THE NATURE OF THE SELF - courtesy of the free Google Sites content creator - author unknown

Psychology of Social Behaviors

• William James (1890) defined a basic duality of the self: it is both the known, “Me,” and the knower, “I.” In modern terminology, the “Me” is the self-concept, or content of the self—our knowledge about who we are, and the “I” is self-awareness, or the act of thinking about ourselves.
  
  
• Gallup’s studies examined whether animals have a sense of self by looking at their reactions when placed in front of a mirror. He found that the great apes seem to have a sense of self—they recognize that their image has changed when anesthetized and a red dye is placed on part of their face. Dolphins showed a similar response. A similar test used with human infants suggested that self-recognition develops at about two years of age.
  
  
• Other developmental studies show that the concept of self evolves from being concrete and focused on observable characteristics to being more abstract and focused on psychological characteristics during the course of childhood and adolescence.
  
  

A. Functions of the Self 

• Researchers have found that the self serves both an organizational function and an executive function.

1. Organizational Function of the Self
   
   • We use self-schemas, mental structures that help us to organize our knowledge about ourselves, to organize our knowledge about ourselves. People use computers for this but as of 2021 there have not been any fully integrated home systems put to the task of facilitating individual self-governance -- this is a void to fill now that the platform is available in Open Source Code. 
   
   • Markus (1977) and others have found that we are more likely to remember information better if we relate it to ourselves. This is referred to as the self-reference effect. Integrating information with our self-schemas helps us organize it better and connect it to other information about ourselves, which makes us more likely to remember it later.
   
   
2. Self-Regulation: The Executive Function
   
   • The self also serves an executive function, regulating people’s behavior, choices, and plans for the future. According to the self-regulatory resource model, self-control is a limited resource and people have a limited amount of energy to devote to self-control and that spending it on one task limits the amount that can be spent on another task.
   
   

B. Cultural Differences in Defining the Self

• In many Western cultures, people have an independent view of the self, focusing on their own internal thoughts, feelings, and actions; in many Asian and other non-Western cultures, people have an interdependent view of the self, defining themselves in terms of relationships with other people.
  
  
• Singelis (1994) developed a scale to measure these two senses of the self (sample items are given on p. 129).
  
  

C. Gender Differences in Defining the Self

• Research suggests that women have more relational interdependence, focusing more on their close relationships, while men have more collective interdependence, focusing on their memberships in larger groups.
  
  
• Cross and Madson (1997) point out that this difference starts in childhood and persists into adulthood. Women focus more on intimacy and on cooperation with a small number of close others, while men focus more on their social groups. In line with this, Gabriel and Gardner (1999) found that, when asked to describe an emotional event in their lives, women described events involving personal relationships while men described events involving social groups.
  
  
• It is important not to overemphasize sex differences, as for the most part, there is a vast overlap in the psychological makeup of the sexes.

KNOWING OURSELVES THROUGH INTROSPECTION

• Intuitively, we recognize that introspection, the process whereby people look inward and examine their own thoughts, feelings, and motives, is one basis of self-knowledge. However, people do not rely on this as much as we expect, and even when they do introspect, they may not recognize why they feel or act the way they do.
  
  

A. Focusing on the Self: Self-Awareness Theory

• Csikszentmihalyi and Figurski (1982) conducted a study where participants recorded their thoughts whenever a randomly-timed beeper sounded; thoughts about the self were surprisingly infrequent.
  
  
• According to self-awareness theory, when we do focus attention on ourselves, we compare our current behavior against internal standards and values. When we become aware of a discrepancy, we attempt to reduce it by changing our behavior to match. If we cannot do this, we will find self-awareness very uncomfortable.
  
  
• Because self-awareness can be unpleasant, we may be motivated to “escape the self” by engaging in drinking, binge eating, sexual masochism, suicide attempts, or spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation.
  
  
• Self-awareness will be pleasant when we meet or exceed our standards.
  
  
• Self-focus can also keep us out of trouble by reminding us of our sense of right and wrong. Several studies show that people are more likely to follow their moral standards when self-aware.

B. Judging Why We Feel the Way We Do: Telling More Than We Can Know

• Many of our mental processes occur outside of awareness—we are aware of the final result of our thoughts, but not of the process by which we got there. However, when asked to provide an explanation for why we have the opinions we do, we easily come up with a reason. Thus, introspection may not lead us to the true causes of our feelings and behavior, but we’ll manage to convince ourselves it did (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
  
  
• Diary studies that track people’s moods show that, although people have strong causal theories about the causes of their own feelings and behavior—for example, thinking that factors like the amount of sleep the previous night influence their moods—these theories are generally wrong.
  
