Social psychology
Chapter 4
The self

Constructing the self-concept: learning who we are

Self-concept: all on an individual’s knowledge about his or her personal qualities.

Sources of the self-concept

People construct the self-concept in much the same way they form impressions of others, by interpreting various types of cues. People often learn their own characteristics from their observed behaviors. They also use thoughts and feelings and other people’s reactions to form impressions of themselves. Finally, people compare themselves to others to learn what characteristics make them unique.

Learning who we are from our own behavior

Self-perception theory: the theory that we make inferences about our personal characteristics on the basis of our overt behaviors when internal cues are weak or ambiguous.
We can learn things about ourselves by observing our own behavior.
People rely on their behavior to draw inferences about themselves, and this is especially true when we are first developing a self-concept or when we do not have a good sense of who we are in a particular domain.

People are especially likely to draw self-inferences from behaviors that they see as having freely chosen.

• Intrinsic motivation: we are doing what we want do do
• Extrinsic motivation: doing what we have to do

Providing external rewards often undermines intrinsic motivation.

Even imagined behaviors can be input for self-perception processes.
Thinking about actual or imagined behavior increases the accessibility of related personal characteristics.

Learning who we are from thoughts and feelings

An important cue to learning who we are comes from an interpretation of our own thoughts and feelings. This might have more impact than our behaviors.

Learning who we are from other people’s reactions

Other people’s views of us also serve as a cue in the development of the self-concept.
Reactions of others serve as a kind of mirror, reflecting our image so that we, too, can see it.

Being explicitly labeled as a trait may shape your self-concept. Other people;s more subtle reactions can also do the trick.

Other people’s reactions have the largest effects on people whose self-concepts are uncertain or are still developing.

Learning who we are from social comparison

Social comparison theory: the theory that people learn about and evaluate their personal qualities by comparing themselves to others.
Two effects:

• Contrast effect:
  An effect of a comparison standard or prime that makes the perceiver’s judgment more different from the standard
• Assimilation effect:
  An effect of comparison standard or prime that makes the perceiver’s judgment more similar to the standard.

People have multiple motives for comparing themselves to other and these spring from our fundamental motivational principles.

• Mastery
  People may seek accurate self-knowledge.
• Connectedness
  To show solidarity with others
• Valuing me and mine
  Feel better about themselves

Social comparisons are important in helping us shape our sense of uniqueness.
The attributes that distinguish us from most others often become defining features of the self.

Learning about self and others: the same or different?

Despite the general similarity between the ways people learn about themselves and others, self-knowledge is richer and more detailed than knowledge about others. People can observe themselves in more situations and have better access to private thoughts and feelings. People also tend to explain their own and other people’s behaviors differently. These differences do not guarantee that our self views are more insightful than other’s views of us.

Differences in cues and knowledge

We usually have a greater quantity and variety of cues about ourselves than we have about others.

• We see ourselves in a wider range of situations and for more time
• Inner thoughts.

The number of cues and type of knowledge we have about close others fall somewhere between the richness of self-knowledge and the paucity of stranger knowledge.

One common strategy we employ to infer other’s thoughts is to consider our own thoughts, assume that others have similar thoughts, and then adjust them to reflect specific information we know about the other person.

Differences in inferences

We may draw different inferences about the causes of behaviors.

Actor-observer effect: the idea that we attribute our own behaviors to situational causes while seeing others’ act as due to their inner characteristics.
Reasons:

• When we witness another person’s behavior, that person is salient.
  He or she is the focus of attention and stands out against the background.
• When asked why something occurred, people consider alternative causes, but they consider different alternatives for the self and for others.

The actor-observer effect is smaller than once assumed and occurs in much more limited circumstances.
The classic actor-observer effect emerges reliably for negative actions, but it may reverse for positive actions, partly to boost self-esteem.
The effect is more likely when a behavior is seen s deviating widely from what most others do in a particular circumstance, compared to behaviors that seem more typical.

Similar shortcomings: more is not always better

When considering other people, we sometimes devote a great deal of careful thought to forming our impressions of them.
This does not always lead to better or more insightful impressions.
Being the leading authority on our self does not guarantee that we are always aware of why we think, feel and act the way we do.

Sometimes people’s judgments about the self are influenced not by the content of self-knowledge but by motives that will increase or decrease their accuracy in making those judgments.

Multiple selves

Because people see themselves in a wide range of situations and roles, self-knowledge is organized around multiple roles, activities, and relationships. People vary in the number and diversity of ‘selves’ that they believe they possess.

