Unit II Social Perception

Self-concept, Perceived Self-control, Self-serving Bias, Self-Perception, Self-esteem, Self and

Gender, Non-Verbal Communication, Attribution, Impression Formation, Impression
Management

Self-concept

The self-concept is the accumulation of knowledge about the self, such as beliefs regarding
personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles.During adolescence,
the self-concept becomes more abstract, complex, and hierarchically organised into cognitive
mental representations or self-schemas, which direct the processing of self-relevant information.

The way in which one perceives oneself, which is considered as self concept, can be divided into

● Personal self concept Example of personal self concept can be for instance, facts or one’s
own opinions about oneself, such as “I have brown eyes” or “I am attractive, etc and
● Social self concept Example may include one’s perceptions about how one is regarded by
others: “people think I have a great sense of humor” as well as self-ideals that is, what or
how one would like to be: “I want to be a lawyer” or “I wish I were thinner” etc.

Self-concept refers to self-evaluation or self perception, and it represents the sum of an

individual’s beliefs about his or her own attributes. Self concept reflects how an individual
evaluates himself or herself in domains (or areas) in which he or she considers success important.
An individual can have a positive self-concept in some domains and a negative self-concept in
others.

Promoting high self-concept is important because it relates to academic and life success.
Although the terms self-concept and self-esteem are often used interchangeably, they represent
different but related constructs. Self-concept refers to a student’s perceptions of competence or
adequacy in academic and nonacademic(e.g., social, behavioural, and athletic) domains and is
best represented by a profile of self-perceptions across domains. Self-esteem is a student’s
overall evaluation of him- or herself, including feelings of general happiness and satisfaction.

Let us now see how self concept is associated with achievement, aggression, depressionetc.
● Self-concept and academic achievement: Self-concept is frequently positively correlated
with academic performance, but it appears to be a consequence rather than a cause of
high achievement. This is a common assumption that an individuals high academic
performance results in their self concept. Whereas, the high academic performance is the
result of individual’s self concept.
● Self-concept and aggression: Another popular assumption is that aggressive students have
low self-concept and use aggression as a means of raising it. Self-concept, depression,
and use of illegal substances: Low self-concept is often considered a defining
characteristic of depression, but the evidence for this is weak.
.

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Perceived Self Control

Perceived Self Control is the attempt by an individual to exert self-control by forcing themselves
to do an activity or to control emotional responses.
Effortful self control depletes our limited willpower reserves. Our brain’s “central executive”
consumes available blood sugar when engaged in self-control. Self-control therefore operates
similarly to muscular strength, are weaker after exertion, replenished with rest, and strengthened
by exercise.
Although the self’s energy can be temporarily depleted, our self-concepts do influence our
behavior. Given challenging tasks, people who imagine themselves as hardworking and
successful outperform those who imagine themselves as failures.
● Self-Efficacy
Stanford Psychologist Albert Bandura captured the power of positive thinking in his
research and theorizing about self-efficacy. A sense that one is competent and effective,
distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s self of self-worth.
Children and adults with strong feelings of self-efficacy are more persistent, less anxious
and less depressed. They also live healthier lives and are more academically successful.
If you believe you can do something, that’s self-efficacy. If you like yourself, overall that’s
self-esteem. When you were a child, your parents may have encouraged you by saying
things like, “You are special” (intended to build self-esteem) instead of “I know you can do
it” (intended to build self-efficacy).
● Locus of Control
Some people seemed to persistently “feel that what happens to them is governed by
external forces of one kind or another, while other feel what happens to them is governed
largely by their own efforts and skills”.
The extent to which people perceive outcomes as internally controllable by their own
efforts or as externally controlled by chance or outside forces is termed as locus of control.
Those who see themselves as internally controlled are more likely to do well in school,
successfully stop smoking, wear seat belts, deal with marital problems directly, earn a
substantial income, and delay instant gratification to achieve long-term goals.
● Learned Helplessness
The sense of hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no
control over repeated bad events.
Dogs confined in a cage and taught that they cannot escape shocks will learn a sense of
helplessness. Researcher Martin Seligman noted similarities to this learned helplessness in
human situations. Depressed or oppressed people, become passive because they believe
their efforts have no effect.
Learned helplessness often occurs when attempts to improve a situation have proven
fruitless: self-determination, in contrast, is bolstered by experiences to successfully
exercising control and improving one’s situation. When people are given too many choices,
they may be less satisfied with what they have then when offered a smaller range of
choices.

