The other option is to assimilate the self with the other person.

Impacts of comparison

• Upward Social Comparison:
  • We can either assimilate with that person and improve our self-evaluation, or we can contrast ourselves with them and have it lower our self evaluation.
• Downward Social Comparison:
  • When we contrast ourselves with someone worse off than us, it improves our self evaluation, and when we assimilate with someone worse off than us, it hurts our self evaluation.
• Meta-analysis finds upward comparisons and contrast responses are more common.
• Upward comparisons can lead to hope/inspiration or regret/envy;
• Downward comparisons can lead to gratitude or scorn/worry.

Motivations Driving Social Comparisons

• Hegelsen and Mikkelsen identified six motivations driving comparisons:
  • Self-enhancement: Wanting to feel better.
  • Self-destruction: Wanting to feel worse.
  • Self-evaluation: Getting a sense of where one stands.
  • Self-improvement: Motivated by a desire to get better themselves.
  • Altruism: Helping others.
  • Common bond: Finding common ground and support. Concerned with others.
    Cultural Differences in Motivations
• Song and colleagues studied South Korean vs. U.S. students' motivations for social comparison on Facebook. Hypothesized differences based on self-construals (interdependent vs. independent, respectively). In general results suggest different cultures may have different motivations for engaging in social comparison on Facebook and that different motivations may have different relationships with outcomes like affect in different cultures.

Social Comparison and Behavior Impacts

• Johnson (2012) suggests responses to upward social comparison depend on the perceived ability to improve.
  • Belief in improvement leads to self-improvement efforts.
    *Employees who expect to get a promotion but aren't given it work harder and perform better.
  • Inability to improve can cause negative/destructive behaviors, such as harming the other person.
    *Envying others was found to often increase social loafing.

Self Evaluation

• Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory (Tesser):
  • Individuals' reactions depend on the relevance of the domain to the individual.
  • If it is not an important domain, it is easy to bask in another's success. If it is, the social comparison hurts self-evaluation

Sabotage test

• Tesser and Smith:
  • Procedure: Male participants paired with friends in a group task.
  • Procedure: Performance importance was manipulated (verbal skills exercise vs. password game).
    *Manipulated results to make friends seem better.
  • Dependent variable: Difficulty of clues given to the participant's friends.
  • Results: When the task was of high importance, difficult clues were given to friends.
    *Individuals specifically sabotage their friends or at least make things more difficult for them when the friend may outperform the participant
• being outperformed by friends causes individuals stress.

Individual Variables test

• Nichols and Stukas (2011): tested the other parts of self evaluation.
  • Procedure: Recruited 40 Australian university undergraduates and had each of them also have a friend participate in the study.
  • Procedure: Manipulated how well the participants thought their friend performed.
  • Hypothesis:
    Their self evaluation is being threatened because their friend performing better than them.
  • Results: With the threat condition, the more narcissistic you are the more you reduced closeness with the friends when you were told they did better than you.

Summary

• Three methods for self-knowledge: introspection, observing behavior, and comparing ourselves to others.
• Introspection may not happen often, but it can make us behave more morally and in line with our moral values.
• Observing our own attitudes may be hard, because there are so many ways attitudes can be interpreted.
• Social comparison involves different directions and allows for contrasting or assimilating.
• Motivations, impact, and behavior depend on cultural and individual differences.