Chapter 2 - the self in a social world Flashcards
spotlight effect
The belief that others are paying more attention to our appearance than they really are.
Timothy Lawson (2010)
- study where students wore a shirt that said american eagle
- nearly 40% of students were sure that others would remember the shirt
- but actually only 10% did
illusion of transparency
The illusion that our concealed
emotions leak out and can be easily
read by others.
(Vorauer & Ross, 1999)
We feel especially transparent when we feel self-conscious and worry about being evaluated negatively
by others
Savitsky and Gilovich (2003)
focus on whether illusion of transparency may be present with inexperienced public speakers
invited 40 university
students to their laboratory in pairs. One person stood at the podium and
spoke for three minutes (on a topic such as “The Best and Worst Things
About Life Today”) as the other sat and listened. Then the two switched
positions and the other person gave a different three-minute impromptu talk.
Afterward, each rated how nervous they thought they appeared while speaking (from 0, not at
all, to 10, very) and how nervous the other person seemed.
People would rate themselves as seeming pretty nervous
but others would rate them as not seeming so nervous
next wondered whether informing speakers that their nervousness isn’t so obvious might help them relax and perform better.
They invited 77 more
university students to come to the lab and, after five minutes’ preparation, give a three-minute videotaped speech on race relations at their university. Those in one group—the
control condition—were given no further instructions. Those in the reassured condition
were told that it was natural to feel anxious but that “You shouldn’t worry much about what other people think. . . . With this in mind you should just relax and try to do your best. Know that if you become nervous, you probably shouldn’t worry about it.”
then explained the illusion of transparency and that others don’t think you are as nervous as you feel
After the speeches, the speakers rated their speech quality and their perceived nervousness
those informed about the illusion-of-transparency phenomenon felt bet-
ter about their speech and their appearance than did those in the control and reassurance conditions. What’s more, the observers confirmed the speakers’ self-assessments.
Social surroundings affect our self-awareness
When we are the only members of
our race, gender, or nationality in a group, we notice how we differ and how others are reacting to our difference. For example, the only woman in an executive meeting is likely to be acutely aware of her gender. When travelling abroad, you may be keenly aware of being Canadian; while at home, however, you might not think about your nationality very much.
Self-interest colours our social judgment
When problems arise in a close relationship, we usually attribute more responsibility to our partners than to ourselves. When things go well at home or work or play, we see ourselves as more responsible. After Canadians Frederick Banting and John Macleod received a 1923 Nobel Prize for discovering insulin, they both thought the discovery was primarily their own. Banting claimed that Macleod, who headed the laboratory, had been more a hindrance than a help. Macleod omitted Banting’s name in speeches about the discovery (Ross, 1981).
Self-concern motivates our social behaviour
In hopes of making a positive impres-
sion, we agonize about our appearance. Like savvy politicians, we also monitor others’ behaviour and expectations and adjust our behaviour accordingly
Social relationships help define the self
In our varied relationships, we have varying selves (Andersen & Chen, 2002). We may be one self with Mom, another with friends, another with teachers. How we think of ourselves is linked to the person we’re with at the moment. And when relationships change, our self-concepts can change as well. University students who recently broke up with a romantic partner shifted their self-perceptions and felt less certain about who they were—one reason breakups can be so emotionally distressing (Slotter, Gardner, & Finkel, 2010).
The self
Self-concept
- who am I
Self-esteem
- My sense of self-worth
Self-knowledge
- How can I explain and predict myself
Social self
- My roles as a student, family member, and friend; my group identity
self concept
How a person answers
the question “Who am I?” provides a
glimpse of their self-concept.
self schema
Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.
Schemas are mental templates by which we organize our worlds. Our self-schemas—our perceiving ourselves as athletic, overweight, smart, or whatever—powerfully affect how we perceive, remember, and evaluate other people and ourselves.
The self-schemas that make up
our self-concepts help us organize and retrieve our experiences.
social comparison
Evaluating your abilities and opinions by comparing yourself to others.