Self serving bias

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Self serving bias is the by product of how we process and remember information about
ourselves. Comparing ourselves with others requires us to notice, assess and recall their
behaviour and ours. Thus there are multiple opportunities for flaws in our information
processing.
Self serving bias is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal causes (e.g., one’s
own traits or characteristics) but to the blame for negative results to external causes (e.g., chance,
task difficulty) or others.
Cognitive model suggests that self-serving bias stems mainly from certain tendencies in the way
we process social information. Specifically, it suggests that we attribute positive outcomes to
internal causes but negative outcomes to external causes because we expect to succeed and have
a tendency to attribute expected outcomes.
In many cases, this cognitive bias allows you to protect your self-esteem. By attributing positive
events to personal characteristics, you get a boost in confidence. By blaming outside forces for
failures, you protect your self-esteem and absolve yourself from personal responsibility.
A number of factors have been shown to influence the self-serving bias, including age and
gender. Older adults tend to make more internal attributions, that is, credit themselves for their
successes. Men are more likely to make external attributions, meaning they tend to blame outside
forces for their failures.Often when a person is depressed or has low self-esteem, this kind of bias
may be reversed: they’ll attribute positive outcomes to outside help or even luck, and blame
themselves when bad things happen.
Adaptive and maladaptive effect of Self-Serving Bias
One advantage of this bias is that it leads people to persevere even in the face of adversity. An
unemployed worker may feel more motivated to keep looking for work if he attributes his
joblessness on a weak economy, for instance, rather than some personal failing. An athlete might
feel more motivated to perform well if she believes that her failure during a previous event was
the result of bad weather rather than a lack of skill.
Self serving bias can be adaptive in that it allows us to savour the good things that happen in our
lives. When bad things happen, however, self-serving bias can have the maladaptive effect of
causing us to blame others or feel cheated out of something we “deserved”.

Examples of Self-Serving Bias

● Following a car accident, both parties involved blame the other driver for causing the
crash.

Self Esteem

Self-esteem is the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of
being worthy of happiness. Self esteem is the one important factor required by anybody to

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succeed in life. It is said that if an individual build their self esteem at their adolescent period it
lasts all through their life.
Self-esteem is our overall attitude towards our self. Self-esteem is most frequently
measured with implicit items that directly assess our perceived level of self-esteem. Other
implicit measures of self-esteem assess how strong the positive or negative associations between
ourselves and stimuli associated with us are, including trait terms.
People may not be aware of their implicit self-esteem

Self-esteem is the overall sense of self-worth we use to appraise our traits and abilities. Our
self-concepts are determined by multiple influences, including the roles we play, the comparisons
we make, our social identities, how we perceive others appraising us, and our experiences of
success and failure.

Self-esteem motivation influences our cognitive processes: facing failure, high self-esteem
people sustain their self-worth by perceiving other people as failing, too and by exaggerating
their superiority over others.

Although high self-esteem is generally more beneficial than low, researchers have found that
people high in both self-esteem and narcissism are the most aggressive. Someone with a big ego
who is threatened or deflated by social rejection is potentially aggressive.

Teachers, administrators, and parents commonly voice concerns about students’ self esteem. Its
significance is often exaggerated to the extent that low self esteem is viewed as the cause of all
evil and high self-esteem as the cause of all good.

Self esteem is all about how much people value them, the pride they feel in them selves, and how
worthwhile they feel. Self-esteem is important because feeling good about yourself can affect
how you act. A person who has high self-esteem will friends easily, is more in control of his or
her behaviour, and will enjoy life more.

