The Social Self

  • Self-awareness: the act of consciously thinking about ourselves

  • Self-schema: piece of info about yourself like your major or hobbies

  • Self-concept: the sum total of all your self-schemas

  • Schema: mental structure that helps organize info

    • heuristic that helps save time and mental energy

    • helps you quickly identify objects

    • helps think about your personal traits

  • Heuristics: automatic thinking that relies on rules of thumb; efficient but flawed

  • Algorithm: deliberate cognitive thinking that uses a step-by-step process; accurate but uses up more mental energy

  • Self-concepts are a “powerful deception generated by our brains for our own benefit

  • Affective Forecasting

    • process of predicting how one would feel in response to future emotional events

  • Self-Reference Effect

    • tendency to remember info better if you relate it to yourself

  • Social Comparison

    • people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others

  • What’s the purpose of self-esteem

    • it’s a gauge that keeps track of our social standing

    • low self-esteem = avoid rejection

    • high self-esteem = seek approval

    • this helps us reap the rewards of social cooperation by keeping us in line

  • Terror Management Theory

    • fear of death and living a meaningless life drives us to seek self-esteem

  • Ways to think about Self-esteem

    • level of self-esteem: high vs low

    • contingent vs non-contingent: is self-esteem contingent on actual successes or failures in life?

    • stable vs unstable: people differ in consistency and some fluctuate constantly

    • based on specific domains like relationships, academics, appearance, etc.

  • Self-control

    • self’s capacity to alter/change itself and its states, particularly to bring them in line with standards such as norms, goals, ideals, or rules

    • inhibits our nature: selfish with more self-control = more moral, moral with more self-control = more selfish

    • low self-control is not necessarily bad because it might help moral people take big risks to help others

  • Self-enhancement

    • desire to view ourselves favorably

  • Self-presentation

    • desire to have others view us favorably

  • Self-verification

    • desire to have others see us as we see ourselves

  • Moral Identity

    • desire to view ourselves as moral people

    • incredibly important to people and will protect at all costs

    • attacking someone’s morality won’t make them change

  • Introspection

    • process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives

    • people don’t rely on this source of info as often as you might think

    • even when people look inward, the reasons for these thoughts can be hidden in the subconscious

  • Causal Theories

    • theories about the causes of one’s own feelings and behaviors; often we learn these theories from our culture

    • problem is that schemas and theories aren’t always correct and can lead to incorrect judgements about the causes of our actions

  • Big 5 personality traits

    • Openness

    • Conscientiousness

    • Extraversion

    • Agreeableness

    • Neuroticism

      • remember with acronym OCEAN