Chapter 5: The Self 

The Self

  • What is the self?

  • Organized collection of concepts and schemas that define how we perceive ourselves

  • Self concepts: concepts of the self, determine what we believe and how we tell about ourselves

  • Overall set of beliefs that people have about their personal attributes

  • As we grow older, our sense of selse develpps into self-concept

  • Morality is viewed as central to our self-concept

  • Self schemas: mental structures that affect how we organize and process social information

  • Beyond our awareness

  • Two functions of the self

  • Organization: the self organizes our perception of the world        

  • What is it in relation to me?

  • Self reference effect: you remember more traits that you selected described you versus ones that describe others

  • Regulation: determines what we will care about, pay attention to the self

  • Limited resource idea: we cant pay attention to everything so we pay attention to things that affect the self

  • Functions according to the book

  • Self-knoweldge: way we understand who we are

  • Introspection: looking inward to examine inside info that we alone have on our thoughts, feelings, and actions

  • Not pleasant

  • We dont like to think of ourselves

  • Reasons for our feelings and behavior can be hidden from our conscious

  • Self-awareness theory: when we are focused on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to internal standards and values

  • We become self-conscious since we are becoming judegemental toward ourselves

  • Can be aversive - people avoid it

  • Self-control: way we make plans and execute decisisons

  • Ability to subdue immediate desires to achieve a long-term goal

  • Helps form implementation intentions: making specific plans of when, where, and how you will fulfill a goal and avoid temptation

  • Impression management: way we present ourselves to others and have them see us the way we want to be seen

  • Self-esteem: the way we maintain positive views about ourselves

  • The Self guides and colors our perceptions of the social world

  • Central: what we attend and care about

  • Only things that pertain to the self

  • persuasive/omni-present: always been there and always present

  • Motivated in an egocentric way

  • Egocentric: centered around the self

  • Human beings are egocentric by nature

  • Literal egocentricism: we can only see things from our point of view

  • Automatic

  • Cocktail party effect: cant hear what someone says at a loud party but when someone says your name, you can hear it clearly

  • Answering “Who am I”

  • Asia/interdependent view of self

  • Count number of answers linked to social identity

  • United States/independent view of self

  • Vast majority of answers are personal attributes

  • Culture interactions

  • Independent acting with interdependent/Individualist acting with collectivist

  • Attend their memberships

  • Critisize sparingly

  • Expect person will be uncomfortable with competition

  • Don’t brag on yourself

  • Can do so on country and family

  • Interdependent interacting with independent

  • Attend to more other person’s beliefs

  • Relationships will be superficial

  • Dont be threatened by competition

  • Business can be done shortly after meeting

  • Development of the social self

  • Based on

  • Culture

  • Western cultures: independent view of self

  • Define one self in terms of one’s actions, feeling, and thoughts

  • Asian/non-western cultures: interdependent view of self

  • Define ones self in terms of ones relationship with other people and recognizing ones thoughts, actions, and behaviors are influenced by others

  • Roles that people acquire

  • Success and failure experiences

  • Other people’s judgements

  • Social comparison

  • Social comparison theory: people learn about their abilities and attitudes by comparing it to other people

  • When do people engage in it?

  • When there is no objective standard or they are unsure of themselves

  • With whom do people compare themselves?

  • When goal is excellence - upward social comparison: comparing yourself to someone who is better than you at something

  • Adopting other’s values

  • Social tuning: one person adopts another person’s attitude or belief

  • Weakness of self-knowledge

  • Explaining our behavior: we can’t see our automatic processes (schemas)

  • Thinking correlation of our behavior = causation

  • We find it difficult to explain why we feel or do things

  • Rely on causual theories: people have theories about what causes their behaviors and use them to explain why they do the things they do

  • Self-perception theory: when our attitudes and feelings are unknown, we infer these states by observing the situations that our behaviors occur in

  • Use attributional theories to explain their behavior

  • Two-factor theory of emotion: experiencing physical arousal and seeking an appropriate explanation for it

  • Look for cues and the most plausible explanation in the environment to explain the behavior

  • Misattribution for arousal: people mistake inferences of what is causing them to feel the way they do

  • Predicting our behavior

  • Predicting our feelings

  • Good at predicting the feeling but not on how long the self feels it

  • Always think it will be longer than it actually will be

  • Main weakness: Illusions of the self

  • Illusion of uniqueness/Barnum effect

  • Definition of uniqueness: things that put us into a minority

  • Illusion of uniqueness: for many of our self concepts, we think we are unique in some characteristic even though we are really not

  • Ex: personality test descriptions - you could think a description really describes just you but it could be generic of everyone

  • Illusion of transparency

  • Tendency for people to overestimate the extent by which their external thoughts and feelings can be read by outside observers

  • Ex: someone tapping a song and thinking others will know it

  • Types of experiments

  • Detection of lies: people are awful lie detectors

  • Detection of disgust: observer thinks the guessers will be able to detect the bad drink because they are aware of which one it is

  • Spotlight illusion

  • People think their actions, appearances, etc are noticed by people more than they do

  • Absence effect: people overestimate the noticeability of their absence

  • Humans are wired to notice presence vs absence

  • Motivation

  • Intrinsic: doing an activity because you enjoy it

  • Extrinsic: desire to do an activity because of an outside reward

  • Over-justification effect: people view their behavior as caused by extrinsic motivation and not realize their intrinsic reasons

  • How to avoid

  • Rewards to people who have no interest in the task

  • Types of rewards

  • Task-contigent: rewarded for doing a task

  • performance -contigent: reward depends on how well someone does a task

  • Mindsets

  • Fixed: set amount of ability that cannot be changed

  • Growth: achievement is result of hard work, trying new strategies, and gaining input from others