Chapter 3 & 6: Self Perception Flashcards
Social comparison theory
The idea that people compare themselves to other people to obtain an accurate assessment of their own opinions, abilities, and internal states.
Philippe Verduyn 2015 Study Facebook
Aims: The idea of social media being good or bad for you
Procedures: The experimenters text-messaged participants five times a day over 6 days, prompting them to fill out a survey upon receiving each text. The survey asked participants
to make a series of ratings, including their current affective well-being (how positive or negative they felt), their amount of passive Facebook use since the last text, their amount of active Facebook use
since the last text, and their
current feelings of envy.
Findings: Passive (but not active) Facebook use makes people feel less upbeat, and this is due in part to feelings of envy, presumably triggered by comparing their own lives with the images of other people’s lives splashed all over their Facebook feeds. Results like these point to social media as a potentially major social influence on
construals and evaluations of the self.
Social identities
The parts of a person’s sense of self that are derived from group memberships.
Ex. Latinx, gay, republican
Variation in how central or important that identity is to each individual
Self-stereotyping
The phenomenon whereby people come to define themselves in terms of traits, norms, and values that they associate with a social group when their identity as a member of that group is salient.
A way that social identities influence a person’s sense of self.
Self-esteem
The overall positive or negative evaluation people have of themselves.
Can refer to their attributes and qualities, our successes and failures, and our self in general
Trait self-esteem
A person’s enduring level of self-regard across time.
Fairly stable
State self-esteem
The dynamic, changeable self-evaluations a person experiences as momentary feelings about the self
can shift depending on the situation
Contingencies of self-worth
The thesis is that people’s self-esteem is contingent on their successes and failures in domains they deem important to their self-worth
Self-esteem goes up when you do well in areas that matter to you, but it drops when you stumble in these areas.
Jennifer Crocker’s theory
Crocker, Sommers, & Luhtanen Self-esteem study
Aim: test contingencies of self-worth model
Procedures. Studied the self-esteem of University of Michigan students who had applied to graduate school. Students filled out a self-esteem questionnaire every day that they received an acceptance or rejection from a university.
Findings: Students had higher
self-esteem on days when they received an acceptance and lower self-esteem on days when they received a rejection. However, these effects were much larger for those students whose self-esteem was highly dependent on academic competence.
Sociometer hypothesis
The idea that self-esteem is an internal, subjective index or marker of the extent to which a person is included or looked on favorably by others.
High self-esteem indicates that we are thriving in our relationships; low self-esteem suggests that we are having interpersonal difficulties.
Culture and Self-esteem
People who construe the self in more
interdependent terms are less concerned with feeling positively about their attributes than are modern Westerners, who define the self in more independent terms. Defining the self in interdependent terms is also associated with being more likely to seek
opportunities for self-improvement.
Interdependent don’t focus on self-esteem like Western cultures
Self-enhancement
The desire to maintain, increase, or protect one’s positive self-views.
Better than average effect
The findings that most people think they are above average on various personality trait and ability dimensions.
Self-perception theory
The theory that people come to know their own attitudes by looking at their behavior and the context in which it occurred and the inferring what their attitudes must be
Bem’s theory
People come to understand themselves and their attitudes in the same way that they come to understand others and their attitudes
D.J. Bem Study
Dissonance vs Self perception
Both processes occur just depending on the context. Dissonance is activated when behavior is inconsistent with preexisting attitudes that are clear-cut and of some importance. Self-perception processes are invoked when behavior conflicts with attitudes that are relatively vague or less important.
System Justification theory
The theory that people are motivated to see the existing sociopolitical system as desirable, fair, and legitimate.
To justify the prevailing sociopolitical system to which they belong, economically disadvantaged people often defend their own disadvantage.
Terror Management theory (TMT)
The theory that people deal with the potentially crippling anxiety with the inevitability of death by striving for symbolic immortality through preserving valued cultural worldviews and by believing they have lived up to their culture’s standards.
Landau et al 2004
Aim: TMT
Procedures: Survey respondents gave their opinions about either the Democratic challenger, John Kerry, or the incumbent Republican, George W. Bush. Some participants responded a er their mortality was made salient, and others did so a fter writing about their experience with dental pain.
Findings: Survey respondents were more favorable to Bush due to him being the head of the country and was seen by many as the leader of the flight against terrorist organizations.
Dechesne et al 2003
Aim: TMT’s contention that mortality salience increases striving for self-esteem.
Procedure: In one study, participants read one of two essays on near-death experiences, such as feelings of leaving and looking down at one’s body. In one condition, the essay stated that, according to scientific consensus, such sensations are expected given the makeup of the brain, and they don’t
suggest in any way the persistence of life a fter death. Participants who read the other essay read about how reports of such experiences point to the plausibility of some sort of life aft er death. Next, all participants received
favorable feedback about themselves from unreliable sources, such as horoscopes, and then rated the sources’ validity.
Findings: Those who read the essay that cast doubt on life after death rated the feedback as more valid than those who read the essay that encouraged belief in an afterlife.
In other words, if we can believe there is life after death, we needn’t be so concerned with living on symbolically, so the need for self-esteem is reduced.