Others around us help to define the standard by which we evaluate our-
selves as rich or poor, smart or dumb, tall or short: We compare ourselves with those around us and become conscious of how we differ. We then use others as a benchmark by which we can evaluate our performance and our beliefs.
Consider a study conducted by Penelope Lockwood of the University of Toronto and
Ziva Kunda of the University of Waterloo (Lockwood & Kunda, 1997). They exposed
first-year or fourth-year accounting students to an article about a superstar accounting student who had won numerous awards, attained a very high grade point average, and landed a spectacular job. For first-year students, this role model represented achievements they
could hope to attain. But fourth-year students students knew that—at this point in their studies—they could not hope to achieve such spectacular heights. As you can see in Figure 2–2,
comparisons to the superstar had strong effects on these students’ self-evaluations. When first- and fourth-year students did not read about the superstar, they had similar self-eval-
uations. But when they were exposed to the superstar, first-year students seemed inspired; their self-evaluations were substantially more positive. Fourth-year students, on the other hand, seemed dejected; their self-evaluations plummeted.
Social comparison explains why students tend to have a higher academic self-evalua-
tion if they attend a school with mostly average students (Marsh et al., 2000; Wang, 2015)
self-concept can be threatened after graduation when a student who excelled in an average high school goes on to an academically selective university. The “big fish” is no
longer in a small pond.
When facing competition, we often protect our shaky self-concept by perceiving the competitor as advantaged. For example, college swimmers believed that their competitors had better coaching and more practice time (Shepperd & Taylor, 1999).
individualism
The concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications.
more common in western cultures
Individualism flourishes when people experience affluence, mobility, urbanism, and mass media, and when economies shift away from manufacturing and toward informa-
tion and service industries (Bianchi, 2016; Grossmann & Varnum, 2015; Triandis, 2000).
independent self
Construing one’s identity as an autonomous self.
One’s identity—as a unique individual with particular abilities, traits, values, and dreams—remains fairly constant.
Western culture assumes that your life will be enriched by believing in your power of personal control.
collectivism
Giving priority to the goals of one’s groups (often, one’s extended family or work group) and defining one’s identity accordingly.
Most cultures native to Asia, Africa, and Central and South America
place a greater value on collectivism
emphasis on the interdependent self
interdependent self
Construing one’s identity in relation to others
In these cultures, people are more self-critical and focus less on positive self-views
Culture and cognition experiment
collectivism also results in different ways of thinking. When shown an animated underwater scene (Figure 2–4), Japanese respondents spontaneously recalled 60 percent more background features than did Americans, and they spoke of more relationships (the frog beside the plant). Americans look more at the focal object, such as a single big fish,
and less at the surroundings
Nisbett
studies examine activation in different areas of the brain (Goh et al., 2007; Lewis, Goto, & Kong,
2008). When shown drawings of groups of children, Japanese students took the facial expressions of all of the children into account when rating the happiness or anger of an individual child, whereas Ameri-
cans focused on only the child they were asked to rate (Masuda et al., 2008).
Pen study
When Heejun Kim and Hazel Markus
(1999) invited people to choose one of these pens, 77 percent of Americans but only 31 percent of Asians chose the uncommon colour (regardless of whether it was orange, as here, or green). This result illustrates differing cultural preferences for uniqueness
and conformity, noted Kim and Markus.
Culture and self esteem
In collectivist cultures, self-esteem is malleable (context-specific) rather than stable (enduring across situations). In one study, four in five Canadian students agreed that they
remain essentially the same person in different situations, compared with one in three Chinese and Japanese students (Tafarodi et al., 2004).
planning fallacy
The tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.
those around you tend to know more accurately when you will finish a task than you do.
Predicting feelings
Sometimes we will know how we feel
Other times we may mispredict our responses. Asked how they would
feel if asked sexually harassing questions on a job interview, most women studied by Julie
Woodzicka and Marianne LaFrance (2001) said they would feel angry. When actually asked such questions, however, women more often experienced fear.
affective forecasting
Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal that people have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). People mispredict how they would feel some time after experiencing a romantic breakup, receiving a gift, losing an election, winning a game, and being insulted (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002; Loewenstein & Schkade, 1999). Some examples follow:
eg.
