The Social Self

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The Nature of The Social Self

• we like to think that we have a consistent self and stable personality
• self is constructed, maintained, and negotiated in social settings

Components of Self

• Individual self – beliefs about yourself as an individual
• Relational self – beliefs about our identities in specific relationships
• Collective self – beliefs about our identities as part of a social group

Self schemas – belief based on past experiences about who we are

• high in extraversion = more self-schema
  • more elaborate beliefs about being extraverted

Self-reference effect – better memory for information related to ourselves

Self-complexity – tendency to define the self in terms of multiple, relatively distinct domains

Origins of The Self

• sources of self-knowledge:
  • from within us
    • introspection
  • from other people
  • from social groups
  • from situations

Introspection

• Narrated self: making sense of who we are and how we change
  • construal
• not necessarily accurate
• others may predict our behavior just as well as we do

Reflected Self-appraisals

• beliefs about what others think of one’s self
• looking glass self
  • people laugh at your jokes → you’re funny
  • people praise your academic work → you’re a good student
• we aren’t actually good at predicting what others think of ourselves

Family and Other Socialization Agents

• Parents, siblings, grandparents, teachers, etc. teach us attitudes and behaviors

• Birth order

  • older siblings:
    • more dominant, achievement-oriented, conscientious, maintain status quo
  • younger siblings:
    • more agreeable, open to new experiences, rebellious, challenge status quo
  • diversification:
    • siblings may take on different roles to minimize conflicts

Social Comparison

Social comparison theory – people compare themselves to others to evaluate their own opinions, beliefs, and internal states

• likely to occur when:
  • no clear objective standard
  • have uncertainty about yourself in a particular domain

Motivated comparisons

• Upward comparison – improve something about yourself
  • role models, people better than you
• Downward comparison – compare yourself to others that are worse than you so you feel better

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Independent Self-Concept

• prevalent in individualistic societies
• A person defines themself as an individual person and uniqueness

Interdependent Self-Concept

• common in collectivist culture
• More likely to describe themselves in relation to who they are in a group and their role in a community

Within Cultures

Power: powerful people have more independent self concepts than low-power people

• power allows for autonomy
• business people in interdependent cultures also tend to have more independent views of the self
• this power dynamic holds across cultures

Gender and the Self

• Across cultures, men have more independent, and women have more interdependent views of the self
  • women refer to relationships
  • women more attuned to external social cues, but men more to internal cues

Situationism

• Our social self changes from one situation to another
• working self-concept: only a subset of self-knowledge is brought to mind in a particular context
• what makes us unique in current situtation

Malleability vs Stability

• Our self is both shifting and stable
  1. Core aspects that are cross-situationally salient
  2. Stable overall self-knowledge but different aspects are salient at different times
  3. Predictable changes → stable within situations
     • Trait – the “average” version of you that is relatively stable across time and situations
     • State – How you are in different situations which changes based on context

Self-esteem

• Self-concept = beliefs about oneself
• Self-esteem = evaluation of oneself (attitude about oneself)
• trait vs self
• changes across time

Sociometer Hypothesis

• Hunger → index of presence or lack of nutrition
• Self-esteem → index of presence of lack of inclusion
  • not important in of itself
• Social exclusion hurts (literally)

Self-esteem: Good or Bad?

• everything in moderation
• inflated egotism

Culture and Self-esteem

• Universal?
  • no
• Exposed to different situations:
  • self-esteem motivation vs self-improvement motivation
    • individualists vs. collectivists
    • Japanese: did poorly = persistence
    • Canadians: did well = persistence

Why do we want to evaluate ourselves?

• self-enhancement
• Self-verification

Self-Enhancement

• better-than-average effect
  • most westerners tend to report better than avg. on most traits
  • why?
    • self-serving construals
    • we judge others on what they are like on average and ourselves by what we are like at our best
• we are motivated to evaluate ourselves positively
• self-affirmation theory
  • reduces self-serving attributional bias

Self-enhancement is people’s desire to maintain, increase, or protect their self-esteem or self-views.

Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory

• Tesser (1988)
• Motivated to have positive self-esteem
• Achieved through motivated reasoning
  • reflection (in unimportant domains)
  • comparison (in important domains)

Cultural Differences

• westerners self-enhance more than East Asians
• Westerners
  • well-being associated with positive self views
• East Asians
  • well-being rather associated with interdependent values

Self-Verification

Self-verification theory: People strive for stable, accurate beliefs about the self because of a desire for coherence.

• allows us to predict outcomes
• memory is more selective for self-consistent information
  • we want those beliefs confirmed, even if they are negative

Self-Handicapping

• we might not live up to the public self we’re trying to portray

Self-handicapping: Tendency to engage in self-defeating behavior to prevent others from assuming poor performance due to lack of ability

Self-Regulation

• likely more important than IQ for academic performance

Self-discrepancy Theory

• Ideal self -⇒ actual self -⇒ ought self
  | |
  dejection agitation
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  promotion focus prevention focus

Strength Model of Self-control

• muscle metaphor
• limited resource
  • ego depletion (on-going debate)
• can be trained
• can be replenished through sleep and sugar