Reference No: KLL-FO-ACAD-000 | Effectivity Date: August 3, 2020 | Revisions No.

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VISION MISSION
A center of human dev elopment committed to the pursuit of wisdom, truth, Establish and maintain an academic env ironment promoting the pursuit of
justice, pride, dignity , and local/global competitiv eness v ia a quality but excellence and the total dev elopment of its students as human beings,
af f ordable education f or all qualif ied clients. with f ear of God and lov e of country and f ellowmen.

GOALS
Kolehiy o ng Lungsod ng Lipa aims to:
1. f oster the spiritual, intellectual, social, moral, and creativ e lif e of its client v ia affordable but quality tertiary education;
2. prov ide the clients with reach and substantial, relev ant, wide range of academic disciplines, expose them to v aried curricula r and co-curricular
experiences which nurture and enhance their personal dedications and commitments to social, moral, cultural, and economic transf ormations.
3. work with the gov ernment and the community and the pursuit of achiev ing national dev elopmental goals; and
4. dev elop deserv ing and qualif ied clients with dif f erent skills of life existence and prepare them f or local and global competitiv eness

LESSON 3 (ATTACHMENT C)
THE SELF AS COGNIVE CONSTRUCT

Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept

Part of what is developing in children as they grow is the fundamental cognitive part of the
self, known as the self-concept. The self-concept is a knowledge representation that contains
knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics,
abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals.
Throughout childhood and adolescence, the self-concept becomes more abstract and complex
and is organized into a variety of different cognitive aspects of the self, known as self-
schemas. Children have self-schemas about their progress in school, their appearance, their
skills at sports and other activities, and many other aspects. In turn, these self-schemas direct
and inform their processing of self-relevant information (Harter, 1999), much as we saw schemas
in general affecting our social cognition.

The specific content of our self-concept powerfully affects the way that we process
information relating to ourselves. But how can we measure that specific content? One way is by
using self-report tests. One of these is a deceptively simple fill-in-the-blank measure that has
been widely used by many scientists to get a picture of the self-concept (Rees & Nicholson,
1994).

Try this for yourself

 I am (please fill in the blank) physical characteristics

 I am (please fill in the blank personality traits
 I am (please fill in the blank) social identity

Although each person has a unique self-concept, we can identify some characteristics that
are common across the responses given by different people on the measure. Physical
characteristics are an important component of the self-concept, and they are mentioned by
many people when they describe themselves. If you’ve been concerned lately that you’ve been
gaining weight, you might write, “I am overweight.” If you think you’re particularly good looking (“I

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am attractive”), or if you think you’re too short (“I am too short”), those things might have been
reflected in your responses. Our physical characteristics are important to our self-concept
because we realize that other people use them to judge us. People often list the physical
characteristics that make them different from others in either positive or negative ways (“I
am blond,” “I am short”), in part because they understand that these characteristics are salient
and thus likely to be used by others when judging them (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka,
1978).

A second aspect of the self-concept relating to personal characteristics is made up

of personality traits—the specific and stable personality characteristics that describe an
individual (“I am friendly,” “I am shy,” “I am persistent”). These individual differences are
important determinants of behavior, and this aspect of the self-concept varies among people.

The remainder of the self-concept reflects its more external, social components; for
example, memberships in the social groups that we belong to and care about. Common
responses for this component may include “I am an artist,” “I am Jewish,” and “I am a mother,
sister, daughter.” As we will see later in this chapter, group memberships form an important part
of the self-concept because they provide us with our social identity—the sense of our self that
involves our memberships in social groups.

We all define ourselves in relation to these three broad categories of characteristics—

physical, personality, and social This greater emphasis on either external and social aspects of
the self-concept reflects the relative importance that collectivistic and individualistic cultures place
on an interdependence versus independence (Nisbett, 2003).

Self-Complexity and Self-Concept Clarity

Although every human being has a complex self-concept, there are nevertheless individual
differences in self-complexity, the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively
independent ways of thinking about themselves (Linville, 1987; Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Some
selves are more complex than others, and these individual differences can be important in
determining psychological outcomes. Having a complex self means that we have a lot of
different ways of thinking about ourselves. For example, imagine a woman whose self-
concept contains the social identities of student, girlfriend, daughter, psychology student,
and tennis player and who has encountered a wide variety of life experiences. The benefits of
self-complexity occur because the various domains of the self help to buffer us against negative
events and enjoy the positive events that we experience.

Just as we may differ in the complexity of our self-concept, so we may also differ in
its clarity. Self-concept clarity is the extent to which one’s self-concept is clearly and
consistently defined (Campbell, 1990 ) Having a clear and stable view of ourselves can help us in
our relationships.When we have a clear self-concept, we may be better able to consistently
communicate who we are and what we want to our partner, which will promote greater
understanding and satisfaction. Also, perhaps when we feel clearer about who we are, then we

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feel less of a threat to our self-concept and autonomy when we find ourselves having to make
compromises in our close relationships.