  
• Nisbett and Wilson (1977) conducted a study in which participants viewed a film. For half of the participants, a “construction worker” buzzed a power-saw outside the room during the viewing. Although the participants (and the researchers!) thought the noise would influence evaluations of the film, it didn’t do so, demonstrating a faulty causal theory.
  
  
• In another Nisbett and Wilson study, participants asked to rate pantyhose at a shopping mall were influenced by the position of the items on the display table; however, participants did not believe that this could affect their responses.
  
  
• In introspecting, people do not rely only on their causal theories; information about past behavior and thoughts before making a decision are also important. Nonetheless, introspection does not always yield the right answer about why we feel the way we do.

C. The Consequences of Introspecting about Reasons

• Wilson’s work has shown that there may be a downside risk to introspecting about reasons when making decisions—namely, we may come up with inaccurate reasons. We may sometimes convince ourselves that these incorrect reasons are correct. This leads to reasons-generated attitude change: attitude change that results from thinking about the reasons for one’s attitudes. People assume that their attitudes match the reasons that are plausible and easy to verbalize. This may be problematic when the “right” reasons (e.g., for why you love someone) are hard to verbalize or inaccessible, and incorrect reasons are easy to verbal or accessible. The attitudes expressed immediately after doing a “reasons analysis” may be temporarily altered by the results of the analysis, and thus do not predict future behavior or attitudes very well.
  
  

KNOWING OURSELVES BY OBSERVING OUR OWN BEHAVIOR

• Bem’s self-perception theory states that when our attitudes and feelings are uncertain or ambiguous, we infer these states by observing our behavior and the situation in which it occurs.
  
  
• We are especially likely to infer our feelings from our behavior when (1) our initial feelings are weak or unclear, and (2) we think about why we have behaved the way we have and decide that it was our free choice.
  
  
• In other words, we are using the same attributional principles described in Chapter 4 to make inferences about our own attitudes.

A. Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation

• Intrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in an activity because we enjoy it or find it interesting; extrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in an activity because of external rewards or pressures.
  
  

1. The Overjustification Effect

• According to self-perception theory, extrinsic rewards may hurt intrinsic motivation. When we are rewarded for engaging in an intrinsically motivating activity, we may now place too much importance on extrinsic reasons and assume that we are doing the behavior in order to achieve the extrinsic reward. This is known as the overjustification effect.
  
  
• For example, Greene, Sternberg, and Lepper (1976) rewarded 9-10 year-olds for playing math games. After the rewards were terminated, children spent significantly less time with the games than they had before they ever got rewards.
  
  
• There are conditions under which the overjustification effect can be avoided: (1) when initial interest in the task is low, as opposed to high; and (2) when one uses performance-contingent rewards that are based on how well a task is done and which provide information and positive feedback rather than task-contingent rewards that are given for performing a task regardless of how well it is done. However, even performance-contingent rewards must be used carefully, because they can backfire by making people anxious about being evaluated.

B. Understanding Our Emotions: The Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

• Schachter (1964) proposed the two-factor theory of emotion: that emotion results from first perceiving physiological arousal and then finding an explanation or label for that arousal.
  
  
• In a study by Schachter and Singer (1962), participants were given an injection of either epinephrine (adrenaline) or a placebo upon arriving at the lab. They were told that the injection was a vitamin that affected vision and were either told the actual effects that epinephrine has or were told that they might experience some symptoms, but not those produced by epinephrine. Participants were then placed with an angry acting confederate in a waiting room (for half the participants; the other half were placed with a euphoric acting confederate). The dependent variable was the emotion felt. Those participants who (a) had been given epinephrine to induce arousal and (b) were NOT told the symptoms that the injection would make them experience felt more angry (or more euphoric) than participants in the other groups.
  
  
• An implication of this theory is that people’s emotions are somewhat arbitrary, depending on the most plausible explanation for arousal. Thus in their experiment, the researchers were able to prevent people from becoming angry by proving a nonemotional explanation for why they felt aroused, and they could make Ss feel a very different emotion by changing the most plausible explanation for arousal.

C. Finding the Wrong Cause: Misattribution of Arousal

• Misattribution of arousal is the process whereby people make mistaken inferences about what is causing them to feel the way they do. Many studies have demonstrated the misattribution of arousal to emotional states that was demonstrated initially by Schachter and Singer. For example, Dutton and Aron (1974) had a woman approach men who were crossing a scary bridge or who had had a chance to rest on a bench after crossing. Those men who were crossing the scary bridge when approached by the woman and asked to complete a questionnaire were more likely to call her and ask her out.
  