Our behaviors, thoughts and feelings depend on what we are doing and who our companions are.
Social comparisons vary from situation to situation.
Other’s reactions also differ.

Self-aspects: summaries of a person’s beliefs about the self in specific domains, roles, or activities.
Distinct self-aspects in our mental representation of the self are the inner reflection of the fact that we actually do think, feel, and behave differently when we are in different social roles, groups and relationships.

Putting it all together: constructing a coherent self-concept

People try to fit the diverse elements of the self-concept together in a way that seems coherent and stable. Coherence can be attained by focusing on a few central traits, making accessible only limited aspects of the self at any given time, and by selectively remembering past acts.

Self-schema: core characteristics that a person believes characterize him or her across situations.

• People can construct a unified and enduring sense of self by noting a few core attributes they believe characterize them uniquely among people and consistently across situations. (self-schema)
  • Once a particular characteristic is incorporated into the self-schema, people notice and process information about it very efficiently.
• People tend to see evidence for these core traits even in their most mundane behavior, thereby reinforcing their sense of a stable and unitary self.

Though people may view themselves as variable in some ways, the core traits that comprise the self-schema are seen as stable.

• Self-coherence can be achieved by making accessible at any one time only a subset of our self-knowledge and self-aspects.
• Self-cohernece can be created and maintained through selective memory.

Across all cultures, the primary function of the self-concept is the same.
For people to survive and flourish, they must adapt successfully to their environment, particularly the social environment consisting of other people. The self-concept is a crucial aid in that adaption.

Constructing self-esteem: how we feel about ourselves

Self-esteem: an individual’s positive or negative evaluation of himself or herself.
A person’s relatively chronic feelings about the self.

State self-esteem: a person’s relatively fleeting feelings about the self in a particular moment.

Our feelings of mastery and connectedness to others play crucial roles in our self-esteem.

Balancing accuracy and enhancement

Accurate self-knowledge regarding our capabilities an preferences is important for guiding our lives. But accuracy is not the only consideration in evaluating the self: we are also greatly influenced by motivational pressures to think well of the self.

Self-esteem summarizes how we are doing at using our self-knowledge to navigate the social world.

Despite the clear value of accurate knowledge, people generally tend to inflate their own abilities and accomplishments, seeking to elevate their self-esteem.
People’s high views of themselves even extend to things they own or are attached to in some way.
Liking the self with other people can even make us like those others more.

Self-enhancing bias: any tendency to gather or interpret information concerning the self in a way that leads to overly positive evaluations.

Evaluating personal experiences: some pain but mainly gain

Events that affect us positively or negatively influence our self-esteem, but we try in several ways to accumulate more positive than negative experiences.

• We choose situations in which we can shine
• We tend to remember our successes more than our failures.

Self-complexity: the extent to which a person possesses many and diverse self-aspects.

Social comparisons: better or worse than others?

We also evaluate ourselves by making comparisons with others. These comparisons are sometimes self-enhancing, but sometimes self-depreacting.

Self-esteem and the self-concept depend on social comparisons.

Self-evaluation maintenance: a theory outlining the conditions under which people’s self-esteem will be maintained or will suffer based on social comparisons to close or distant others.
Two possible reactions, depending on the closeness of the other person.
Forced comparisons can have positive and negative consequences.

Sometimes we can try to avoid comparisons that make us look bad of feel unhappy.

• Establish distance between ourselves and those who are successful
  Downplaying our similarities or backing off from our relationships with them.
• Comparing ourselves with others who are less successful or fortunate
  People who learn that they have some positive attribute tend to underestimate the number of others who share the same characteristic.

Why self-enhance?

Despite the value of accurate self-knowledge, self-enhancement occurs for two primary reasons:

• Some actions that appear self-enhancing are aimed at actual self-improvement, reflecting the successful use of the self to guide our behavior adaptively.
• High self-esteem can be an important resource that protects us against stress and threats to the self

Self-regulation: efforts to control one’s behavior in line with internal standards or external standards

People differ in their relative sensitivity to these motives.
Men are more influenced by success or failures involving mastery and women’s by connectedness.

Effects of the self: self-regulation

That what we know about ourselves functions to regulate many important aspects of our lives.

The self and thoughts about ourselves and others

Self-knowledge serves as a framework for perceiving other people and processing social information in general.

Once we have constructed a self-concept, the familiar principle of conservatism comes into operation, and we become much less open to new information about the self.
An established self-concept influences both the way we think about ourselves and the way we perceive and remember social information in general.
The self-concept affects memory.

The self-concept tells us what types of social information are particularly important to us, so it serves as an organizing framework for perceiving and remembering information about people in general.