Body image is how someone feels about his or her own physical appearance. Body image can be
closely linked to self esteem, that’s because as kids develop into teens, they care more about how
others see them.

There are many causes for the lack of positive self esteem. Let us review some of them.

Hereditary is a main factor for low self esteem. If the parents are introverts and they never
mingle with people for fear of their inability, the chances that children have low esteem are more.
● The living conditions.

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 ● Lack of proper education is another factor affecting the self esteem. Uneducated children
will develop lack of self esteem as they will face problems in interacting with the
educated of their age.
● Physiological. Adolescence is a period when major physical changes occur in boys and
girls. The gender hormones start the functioning in full swing during this period.
● Societal implications. During the adolescent stage of a child, society put many
restrictions in their behaviours and attitudes. Girls will be automatically tempted to move
away from the boys and boys are restricted to mingle with girls during the period.
● Fear about future. During the late periods of adolescence, the children will seriously think
about their future and in many cases they will get depressed of their future.
Unemployment, dating problems, insecurity, lack of financial backgrounds and many
such factors make the adolescents afraid of facing the world.
● Diseases and other physical ailments. These children will be thinking that they are debris
in the world. These thinking processes make them to keep away from other sand they can
become agitated.
● There are many such reasons for low self esteem of adolescents. If proper care is not
given, the low self esteem gradually will lead to many physical and mental ailments. It is
important to bring up the adolescents with high self esteem.

Gender and Self

There is small but reliable gender difference in self-esteem. Women’s self-esteem is worse than
men’s to extent that they live in a nation with more exclusion of women from public life
compared to women who live in a nation with higher labour force participation by women.
Among those U.S women who work in occupations in which discrimination is frequent and
pervasive, lower self-esteem is more prevalent than among women in occupations in which
discrimination is encountered less often.

Self Perception

“Individuals come to know their own attitudes, emotions and internal states by inferring them
from observations of their own behaviour and circumstances in which they occur. When internal
cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, the individual is in the same position as the
outside observer” (Bem, 1972).
Self-perception theory represents one of the most influential theories of how self knowledge
unfolds. Developed by social psychologist Daryl Bem self-perception theory consists of two
basic claims.
a) First the theory claims that people come to know their own attitudes, beliefs, and other internal
states by inferring them from their own behaviour and the circumstances under which they occur.
So a student who observes that he or she constantly reads psychology books may infer an interest
in psychology.
b) Second the theory claims that when internal cues are weak, the individual is in the same
position as an outside observer who must rely upon the external cues of their behaviour to infer
their own inner characteristics. In this case people’s conclusion that they genuinely like
psychology will be reinforced if there are no external incentives to explain their behaviour (e.g.,
grades), and they have no clear prior opinions regarding psychology. Thus people simply use
their behaviour and the circumstances in which it occurs to infer their own beliefs and attitudes.

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One reason why self-perception theory has been so influential stems from its simplicity as an
explanation for how self-knowledge develops. That is people come to know themselves merely
by observing their own behaviour. Beyond its simplicity, however, self-perception theory has
been so influential because it provides an important contrast to the most famous psychological
theory of how behaviour shapes self-knowledge: cognitive dissonance theory.

Social Perception

Social perception is the process through which we seek to understand other persons. Every
individual engage in this process very often and devote a lot of effort to find out – what they are
like as individuals, why they act (or don’t act) in certain ways, how they will behave in the future
or in other situations.

Some of the aspects of social perception include

- Non verbal communication
- Attribution
- Impression formation
- Impression management

Non verbal communication is the communication between individuals that does not involve the
content of spoken language. It relies instead on an unspoken language of facial expression, eye
contact, body movements and postures and touch. Most of the time and much of the information
is conveyed through non verbal rather than verbal communication. Hence while trying to
understand the other persons, individuals rely on non verbal cues alongwith the verbal
communication. Human feelings and emotions are often reflected in the face and can be read
there in specific expressions.

