WEEK 2- Social Thinking

The Self


Self-Concept

 Who am I?

  • Not only includes self-schemas, but also possible selves

  • Your overall picture of yourself

  • “I am ______”


Self-Esteem

My sense of self-worth

  • The things that you think are great and not great about yourself


Self-Knowledge

How can I explain and predict myself?

  • Social Comparison (upward and downward) 

  • Temporal Comparison 

  • Social Identity (vs personal identity) 

  • Other people’s judgements (looking glass self)

  • Explaining our behaviour

  • Predicting our behavior

  • Predicting our feelings


Social Self

My roles as a student, family member, and friends, my group identity

  • Who you are in terms of your group memberships?


Related Terms

  • Schema

    • Mental framework that helps guide the processing of information

    • Helps organize information

    • Cuts down amount of processing 

    • Eg. stereotypes

  • Self-schema

    • Mental framework that helps to guide the processing of information about ourselves

  • Self-reference 

    • When we remember things better and process things more efficiently when it is relevant to us/ when it applies to us

    • You are more likely to remember things if it is relevant to you


Possible Selves

Who we believe we are going to become in the future

  • Who we want to be or who we don’t want to be

  • Can bring either hope or fear


Self- Esteem

Your overall sense of self-worth

  • Research is done though self report

  • Western worlds have good self esteem

  • Eastern worlds rate themselves lower

  • Difference between explicit and implicit self esteem

    • What you will report about yourself vs how you feel subconsciously

    • When this is taken into consideration, western worlds and eastern worlds actually feel the same about themselves, eastern cultures just tend to be more modest



Self-Awareness

How we see ourselves at a given time depends on how much attention we have focused on ourselves.

  • Seeing ourselves in a mirror or on video can do what?

    • Mirrors in stores sometimes work to prevent shoplifters

      • Forces them to reflect on themselves

      • We will compare of ourselves against our values and morals

    • Halloween kids and candy bowl

      • Factors that will influence: peer pressure, parents, costumes (they don't see it as themselves who are stealing)

  • This theory is known as the self-awareness theory (Duval & Wicklund, 1972 ).

  • While we have our attention turned inward, we compare and evaluate our behaviour against our standards and values of what our behaviour should be – what happens when our behaviour doesn’t match up with our standards and values?



Self and Culture


Social Comparison (upward and downward)

When we don't know if our behaviours are appropriate, we will look to other people to compare ourselves to 

  • Upward: when we compare ourselves to people who are doing better than you or people who are more successful

    • Can lead to negative feelings or positive feelings

    • Eg. great, successful 4th year accounting student. 1st year student comparison vs 4th year student comparison

  • Downward: we compare ourselves to people who are worse off

    • Can make us feel guilty or better


Temporal Comparison

  • Comparing ourselves to different points in time

  • Eg. past self vs future self


Social Identity (vs personal identity)

  • Who we are in terms of our group memberships

  • Eg. university student etc vs confident, empathetic


Other people’s judgements (looking glass self)

  • It's a “them problem” rather than a “me problem”

  • We incorporate other people's judgements into our view of ourselves

  • We use other people’s judgements as a mirror of ourselves


Explaining our behaviour 

  • Sometimes we do things and don’t know why


Predicting our behaviour

  • Sometimes we like to think we would behave one way but it is a lot harder to do when actually faced with the situation


Predicting our feelings

  • We have a hard time predicting how we will feel about something

  • Eg. divorce rates


Individualism

Where The focus is on the independent self

  • Eg. your performance, your successes

  • Independent self

  • Self-concept as stable 

  • Self-esteem as personal

    • How i feel about my overall personal self-worth


Collectivism

Interdependent, relationships with other people

  • Interdependent self 

  • Self-concept as malleable

    • Always changing and depends on the people

  • Self-esteem as relational

    • Depends on your relationships with other people


Self-Serving Bias

The tendency to think that were better than everyone else, to believe that everything that is good is a result of ourselves

  • Can be associated with narcissism

  • We do it in a way to protect our self-esteem and feel better about ourselves

  • How do ‘self-servers’ explain positive and negative events?