Self and emotions

Emotions are sparked by interpretation of self-relevant events and their causes. Emotions signal the occurrence of significant events and motivate us to act in response. As they perform this self-regulation function, emotions involve the whole self, body and mind. They involve facial expression, physiological responses, subjective feelings, and overt behaviors.

How do emotions arise?

Emotions are complex and multifaceted and involve the entire self, body and mind.

Appraisal: an individual’s interpretation of a self-relevant event or situation that directs emotional responses and behavior.
Different appraisals of the same situation can produce different emotions.
Appraisals can involve a host of considerations, various combinations can produce different emotions.
Appraisals are flexible.

Our appraisals and the labels we apply to our won inner feelings are often based on salient cues.
Like other aspects of self-knowledge, the emotions we experience and our beliefs about their causes actually reflect interpretations. Culture can strongly affect the ways we interpret events and therefore the kind of emotions we feel.

Appraisals, emotions, bodily responses: all together now

Our appraisals of events not only cause our emotions but also affect many aspects of our body and mind.
Some actions tendencies are biologically determined. Other emotional behaviors are learned.
Emotions affect thinking, focusing us on the content of our appraisals.

Appraisals, bodily responses, subjective feelings and emotionally driven behavior are frequently activated together.
They become associated so that any one aspect can engage all the rest.

The self in action: regulating behavior

We sometimes control our behavior in a manner that allows us to communicate our true selves to others.
Other times we manipulate our behavior to craft a desired impression form others.
We sometimes control our behavior in ways that help us achieve a desired self.

Once we have an established self, we use this self to control and direct our behavior in important ways.

Self-expression and self-presentation

Self-expression: a motive for choosing behaviors that are intended to reflect and express the self-concept.

Self-presentation: a motive for choosing behaviors intended to create in observers a desired impression of the self.

Personality differences in preference for self-expression and self-presentation: self-monitoring

Self-monitoring: a personality characteristic defined as the degree to which people are sensitive to the demands of social situations and shape their behaviors accordingly.
These behavioral patterns may be motivated by a desire to obtain status within social groups.

Regulating behavior to achieve a desired self

One of the most fundamental aspects of self-regulation involves the way self-knowledge motivates our behavior toward important goals or standards.

Self guides: significant personal standards to which we strive.
Two kinds:

• The ideal self: a person’s sense of what he or she would ideally like to be.
• The ought self: a person’s sense of what he or she is obligated to be, or should be

These are part of the self-concept.

Regulatory focus theory: a theory that people typically have either a promotion or prevention focus, shaping the ways they self-regulate to attain positive outcomes versus negative outcomes.
Promotion: self-regulation is guided primarily by the ideal self or other standards that represent ideals.
Prevention: self-regulation is guided primarily by the ought self or other standards representing duties or obligations.

People prefer behavioral strategies that match their regulatory focus.

From self to behavior, and back again

Regulations can have long-lasting effects because our behavior often ends up impressing ourselves just as much as our audience.
The presence of an audience strengthens these outcomes.

Temptations that may derial self-regulation

When situations offer us short-term benefits that detract from longer-term goals, we may face challenges in regulating our behavior. We can actively and effortfully choose strategies to overcome these temptations. But, if we fail to reach our goals, negative consequences ensue.

Several strategies can weaken the effects of temptations and allow us to better accomplish our long-term goals.

• We can self-administer penalties or rewards to encourage ourselves to stick with our goals.
• We can try to think of these acts that contribute to our long-term goals in especially positive ways, linking them to our central values
• We can view temptations in more abstract ways, which should highlight the temptation’s incompatibility with our central goals.

Self-affirmation: any action or event that enhances or highlights one’s own sense of personal integrity, such as affirming one’s most important values.
Can restore self-control when one is low on inner resources.

Negative effects of not reaching goals

Self-awareness: a state of heightened awareness of the self, including our internal standards and whether we measure up to them.

Once we have constructed a sense of self, we begin to use it to regulate many aspects of our lives. Our self-concepts tends to resist change and to influence our thoughts, emotions and behavior.

Defending the self: coping with stresses, inconsistencies and failures

Our sense of self is our most valuable possession.
We use it continually, both a guide for action and an aid in interpreting others’ reactions to us.

Threats to the well-being of the self

When treated by external events or negative feedback, people must defend their sense of who and what they are. Threats to the self affect not only emotional well-being but also physical health. The most damaging threats are those we appraise as uncontrollable.