Self-Awareness

Like any other schema, the self-concept can vary in its current cognitive accessibility. Self-
awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-
concept. When our self-concept becomes highly accessible because of our concerns about being
observed and potentially judged by others, we experience the publicly induced self-awareness
known as self-consciousness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Rochat, 2009).

Perhaps you can remember times when your self-awareness was increased and you
became self-conscious—for instance, when you were giving a presentation and you were
perhaps painfully aware that everyone was looking at you, or when you did something in public
that embarrassed you. Emotions such as anxiety and embarrassment occur in large part because
the self-concept becomes highly accessible, and they serve as a signal to monitor and perhaps
change our behavior.

In addition to variation in long-term accessibility, the self and its various components may
also be made temporarily more accessible through priming.

Social psychologists are interested in studying self-awareness because it has such an

important influence on behavior. People become more likely to violate acceptable, mainstream
social norms when, for example, they put on a Halloween mask or engage in other behavi ors that
hide their identities. And when people are in large crowds, such as in a mass demonstration or a
riot, they may become so much a part of the group that they experience deindividuation—the
loss of individual self-awareness and individual accountability in groups (Festinger, Pepitone, &
Newcomb, 1952; Zimbardo, 1969) and become more attuned to themselves as group members
and to the specific social norms of the particular situation (Reicher & Stott, 2011).

Two aspects of individual differences in self-awareness have been found to be important,

and they relate to self-concern and other-concern, respectively (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss,
1975; Lalwani, Shrum, & Chiu, 2009). Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to
introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings. People who are high on private self-
consciousness are likely to base their behavior on their own inner beliefs and values—they let
their inner thoughts and feelings guide their actions—and they may be particularly likely to strive
to succeed on dimensions that allow them to demonstrate their own personal accomplishments
(Lalwani et al., 2009).

Public self-consciousness, in contrast, refers to the tendency to focus on our outer

public image and to be particularly aware of the extent to which we are meeting the standards set
by others. These are the people who check their hair in a mirror they pass and spend a lot of time
getting ready in the morning; they are more likely to let the opinions of others (rather than their

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own opinions) guide their behaviors and are particularly concerned with making good
impressions on others.

According to self-awareness theory (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), when we focus our
attention on ourselves, we tend to compare our current behavior against our internal standards.
Sometimes when we make these comparisons, we realize that we are not currently measuring
up. In these cases, self-discrepancy theory states that when we perceive a discrepancy
between our actual and ideal selves, this is distressing to us (Higgins, Klein, & Strauman, 1987).

In part, the stress arising from perceived self-discrepancy relates to a sense of cognitive
dissonance, which is the discomfort that occurs when we respond in ways that we see as
inconsistent. A potential response to feelings of self-discrepancy is to try to reduce the state of
self-awareness that gave rise to these feelings by focusing on other things.

There are certain situations, however, where these common dissonance-reduction

strategies may not be realistic options to pursue. In such cases, self-affirmation
theory suggests that people will try to reduce the threat to their self-concept posed by feelings of
self-discrepancy by focusing on and affirming their worth in another domain, unrelated to the
issue at hand. For instance, the person who has become addicted to an illegal substance may
choose to focus on healthy eating and exercise regimes instead as a way of reducing the
dissonance created by the drug use.

There are also emerging findings exploring the role of self-awareness and self-affirmation
in relation to behaviors on social networking sites. Gonzales and Hancock (2011) conducted an
experiment showing that individuals became more self-aware after viewing and updating their
Facebook profiles, and in turn reported higher self-esteem than participants assigned to an
offline, control condition

. Perhaps sometimes we can have too much self-awareness and focus to the detriment of
our abilities to understand others.

Overestimating How Closely and Accurately Others View Us

Although the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, and although people
(particularly those high in self-consciousness) are aware of their self and how they are seen by
others, this does not mean that people are always thinking about themselves. In fact, people do
not generally focus on their self-concept any more than they focus on the other things and other
people in their environments (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982).

On the other hand, self-awareness is more powerful for the person experiencing it than it
is for others who are looking on, and the fact that self-concept is so highly accessible frequently
leads people to overestimate the extent to which other people are focusing on them (Gilovich &
Savitsky, 1999). Although you may be highly self-conscious about something you’ve done in a

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particular situation, that does not mean that others are necessarily paying all that much attention
to you.

There is also some diversity in relation to age. Teenagers are particularly likely to be
highly self-conscious, often believing that others are watching them (Goossens, Beyers, Emmen,
& van Aken, 2002).

People also often mistakenly believe that their internal states show to others more than
they really do. Gilovich and colleagues called this effect the “illusion of transparency.” This
illusion brings home an important final learning point about our self-concepts: although we may
feel that our view of ourselves is obvious to others, it may not always be!

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DeAndrea, D. C., Shaw, A. S., & Levine, T. R. (2010). Online language: The role of culture in
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