SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

An Interplay of Self and Social World, Self-Concept

INTENDED LEARNING
OUTCOMES
o Define the concept of self and its significance within
the context of the social world.
o Identify the key components of self-concept and the
various influences that shape one’s perception of the
self.
o Recognize the interplay between self and the social
world, understanding how external factors impact one’s
self-concept.
SELF-CONCEPT: WHO AM I?
Complete the
sentence “I am
____________” in
three different ways.
OUR SENSE OF SELF
o The most important aspect of yourself is
your self.
o Schemas – mental templates by which we
organize our worlds.
o Self-schema – beliefs about self that organize
and guide the processing of self-relevant
information.
SOCIAL COMPARISONS
o Evaluating one’s opinions and abilities by comparing
oneself with others.
o Schadenfreude – schaden (damage or harm); freude (joy);
finding pleasure at other’s suffering/misfortune
o Social comparisons are sometimes based on incomplete
information and can diminish our satisfaction in other ways.
o Upward social comparison - the tendency to compare ourselves
with those perceived to be better off than us.
o Downward social comparison - involves comparing oneself to
someone else perceived as “lesser” or “worse”
OTHER PEOPLE’S JUDGMENT
o Labels that are accompanied to us are being
incorporated to our self-concepts and behavior.
o looking-glass self – as described by sociologist
Charles H. Cooley (1902), our use of how we think
others perceive us mirror for perceiving ourselves.
o George Herbert Mead (1934), also a sociologist, refined this
concept, noting that what matters for out self-concepts is not
how others actually see us but the way we imagine they see
us.
SELF AND CULTURE
o Individualism – the concept of giving
priority to one’s own goals over group goals
and defining one’s identity in terms of
personal attributes rather than group
identifications.
o independent self – construing one’s identity as an
autonomous self.
SELF AND CULTURE
o Collectivism – giving priority to the goals of
one’s group (often one’s extended family or
work group_ and defining one’s identity
accordingly.
o In individualistic cultures, being different
and standing out is seen as an asset. In
collectivistic cultures, it is seen as a detriment.
SELF AND CULTURE
SELF AND CULTURE
SELF-CONCEPT
o Our sense of self helps organize our thoughts
and action.
o Self-concept consists of two elements:
o self-schemas – guide our processing of self-relevant information
o possible selves – representation of an individual’s ideas of what
they might become, what they would like to become, and what
they are afraid of becoming.
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Self-Esteem, Self-Knowledge and Social Self
INTENDED LEARNING
OUTCOMES
o Define the concept of self-esteem ad its associated
concepts.
o Define the concept of self-knowledge and its
related concepts.
o Define the concept of the social self and its
associated concepts.
SELF-ESTEEM
o refers to how we value and perceive ourselves.
o “self-worth”
o In collectivist cultures, self-esteem tends to be
malleable (context-specific) rather than stable
(enduring across situations).
oFor those in individualistic cultures, self-esteem is
more personal and less relational.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
o “Know thyself”
o “There is one thing, and only one in the whole
universe which we know more about than we
could learn from external observation. That one
thing is ourselves” – C.S. Lewis (1952)
o refers to knowledge of one’s own mental states,
processes, and dispositions.
PREDICTING OUR BEHAVIOR
o Planning fallacy – the tendency to
underestimate how long will it take to
complete a task.
o You can improve your self-predictions by
being more realistic about how long tasks
took in the past.
PREDICTING OUR FEELINGS
o Sometimes, we know how we will feel but other times,
we may mispredict our responses.
o Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal that people
have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and
the duration of their future emotions (Wilson & Gilbert,
2003).
o Impact bias – overestimating the enduring impact of
emotion-causing events.
WISDOM AND ILLUSIONS OF
SELF-ANALYSIS
o We are unaware of much that goes in our minds. Perceptions and
memory studies show that we are more aware of the results of our
thinking than of its process.
o Timothy Wilson (1985, 2002) offered a bold idea: Analyzing why we
feel the way we do can actually make our judgments less accurate.
o Dual attitude system – differing implicit (automatic) and explicit
(consciously controlled) attitude toward the same object.
o Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and persuasion.
o Implicit attitudes change slowly, with practice that forms new habits.
WISDOM AND ILLUSIONS OF
SELF-ANALYSIS
o The research on the limits of our self-knowledge has
two practical implications:
o psychological inquiry
o Self-reports are often untrustworthy.
o Errors in self-understanding limit the scientific usefulness of
subjective personal reports.
o everyday lives
o Even if people report and interpret their experiences with
complete honesty, that does not mean their reports are true.
WISDOM AND ILLUSIONS OF
SELF-ANALYSIS
o The research on the limits of our self-knowledge has
two practical implications:
o psychological inquiry
o Self-reports are often untrustworthy.
o Errors in self-understanding limit the scientific usefulness of
subjective personal reports.
o everyday lives
o Even if people report and interpret their experiences with
complete honesty, that does not mean their reports are true.
SELF-ESTEEM MOTIVATION
o Most people are extremely motivated to
maintain their self-esteem.
o When people have markedly different
ability levels, they report not getting along
well – hence, their self-esteem is threatened.
o Schadenfreude – joy at another’s misfortune/suffering.
SELF-ESTEEM MOTIVATION
o Relationships enable surviving and thriving, so
the self-esteem gauge alerts us threatened to social
rejection, motivating us to act with greater
sensitivity to others’ expectations.
o Studies confirm that social rejection lowers self-
esteem and makes people more eager for
approval.
SELF-ESTEEM MOTIVATION
o Jeff Greenberg offered another perspective called
terror management theory.
o This theory proposes that people exhibit self-
protective emotional and cognitive responses (including
adhering more strongly to their cultural worldviews and
prejudices) when confronted with reminders of their
mortality.
NARCISSISM: SELF-ESTEEM’S
CONCEITED SISTER
o Actively pursuing self-esteem can be detrimental.
o According to a study, individuals whose self-worth was
contingent on external sources (such as grades or other’s opinions)
experienced more stress, anger, relationship problems, drug and
alcohol use, and eating disorders than did those whose sense of
self-worth was rooted more in internal sources, such as personal
virtues.
o Those who pursue self-esteem, perhaps by seeking to become
beautiful, rich, or popular, may lose sight of what really makes
them feel good about themselves.