Social Psychology of the Self

  1. What is the Self?
  2. The “I” Self: the self that thinks or perceives something. The ‘active’ self.
  3. The “Me” Self: the object of our thoughts, attention, or perception about ourselves. The ‘empirical’self.
  4. Self-Esteem
  5. Self-Concept
  6. Self-schemata
  7. Self-Knowledge
  8. 3 Motives about Self-Knowledge and Self-understanding
  9. Accuracy: Getting a realistic picture or our abilities, our personality, etc.
  10. Self-enhancement: Thinking of ourselves as good.
  11. Self-verification: Getting information and interpreting it so that it confirms what we already know about our selves.
  12. How do we learn about ourselves
  13. The Reflected or Looking-Glass Self: “in imagination we perceive in another’s mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it.” (Cooley, 1922/1964, p. 184).
  14. Social Comparison: We gain knowledge of ourselves by comparing our attitudes or opinions to the attitudes and opinions of others.

(a)The similarity and related attributes hypothesis: We compare to people who are similar to us and/or who share ‘related attributes’ that should make them similar to us. This is particularly relevant to the accuracy motive.

(b)Upward Comparison: When we are motivated to improve our performance, we compare to people who we expect to be (slightly) better than us.

(c)Downward Comparison: Sometimes, we compare ourselves to people who are likely to be worse than us. This is particularly relevant to the self-enhancement motive.

  1. Self-perception: We make attributions for our own behavior in much the same way that we make attributions for the behavior of others.

(a)Do I like “Beauty & the Geek”? I must, because I watch it all the time.

  1. Self-related biases in Attribution
  2. The Actor-Observer Difference
  3. The Self-serving Attributional Bias
  4. We make internal attributions for success, and external attributions for failure.
  5. Self-enhancement or Self-verification?
  6. Self-handicapping: Setting up the situation so we can make a self-serving attribution.
  7. When are we most likely to self-handicap?
  8. Self-handicapping , discounting, and augmenting
  9. Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRG-ing): By associating ourselves with someone successful, we get a ‘boost’.
  10. Do social comparison and BIRG-ing push us in opposite directions?
  11. Self-presentation: An additional motive
  12. Presenting our identity. Controlling how people see us and making sure they see us as we ‘really’ are (or, at least as we think we are!).
  13. Strategic Self-presentation
  14. Presenting ourselves so we look good
  15. Presenting ourselves so we can get something.

(a)Ingratiation

iThe Ingratiator’s Dilemma

(b)Self-promotion

iThe Self-promoter’s paradox.

11/07