  

D. Interpreting the Social World: Cognitive Appraisal Theories of Emotion

• Attribution is not the only means by which we learn what we feel. Appraisal theories of emotion hold that emotions result from people’s interpretations of events, even
  in the absence of any physiological arousal. Your view of (1) whether the event had good or bad implications for you and (2) your view of what caused the event are particularly important determinants of experienced emotion.
  
  
• These theories differ from Schachter and Singer’s theory in the importance of arousal—according to these theories, arousal does not always come first; cognitive appraisals alone are a sufficient cause of emotion.
  
  
• When people are aroused and uncertain where this arousal comes from, Schachter and Singer’s theory may apply, but when they are not aroused, cognitive arousal theories may apply. Both theories agree that one way people learn about themselves is by observing events, including their own behavior, and trying to explain those events.

USING OTHER PEOPLE TO KNOW OURSELVES

• What others around us tell us about ourselves is a very important source of self-knowledge.
  
  
• Gallup’s ape studies show that social contact is critical to the very development of a self-concept—only those apes raised with others passed the “red dye” mirror test.

A. Knowing Ourselves by Comparing Ourselves to Others

• We also come to know ourselves by comparison to other people. Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory is the idea that, when objective criteria for self-evaluation are not present, we learn about our own abilities and attitudes by comparing ourselves to other people
  
  
• When do people compare themselves with others? When there is little objective information available.
  
  
• With whom do we compare ourselves? Gilbert and Mussweiler suggest that initially we compare ourselves to everyone, and then we seek an appropriate comparison. Similar others provide the most appropriate comparisons.
  
  
• When our goal is to find out information about ourselves, we are likely to engage in comparison to others who are similar to us on the important dimension.
  
  
• Sometimes we engage in upward social comparison, comparing ourselves to people who are better than we are on a particular trait or ability, in order to assess our own abilities. We may look to experts to set the standard of excellence, but it is often more useful to compare ourselves to someone who is similar to us.
  
  
• We also use social comparison to boost our egos; in this case, we are likely to engage in downward social comparison, or comparing ourselves to people who are worse than we are on a particular trait or ability. For example, Wood et al. (1985) found that cancer patients used downward comparisons to make themselves feel more optimistic about the course of their own illness.
  
  
• Another way we can feel better about ourselves is to compare our current performance with our own past performance, another sort of downward comparison.

B. Knowing Ourselves by Adopting Other People’s Views

• Under some conditions people adopt the views of close others according to Coonley’s looking glass self. We may even adjust our views when we meet someone for the first time, if we want to get along with the person. This is called social tuning: the process whereby people adopt another person’s attitude.
  
  
• In a study by Sinclair, Lowery, Hardin & Colangelo (2005) participants matched their views toward those of a likable experimenter and reacted against the views of an unlikable experimenter thus showing that we tend to automatically adopt the views of people we like and automatically reject the views of people we do not.

IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT: ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

• Through self-presentation we attempt to present who we are, or who we want people to believe we are, to other people. Self-presentation occurs through our words, nonverbal behaviors, and actions. Impression management occurs when we consciously or unconsciously orchestrate a carefully designed presentation of self to fit a particular goal or need in a social interaction.
  
  
• Goffman developed a theory based on a dramaturgical model which uses the theater as a metaphor for social life.
  
  
• Ingratiation is the process whereby people flatter, praise, and try to make themselves likable to another person. Ingratiation can backfire if the other recognizes we are doing it.
  
  
• Self-handicapping is creating obstacles and excuses for ourselves (in advance of a poor performance) so that if we do poorly, we have a ready-made excuse. People self-handicap either by behaviorally creating obstacles (e.g., drinking the night before an exam) or by citing verbal excuses.
  
  
• One downside risk of self-handicapping is that it may actually cause the poor performance that is so feared, as we come to believe our own excuses and exert less effort on the task.

A. Culture, Impression Management, and Self-Enhancement The impression management strategies that people use differ considerably from culture to culture. Research seems to conclude though that the desire to manage the image we present to others is strong in all cultures, though the kinds of images we want to present depend on the culture in which we live.

All of this being said, now imagine a fully functioning "self-to-self feedback loop" where you benefit by new abilities to self-govern inside of your private household. This is an exceedingly dynamic opportunity.