Understanding Self-Concept and Social Interactions

Overview of Self-Concept

• Self-concept formation involves various factors
• Important factors include feedback from others (looking glass self), social comparison, culture, and introspection.
• Other influences are self-perception, cognitive dissonance processes, and social roles.

Looking Glass Self

• Perception of self is influenced by views of other people
• Individuals incorporate others' views into their self-concept.
• Terms related to this concept are "reflected appraisals" and "metaperceptions."

Sociometer Theory

• Self-esteem is a gauge that monitors acceptance or rejection by others (Leary & Downs, 1995).
• Self-esteem has affective and cognitive components.
• Self-esteem functions as a sociometer monitoring the social environment for cues indicating disapproval, rejection, or exclusion
• An individual gets alerted via negative affective reactions, when cues are detected

Sociometer Hypothesis

• Social exclusion lowers state self-esteem
• Feelings of self-esteem reduce when being excluded from a group
• Perceived exclusion is associated with low trait self-esteem
• People who generally perceive rejection also have low self-esteem.
• Threats to self-esteem motivate approval-seeking behaviors.
• Exclusion avoidance is emphasized.

Inhibition and Feedback

• People generally avoid communicating interpersonal evaluations, especially negative ones.
• Constructive Feedback Study (Abi-Esber et al., 2022) shows people avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help them
• People worry about awkwardness and harm to relationships and don't appreciate how others value feedback
• Study participants imagined work scenarios, such as a colleague with sweat stains on their shirt
• Feedback givers estimated how much the colleague wanted to be told about the sweat stains ("0" = definitely doesn't want to be told, "10" = definitely wants to be told).
• Feedback receivers reported how much they wanted to be told by a colleague about sweat stains ("0" = definitely doesn't want to be told, "10" = definitely wants to be told).
• Error bars in the study represent 95% confidence intervals
• Feedback-givers' estimates are driven by how uncomfortable they would feel (e.g., embarrassed, self-conscious).
• How much they thought it would harm their relationship also played a part.
• The effect was stronger for more consequential issues and was the same for strangers, acquaintances, and close friends.
• A study replicated the discrepancy with friends, where one person was randomly assigned to give constructive feedback.
• Givers believed that receivers wanted feedback less (M = 5.18) than receivers reported wanting to get it (M = 6.98).
• Givers underestimated how much receivers valued the feedback they got

Insufficiently Complimentary Study

• (Zhao & Epley, 2021): Proposed that people are overly hesitant to express compliments.
• Hesitance exists because people are worried about competently expressing compliments
• Recipients focus more on the warmth conveyed
• Compliment-givers think they are viewed as less competent than they actually are

Metaperception Biases

• Metaperceptions are people’s perceptions of how they are viewed by others.
• "Liking Gap" (Boothby et al., 2018): People underestimate how much they are liked by interaction partners.
• Driven by having more negative thoughts about one's own performance in conversation than about the other person's.
• Spotlight Effect: People overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noticed by others (Gilovich et al., 2000).
• Transparency Overestimation: People exaggerate how clear their thoughts, feelings, traits, and goals are to others.

Overarching theme

• People assume what stands out to them also stands out to others
• Egocentrism: People focus on themselves and assume others share their perspective.
• Numerous motivations can contribute

Self-Verification Theory

• (Swann, 1987): People need to seek confirmation of their self-concept, whether positive or negative.
• The need to seek confirmation can conflict with the desire to uphold a favorable view of oneself
• Sense of accuracy, predictability, and security affects self-verification
• Selective interaction, identity cues, and interaction strategies influence behavior
• Cognitive processes include preferential attention, selective encoding, and retrieval, along with selective interpretation.

Social Comparison Theory

• (Festinger, 1954): Learning about one's abilities and attitudes involves comparison to other people
• It is a drive to evaluate opinions and abilities
• Supported indirectly by research on "automatic" social comparisons
• It debates evaluation and social connection is the ultimate goal

Self-Evaluation

• People sometimes seek accurate self-evaluation, but also have self-enhancement and self-improvement motivations
• Accurate evaluation happens best with objective standards (social comparison is a second choice)
• People prefer social comparison with similar others
• Similarity on related attributes is important

Forced Comparisons and Effects on Positivity of Self-Evaluations

• Mr. Clean & Mr. Dirty Study (Morse & Gergen, 1970): An individuals' self-esteem was affected by who else was in the room
• "Frog pond effect": Individuals who perform well within an unsuccessful group have more favorable self-evaluations than equally capable individuals who perform poorly within a successful group

Social Media social comparisons

• (Midgley et al., 2021)
• Distinctiveness Theory: People define themselves in terms of what makes them different from those around them
• Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory: People define themselves in terms of dimensions on which they outperform close others
• Closeness of others (similarity or emotional bond) is key.
• Closeness outperformed by close other on self-relevant dimension results in a painful comparison
• Closeness outperformed by close other on self-irrelevant dimension results in basking in reflected glory
• Distant others are less impactful
• Faced with a close other’s excellent performance, people decrease relevance of the performance domain to their self-concept
• People decrease the performance differential or closeness to the other

Different Views of Self

• Independent View of Self: Defining oneself in terms of internal thoughts, feelings, and actions, and not in terms of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people
• Interdependent View of Self: Defining oneself in terms of relationships to other people, recognizing that one's behavior is often determined by the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others

Introspection and Implicit Theories

• People cannot accurately report the effects of particular stimuli on their responses (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
• People may not interrogate a memory of the cognitive processes that were operating
• They may base their reports on implicit, a priori theories about the causal connection between stimulus and response
• Reports about mental processes are sometimes correct
• Reports are not due to introspective awareness but due to the incidentally correct employment of causal theories.
• Examples: misattributions of arousal and feelings of familiarity
• Misattributions of Arousal:Dutton & Aron (1974) Bridge Study shows disruptive effects of introspection
• People want to sound reasonable, but do not always know the reasons for their feelings.
• People search for plausible-sounding reasons and adopt the attitude implied by the biased reasons

Self-Perception and Cognitive and Dissonance Processes

• Self-Perception Theory: People "know" their own attitudes, emotions, and internal states by watching their behavior and the environment
• To the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or unintelligible, people relies on external cues to infer someone's state (Bem, 1972, p. 2)
• Self-Presentation Study (Dunn et al., 2007) involved instructions to have a regular conversation to make a good impression.
• People put their best face forward so the partner leaves with a positive impression

Cognitive Dissonance

• (Festinger, 1957): Discomfort from realizing behaviors are inconsistent with attitudes or holding two conflicting attitudes
• Motivation to avoid dissonance
• Ways to reduce dissonance includes changing attitude or behavior, seeking new information, and minimizing the importance of the conflict
• Insufficient Justification Effect: Reduction of dissonance by internally justifying behavior when external justification is insufficient
• Insufficient Punishment: Dissonance aroused from lack of external justification for resisting a desired activity, individuals devalue the forbidden activity or object
• Post-Decision Dissonance: Dissonance aroused after a decision; reduced by enhancing the chosen alternative and devaluing the rejected alternatives
• Justification of Effort: Increase the likings for soemthing they worked hard to attain
• Self-perception theory is applicable for weaker, more ambiguous attitudes (attitude formation)
• Dissonance theory is applicable when attitudes are clearer and stronger (attitude change)
• Self-Affirmation Theory: Theory that people reduce the impact of a dissonance-arousing threat to self-concept by focusing on and affirming their competence in a dimension unrelated to the threat