- hungry shoppers
- People overestimate how much their well-being would be affected by both bad events and good events
we often “miswant.”
People who imagine an idyllic desert island holiday with sun, surf, and sand may be disappointed when they discover “how much they require daily structure, intellectual stimulation, or regular infusions of
Pop Tarts” (p. 182). We think that if our candidate or team wins we will
be delighted for a long while. But study after study reveals our vulnerability to impact bias—overestimating
impact bias
Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events.
We are especially prone to impact bias after negative events.
Moreover, said Wilson and Gilbert (2003), people neglect the speed and power of their
coping mechanisms, which include rationalizing, discounting, forgiving, and limiting emo-
tional trauma. Because we are unaware of the speed and strength of our coping, we adapt to
disabilities, romantic breakups, exam failures, layoffs, and personal and team defeats more readily than we would expect. Ironically, Gilbert and his colleagues report (2004) that
major negative events (which activate our psychological defences) can be less enduringly distressing than minor irritations (which don’t activate our defences). We are, under most
circumstances, remarkably resilient.
The wisdom and illusions of self-analysis
We are unaware of much that goes on in our minds. Perception and memory studies show that we are more aware of the results of our thinking than of the process.
In nine experiments, Wilson and his
colleagues (1989) found that the attitudes people consciously expressed toward things or
people usually predicted their subsequent behaviour reasonably well. Their attitude reports
became useless, however, if the participants were first asked to analyze their feelings. For example, dating couples’ current happiness with their relationship accurately predicted whether they would still be dating several months later. But participants who first listed all the reasons they could think of why their
relationship was good or bad before rating their happiness were misled—
their happiness ratings were useless in predicting the future of the relationship! Apparently, the process of dissecting the relationship drew attention to easily verbalized factors that were not as important as harder-to-verbalize happiness. We are often “strangers to ourselves,” Wilson concluded (2002).
dual attitudes
Differing implicit (automatic) and explicit (consciously controlled) attitudes toward the same object. Verbalized explicit attitudes may change with education and
persuasion; implicit attitudes change
slowly, with practice that forms new
habits.
Our automatic, implicit attitudes regarding someone or something often differ from our consciously controlled, explicit attitudes
Self-reports are often untrustworthy.
self-esteem
A person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.
Self-esteem thus depends on whether we believe we have traits that make us attractive to others, and not necessarily on the traits
that we say we value most.
study on self esteem
One intriguing study examined the effects of very general feedback on self-esteem. Imagine you’re getting your grade back for the first test in a psychology class. When you see your grade, you groan—it’s a D–. But then you get an encouraging email with some review questions for the class and this message: “Students who have high self-esteem not only get better grades, but they remain self-confident and assured. . . . Bottom line: Hold your head—and your self-esteem—high.” Another group of students instead get a message
about taking personal control of their performance or receive review questions only. So which group does better on the final exam? To the surprise of the researchers, the students whose self-esteem was boosted did by far the worst on the final; in fact, they flunked it (Forsyth et al., 2007). Struggling students told to feel good about themselves, the researchers suggested, may have thought, “I’m already great—why study?”
study on upward comparison in romantic relationships
(Zuckerman & Jost, 2001). In contrast, researchers at the University of
Toronto found that people often react more positively to upward comparisons, rather than downward comparisons, to romantic partners (Pinkus et al., 2008). When a partner out-performs us in a domain important to both our identities, we may reduce the threat by affirming our relationship, saying, “My capable partner, with whom I’m very close, is part of who I am”
terror management theory
Jeff Greenberg (2008) offers another perspective, called “terror management theory,” which argues that humans must find ways to manage their overwhelming fear of death. If self-esteem is only about acceptance, he counters, why do “people strive to be great rather than to just be accepted” (p. 51)? The reality of our own death, he argues, motivates us to gain recognition from our work and values. There’s a worm in the apple, however: Not everyone can achieve such recognition, which is exactly why it is valuable and why self-esteem can never be wholly unconditional (or not based on anything, such as when parents say, “You’re special just for being you”). To feel our lives are not in vain, Greenberg maintains, we must continually pursue self-esteem by meeting the standards of our societies.
