The Social Self: Concept, Knowledge & Esteem

• The lecture is about The Social Self.
• Topics to be covered include the self-concept, self-knowledge, self-presentation, and self-esteem.
• There is a tutorial about social comparison and its relationship social media and self-esteem

The Self-Concept Defined

• Self-concept encompasses the complete set of beliefs people have about themselves,
• Self-concept includes knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and memories.
• Self-concept determines how individuals think, feel, and act in various situations.
• Related terms include identity and ego.

The Twenty Statements Test (TST)

• Devised by Kuhn & McPartland in 1954.
• Involves writing 10 "I am..." statements that are comfortable to share publicly, followed by 10 more personal statements.
• An exercise involves participants swapping their first 10 statements with another person.
• Responses often reflect social roles, relationships, and group memberships.
• They can also include personal characteristics, hobbies, aspirations, physical attributes, emotional states, and one's sense of continuity.

"I" vs. "Me"

• William James offered a distinction between "I" and "me."
• "I" represents the self as a conscious observer and awareness of the world.
• "Me" represents the self as a person in the world, encompassing autobiographical memories and relationships.
• "Me" also includes future planning and a sense of narrative coherence over time.

Different Selves

• Personal self is the awareness of your own thoughts and feelings, incorporating personality, attitudes, and beliefs.
• Social self is how one acts in private versus public settings, or in formal versus informal situations.
• Relational self comes from interconnected relationships with family and friends.
• Collective self arises from belonging to groups.

Self-Awareness

• Self-awareness involves being conscious of one's own characteristics, feelings, and behaviors.

Self-Recognition in Infants

• The mirror or "rouge" test is used to assess infants' ability to recognize themselves in a mirror.
• An adult places a mark on the child’s face without them knowing.
• Infants aged 9-12 months generally do not react to the mark.
• Infants around 18 months and older attempt to remove the mark, indicating self-recognition.

Self-Recognition in Animals

• Great apes use mirrors to groom and make faces.
• Great apes have passed the mirror test.
• Dolphins spend more time in front of a mirror if they have a mark on their bodies.

Self-Knowledge Acquisition

• Self-knowledge can be acquired through introspection and self-perception.

Self-Knowledge: Introspection

• Introspection involves looking inward to analyze memories, thoughts, feelings, motives, and intentions.

Self-Knowledge: Self-Perception Theory

• Self-perception theory suggests people infer their own attitudes and feelings by observing their own behavior, especially when internal cues are weak.
• People's views of themselves are consistent with their public behavior and statements.

Limits to Self-Knowledge

• People often believe that they know the reasons for their actions, but they are often mistaken.
• People tend not to notice when their opinions change, and they are motivated to see themselves as consistent in their beliefs.
• Situational factors may be underestimated and overestimated.

Illusory Superiority (Dunning-Kruger Effect)

• The Dunning-Kruger effect describes the phenomenon where people with low competence in a skill tend to overestimate their ability.
• The skills needed to recognize competence tend to be the same skills needed to produce competent performance.
• Estimations of our performance are affected by our pre-existing views of our likely competence.
• This can lead to risky behaviour stemming from overconfidence.
• It can also lead to bad decisions due to the inability to distinguish relevant and irrelevant knowledge.

Accuracy in Predicting Future Behaviour

• People are not skilled at predicting their own future behavior.
• One reason for this is that they underestimate the power of the situation.
• One reason for this is that they do not make sufficient use of the data provided by their past behavior.
• People are over-influenced by their images of their possible-future self (optimism bias).

Predicting Behavior of Others

• People's college roommates are better predictors of relationship outcomes than they themselves are.
• Medical and psychology students more accurately predict peers' exam performances than their own.
• Close friends provide more accurate estimates of one's routine daily activities than they do themselves.

Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA)

• People know themselves better than others regarding internal traits like self-esteem.
• Others may know someone better regard external traits lke talkativeness.
• Others are more objective on traits that are important to self-esteem, like intelligence or creativity.

Self-Knowledge Recap

• Self-concept is influenced by our personal attributes, but we are often less knowledgeable about ourselves than we think.
• Predicting future behavior is difficult.
• The need to preserve self-esteem can limit self-knowledge.

Coming Up

• The next lecture topic is self-presentation.
• Watch the video on Moodle about the Dunning-Kruger effect.