Staring is a form of eye contact in which one person continues to gaze steadily at another
regardless of what the recipient does. A stare is often interpreted as a sign of anger or hostility as
in cold stare – and most people find this particular nonverbal cue disturbing.

Body language are the cues provided by the position, posture, and movement of others’ bodies or
body parts. Depending on the situation, touch can suggest affection, sexual interest, dominance,
caring or even aggression. When touching is considered appropriate, it often produces positive
reactions in the person being touched. One acceptable way in which people in many different
cultures touch strangers is through handshaking.

Research findings indicate that handshaking provides useful nonverbal cues about others’
personality, and can influence first impressions of strangers. If we pay careful attention to certain
nonverbal cues, we can recognize efforts at deception by others-even if these persons are from

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cultures other than our own. Paralanguage is a type of nonverbal communication involving vocal
expressions other than speech, such as tone and pitch.

Nonverbal cues play a role in many important social situations-between doctors and their
patients, as well as during job interviews. Posture in the form of power posing can affect our
confidence and actual performance in stressful situations.

Attribution refers to our efforts to understand the causes behind others’ behavior and on some
occasions, the causes behind our behavior also. Kelly’s theory of causal attribution explains
whether the behavior of other people stems from internal cause or external cause or a
combination of both. Eg. Poor grade is because of teacher’s unfair and biased behavior (an
external cause ) or because of not studying well (internal cause) or because of both the factors.
According to Kelley, in our attempts to answer the question why about others’ behavior, we
focus on information relating to three major sources of information.

According to psychologist Harold Kelley’s covariation model, we tend to use three types of
information when we’re deciding whether someone’s behavior was internally or externally
motivated.

1. Consensus, or whether others would act similarly in a given situation. If other people
would typically display the same behavior, we tend to interpret the behavior as being
less indicative of an individual's innate characteristics.
2. Distinctiveness, or whether the person acts similarly across other situations. If a
person only acts a certain way in one situation, the behavior can probably be
attributed to the situation rather than the person.
3. Consistency, or whether someone acts the same way in a given situation each time it
occurs. If someone’s behavior in a given situation is inconsistent from one time to the
next, their behavior becomes more difficult to attribute.

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When there are high levels of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency, we tend to attribute
the behavior to the situation.

Impression formation is the process through which we form impression of others. Impressions
exert strong and lasting effects on other persons’ perceptions of us. And the way other persons
perceive us can strongly influence their behavior toward us.

Most people are concerned with making good first impressions on others because they believe
that these impressions will exert lasting, positive effects. Research on impression formation - the
process through which we form our views of others – suggests that this is true.

Asch’s classic research on impression formation indicates that impressions of others involves
more than simple summaries of their traits. Some traits(central traits such as warm and cold) can
influence the interpretation of other traits.

First impressions are formed very quickly-within seconds or less-but speed does not necessarily
equal accuracy. Although some studies show that even thin slices of information about others
produce reasonable accurate perceptions, other research indicates that first impressions are above
chance in accuracy for only some attributes (e.g., threat). Once they are formed, first impressions
can be changed when information is acquired.

This occurs primarily when new information causes us to reinterpret the initial information, and
the new information is relevant to being judged.

In order to make a good impression on others, individuals, often engage in impression

management or self-presentation.

Impression management involves the effort by individual to make a favourable impression on

others. Hence most of us do our best to look good to others when we meet them for the first time.
Individuals use specific strategies to boost one’s physical appearance and different tactics to
induce positive moods and reaction in others.

Most techniques used for this purpose fall into two categories:

● self-enhancement (efforts to boost one’s appeal others) specific strategies include efforts
to boost one’s appearance – either physical or professional. Physical appearance relates to
the attractiveness and appeal of the dress, and personal hygiene.
● other-enhancement (efforts to induce positive moods or reactions in others). Forms of
other-enhancement include flattering others, expressing agreement with them, doing
favors for others and asking for their advice

Evidence indicates that impression management tactics can work, but only up to a point. If they
are overdone, these tactics can be recognized for what they are, and generate negative rather than
positive reactions from others.

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