pursuing self esteem can back fire
However, actively pursuing self-esteem can backfire. Jennifer Crocker and colleagues found that students whose self-worth was contingent on external sources (such as grades or others’ opinions) experienced more stress, anger, relationship problems, drug and alcohol use, and eating disorders than did those whose sense of self-worth was rooted more in internal sources, such as personal virtues (Crocker, 2002; Crocker & Knight, 2005; Crocker & Luhtanen, 2003; Crocker & Park, 2004).
Ironically, note Crocker and Lora Park (2004), those who pursue self-esteem, perhaps by seeking to become beautiful, rich, or popular, may lose sight of what really makes them feel good about themselves. University students who tried to impress their roommates by emphasizing their good qualities and hiding their bad ones found that their roommates actually liked them less, which then undermined their self-esteem
The Trade-Off of Low vs. High Self-Esteem
- People low in self-esteem are more vulnerable to anxiety, loneliness, and eating disorders.
- When feeling bad or threatened, those with low self-esteem often take a negative view of everything.
Narcissism: Self-esteem’s conceited sister
High self-esteem becomes especially problematic if it crosses over into narcissism or having an inflated sense of self.
Most people with high self-esteem value both individual achievement and relationships with others. Narcissists usually have high self-esteem, but they are missing the piece about caring for others
Narcisim, self esteem and agression
In a series of experiments conducted by Brad Bushman and Roy Baumeister (1998), undergraduate volunteers wrote essays and received rigged feedback that said, “This is
one of the worst essays I’ve read!” Those who scored high on narcissism were much more likely to retaliate, blasting painful noise into the headphones of the student they believed had criticized them. Narcissists weren’t aggressive toward someone who praised them
(“Great essay!”); it was the insult that set them off. But what about self-esteem? Maybe only the “insecure” narcissists—those low in self-esteem—would lash out. But that’s not
how it turned out; instead, the students high in both self-esteem and narcissism were the most aggressive. The same was true in a classroom setting: Those who were high in narcissism were most likely to retaliate against a classmate’s criticism by giving the person a bad grade (Bushman et al., 2009; Figure 2–7). Narcissists are especially likely to lash out when the insult is delivered publicly—and thus punctures their carefully constructed
bubble of superiority.
self-efficacy
A sense that one is competent and effective, distinguished from self-esteem, which is one’s sense of self-worth. A sharpshooter in the military might feel high self-efficacy and low
self-esteem.
Children and adults with strong feelings of self-efficacy are more
persistent, less anxious, and less depressed. They also live healthier lives and are more academically successful.
self-serving bias
The tendency to perceive yourself favourably.
self-serving attributions
A form of self-serving bias; the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to other factors.
managers usually blame poor performance on workers’ lack
of ability or effort while workers blame external factors, such as excessive workload or difficult co-workers
explanatory style
A person’s habitual way of explaining life events. A negative, pessimistic,
and depressive explanatory style
attributes failures to stable, global,
and internal causes.
defensive pessimism
The adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action.
false consensus effect
The tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviours.
false uniqueness effect
The tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviours.
temporal comparisons
Comparisons between how the self is viewed now and how the self was viewed in the past or how the self is expected to be viewed in the future.
self-handicapping
Protecting one’s self-image with behaviours that create a handy excuse for later failure.
self-presentation
The act of expressing yourself and behaving in ways designed to create a favourable impression or an impression that corresponds to your ideals.
self-monitoring
Being attuned to the way you present yourself in social situations and adjusting your performance to create the desired impression.
self-presentation theory
A theory positing that we are eager to present ourselves in ways that make a good impression.
learned helplessness
The hopelessness and resignation learned when a human or animal perceives no control over repeated bad events.