    • Positive events are because of them, they take the credit for it

    • Negative events are because of someone else, they won’t take credit for it

  • Situations that combine both skill and chance especially likely to expose such tendencies

    • The majority of people do it

  • Also occurs when people compare themselves to others

    • More likely to happen when something is subjective rather than objective

    • Eg. can’t say you’re amazing if you failed a test

  • most people see themselves as better than average when it comes to anything that is subjective and desirable

  • People often assign more importance to things they are good at and ‘downplay’ things they are not good at this makes them feel better about themselves


Unrealistic Optimism

Tendency to believe things will turn out well overall

  • How is this bad? 

    • Being optimistic that something bad won’t happen to you

    • Eg. wildfires, safe sex, addiction, domestic violence (“they will change”)

  • How is it good?

    • Must be realistic optimism

    • Eg. cancer patients having optimism


False consensus and False Uniqueness

  • We often make ourselves feel better by either overestimating or underestimating the commonality of our behaviours 

  • Eg. when we’re doing something bad “everyone else does it(false consensus)

  • Eg. when we’re doing something good “im unique)

  • Participate in this to self-serve

Self- Presentation

  • Do people actually believe these self-enhancing remarks?

    • There are times that people do

    • But we also have false modesty to “fish for compliments”


False modesty

Research has provided evidence that people may present a different self than they feel – clearest example is with “false modesty”

  • Eg. – “I look so awful today” – “no, you don’t, you look great!”


Impression Management

Continually managing the impressions we create –by:

  • Self-presentation, making sure we put our best foot forward

  • Self-monitoring, frequently checking in to see what kind of impression we are making

    • “Do they like me?” “Are they laughing?”

    • Eg. job interview


Self-handicapping

Protecting one’s self-image with behaviours that create a handy excuse for later failure

  • What are some examples?

    • Eg. going out to a bar before a test

      • Gives you an excuse for later

      • Find reasons to sabotage to ourselves so when something bad happens, we can point to it

  • Why do people do it?

    • Relates to self-serving bias

    • To protect our self-esteem


Thinking about the Self

There are different ways we see the self: 


Self-complexity

  • How an individual’s self-concept is organized

  • For those high in complexity, important aspects of the self are distinct from one another

    • Eg. your role as a student is different from role as an athlete

    • Able to compartmentalize, able to keep roles distinct and separate

      • Eg. doctor who is able to separate work life from personal life

  • For those low in complexity, there is greater overlap in different components of the self

    • Who they are at work is also who they are at home

      • Eg. doctor is not able to separate

      • Generally we find it difficult to compartmentalize so it is good to seek therapy for this


Identity interference

  • Occurs when two important social identities are perceived as being in conflict, such that acting on the basis of one identity interferes with performing well based on the other

    • Eg. a sibling having to step into a parental role


Inferring Who We are from how we behave self-perception theory

  • Self-perception theory (Bem, 1972):

    • When our attitudes and feelings are uncertain, we infer how we think/feel by observing our own behaviour and the situation

    • Turn to past behaviour to judge how we feel about something

    • Eg. not sure if they like classical music, but remembers they hum along to it in elevators

    • Eg. not sure about liking someone, but remembering laughing at their jokes at a party



What is self-esteem?

Overall evaluation of ourselves

  • Measurement of self-esteem

    • Rosenberg self-esteem scale is most common

      • Explicit measure

      • Eg. using self-report to measure self esteem

        • You are consciously aware of how you feel about yourself

        • Some questions are reverse-scored to make sure participants are paying attention

          • Not saying yes to everything because some are about feeling good about yourself and some are about feeling like a failure 

  • Unlike explicit measures, subtle measures attempt to use nonconscious assessment procedures

    • E.g. IAT

      • Implicit association test,  Harvard



Rosenberg self-esteem scale


Revisiting Social Comparison

Depending on how we categorize the self in relation to the other, we can achieve a positive self-perception


  1. Self-evaluation maintenance model (Tesser, 1988)

  • The perspective that suggests that to maintain a positive view of the self, we distance ourselves from others who perform better than we do on valued dimensions, but move closer to others who perform worse

  • Eg. You look better compared to someone who is doing worse


  1. Social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979)

  • Our response when our group identity is salient 

  • Suggests that we will move closer to positive others with whom we share an identity but distance ourselves from other in-group members who perform poorly or otherwise make our social identity negative

    • Eg. They make your group look well, by association they make you look good