Social Psychology Chapter 2: The Social Self PDF

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 2 The Social Self THE SELF 2 ▪Self Concept ▪Self Esteem ▪Self Presentation  SELF CONCEPT ▪ Sum of the beliefs you have about yourself ▪ Self-Schema ▪ Beliefs about yourself that guide how you process information. SELF AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS ▪ We comp...

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter 2 The Social Self THE SELF 2 ▪Self Concept ▪Self Esteem ▪Self Presentation  SELF CONCEPT ▪ Sum of the beliefs you have about yourself ▪ Self-Schema ▪ Beliefs about yourself that guide how you process information. SELF AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS ▪ We compare ourselves to others and are conscious of those differences. ▪ Lockwood and Kunda (1997) found that social comparisons can have either positive or negative effects. SELF AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS Other people’s judgments  Positive and negative judgments have different effects  The looking-glass self  How we imagine others see us 6 SELF AND CULTURE 7 SELF AND CULTURE Culture and self-esteem  Collectivist cultures: ▫ Self-esteem is relational and malleable ▫ Persist longer on tasks when failing ▫ Upward social comparisons ▫ Balanced self-evaluations  Individualist cultures: ▫ Self-esteem is less relational and more personal ▫ Persist longer on tasks when succeeding ▫ Downward social comparisons ▫ Self-evaluations biased positively 8 SELF AND CULTURE 9 SELF-KNOWLEDGE Predicting behaviour  Planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task Predicting feelings  Affective forecasting: prediction about future feelings  Impact bias: overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events 10  SELF-KNOWLEDGE  Dual attitude system:  Implicit (automatic) attitudes  Change slowly, with practice that forms new habits  Explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes  May change with education and persuasion  Practical implications:  Self-reports are often untrustworthy  Sincerity does not guarantee validity 11  SELF ESTEEM ▪ The affective component of the self, how you feel about yourself. ▪ Our sense of self-esteem functions as a sociometer, and indicates how well we are doing in the eyes of other people ▪ Self-esteem maintenance motive ▪ Self-esteem feelings as a fuel gauge ▪ Compassion is a route to self-esteem SELF-EFFICACY ▪ A belief in your own competence ▪ Differs from self-esteem, which reflects how much a person likes themselves 13  SELF ESTEEM ▪ Does high self-esteem lead to better life outcomes? THE TRADE-OFF OF LOW VS. HIGH SELF-ESTEEM  Low self-esteem associated with more anxiety, loneliness, and eating disorders  Often higher in gang leaders, terrorists, and imprisoned men who have committed violent crime Narcissism: Self-esteem’s conceited sister  Those high in both narcissism and self- esteem tend to be more aggressive  Narcissism seems to have increased over the past decades 15 WHAT IS THE NATURE AND MOTIVATING POWER OF SELF-ESTEEM? 16 SELF ESTEEM Self-Discrepancy Theory Actual versus Guilt, anxiety, shame Ought self Actual Disappointment, frustration, versus Ideal sadness self SELF ESTEEM ▪ Maintained by self-serving bias ▪ The tendency to attribute personal failure to external forces and personal success to internal forces ▪ Self-Enhancement ▪ Implicit egotism ▪ Self-serving attributions ▪ Positive illusions ▪ Downward social comparisons UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM ▪Most people are predisposed to optimism ▪Unrealistic optimism about future events ▪ Supported by being pessimistic about the future of others ▪ E.g., undergraduates believe they are far more likely than their classmates to get a good job ▪ Illusory optimism increases vulnerability ▪Optimism promotes self-efficacy ▪Defensive pessimism helps people prepare for problems. 19 ▪ Ironic Mental Processes FALSE CONSENSUS AND UNIQUENESS ▪ False consensus effect ▪ Overestimating the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviours ▪ False uniqueness effect ▪ Underestimating the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviours 22 EXPLAINING SELF-SERVING BIAS 23 SELF-HANDICAPPING Protecting one’s self-image with behaviours that create a handy excuse for later failure: ▪ e.g., partying the night before an exam 24 IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT ▪ Self-presentation: wanting to present a desired image to the world ▪ Self-monitoring: being attuned to the way one presents oneself in social situations and adjusting one’s performance to create the desired impression 25  SELF PRESENTATION ▪ Strategic ▪ Ingratiation ▪ Self-promotion ▪ Self-Verification