Anything that contradicts our sense of who we are and how we feel can cause negative implications for the self.
Feedback inconsistent with an established self-concept is avoided, distrusted or resisted, even if it is flattering. And also little things like everyday stress.

Emotional and physical effects of threat

Threats about the self arouse the gamut of negative emotions.
People with high self-esteem are at least in part protected from the negative effects of such events, even if the events are extreme.
When people’s self-esteem is overinflated or unstable, the impact of negative events may be magnified.

Threats to the self have effects beyond our emotions. They also contribute to physical illness.
Major setback adversely affect or health, but so do everyday minor hassles.
Threats to the self bring us down, tick us off, and alter our immune responses the kind of physiological changes that contribute to illness.

When people were reminded of significant mismatches between their current self and their self-guides, levels of natural killer cell activity in their bloodstream decreased. Threats to the self also elevate the stress hormone cortisol which, in the short therm, may aid in dealing with the threat.

The negative emotions that we experience in response to threats put physical health at risk.

The effects of positive emotions endure across major portions of a lifetime.
Positive emotion is strongly associated with better health across many years or even decades.

Threat an appraisals of control

The most threatening events are those we judge to be out of control. S
When our basic motive to master our environment is called into question, a vital part of our sense of self is threatened.
Uncontrollable stressful events are much more hazardous to health than controllable ones.

Defending against threat: emotion-focused coping

To defend against threats, people sometimes try to manage their emotional responses through escape, distraction, focusing on more positive aspects of the self, writing about the threat, or tending to the self and important relationships.

Emotion-focused coping: dealing with the negative emotions aroused by threats or stressors, often by suppressing emotions or distraction.

Escaping from threat

Escape mercifully terminates the painful awareness of inadequacies.
People who have fallen short of a personal standard will make a quick exit from the stressful situation, if they can.

Even as mundane a behavior as watching TV may be a way for some people to escape painful self-awareness through distraction. Escape can take other forms as well. (like alcohol)

Downplaying threat by focusing on the more positive aspect of the self

Downplay negative consequences of poor performance their importance in comparison to other domains of life.
Expressing the personal characteristics we see as most important and value most highly through self-affirmation can help us cope with failure, uncertainty and stress in other areas.

Terror management theory: a theory stating that reminders of one’s own mortality lead individuals to reaffirm basic cultural worldviews, which can have both positive and negative effects.

Working through threat by writing about it

Artistic expression helps people cope emotionally. Even such simple forms of expression such as writing or talking about the feelings produced by threatening events can help overcome some of their emotional and physical costs.

Tend and befriend

One means to cope emotionally with stress is by nurturing one’s self, one’s kin, and other people, and by creating and maintaining social networks of close others.
Women are more likely to use this strategy.

Attacking threat head-on: problem-focused coping

Sometimes people respond to threats directly, attempting to reinterpret or remove the negative threat or situation itself. Strategies include making excuses, seeking to take control, or directly attacking the problem.

Suppressing emotional feelings comes with costs.

Problem-focused coping: dealing with threats or stressors directly, often by reappraising the situation or by directly removing the threat.

Making excuses: it’s not my fault

Most people like to take credit for their successes and notable accomplishments and to attribute failure to external causes.

Self-handicapping

Seeking to avoid blame for an expected poor performance, either by claiming an excuse in advantage or by actively sabotaging one’s own performance (like failing to practice).

Taking control of the problem

Even when their outcomes are negative, people often feel better if they think they have control.
We attempt to exert control whenever we can, and when we feel in control we try harder and often perform better.
We often exaggerate the amount of control we possess, even if situations are actually ruled by chance.

How to cope?

The individual’s resources as well as characteristics of the threatening situation dictate the best response to threats. No single type of response is always best, but many types of coping can help overcome the threat, preserve psychological well-being and protect physical health.

Self-esteem as a resource for coping

People vary in the cognitive and emotional resources they have to aid in coping.
Self-esteem is also an important resource for coping with threats to the self. Those with high self-esteem respond to such threats with far fewer emotional and physical symptoms than do those with low self-esteem, and they even respond better physiologically in the face of the most pressing social threat, social exclusion.
High self-esteem leads to self-enhancement and successful coping, which restores high self-esteem, which triggers self-enhancement and so on.

Controllability and coping

The best way to cope depends on the characteristics of the threat as well as on these of the threatened person.
Depending on their appraisals of the threat and their own resources, people can choose among many possible coping strategies. Every style of coping has its costs as well as its benefits.
The most important appraisal is of a threat’s controllability.
Controllable threats really represent challenges rather than threats.
With challenges, problem-focused coping might work best, even if it increases immediate distress.