Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chapter 3 - The Social Self
Chapter 3 - The Social Self
Chapter 3
Game Plan
• Self-concept and its sources
• Introspection
• Perceptions of our own behavior
• Influences of other people
• Culture
• Self-esteem
• Need for self-esteem
• Self-discrepancy theory
• Self-awareness trap
• Self-regulation and its limits
• Mechanisms of self-enhancement
• Self-presentation
• Strategic self-presentation
• Self-enhancement
• Self-verification
The Self-Concept
Warm-Up Activity!
• Take a sheet of paper, or open a document on your computer
• Write “I AM…” on the top
• List 10 things that would fit after “I AM…”
• Don’t worry about order or importance! Just list them in the order in
which they come to your mind
• Hold on to your responses (till next class)
• Take 5 minutes to complete this exercise
Self-Concept
• Self-Concept
• The sum of total beliefs people have about themselves
• Made of many self-schemas
• Self-Schema
• Beliefs about oneself that guide processing of self-relevant information
• Cognitive in nature
Sources of Self-Concept
1. Introspection
2. Perceptions of our own behavior
3. The influence of other people
4. Autobiographical memories
5. Culture
Sources of Self-Concept: Introspection
• How do we achieve insights into our own beliefs, attitudes, emotions, desires,
and motivations?
• Introspection
• Looking inward at one’s own thoughts and feelings
• Self-knowledge
• Social psychologists skeptical about the accuracy of introspection
• People often cannot explain the causes or correlates of their own behavior
• People overestimate the positives when self-assessing
• Better-than-average effect
• Statistically impossible
Sources of Self-Concept: Introspection
• Affective Forecasting
• The process of predicting how we would feel in response to future
emotional events
• How would you feel if you fail this class? How long would that feeling last?
• How would you feel if your partner breaks up with you? How long would
that feeling last?
• People find this difficult
• People also tend to overestimate the strength + duration of their
emotional reactions
• Impact + Durability Bias
Sources of Self-Concept: Introspection
• Why this impact + durability bias?
• We tend to underestimate our own psychological coping mechanisms
• We believe that others will suffer even more than we would
• Even more discounting of others’ coping mechanisms
Sources of Self-Concept: Perceptions of Our
Own Behavior
• How many of you have devoured a sandwich so fast, after which you realized
that you were actually very hungry?!
• Daryl Bem (1972)
• People can learn a lot about themselves by watching their own behavior
• Self-Perception Theory
• When internal states are difficult to interpret, we gain insight by
observing our own behavior and the situation in which that behavior
takes place
Sources of Self-Concept: Perceptions of Our
Own Behavior
• Limits to Self-Perception
• People learn about themselves through self-perception only when the
situation alone is insufficient to have caused the behavior
• E.g., If you were paid to house that sandwich, you won’t necessarily
deduce that you were hungry!
• Vicarious Self-Perception
• Learning about yourself by observing the behavior of someone else
with whom you completely identify
Sources of Self-Concept: Perceptions of Our
Own Behavior
• Self-Perception of Emotions
• Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Changes in facial expressions can trigger corresponding changes in
the subjective experience of emotion
• But face not necessary for the subjective experience of emotion
Sources of Self-Concept: Perceptions of Our
Own Behavior
• Self-Perception of Motivation