Self and identity (Social Psych)

Question 1

What is the extent of Social Psychology?

Answer 1

• Businesses use social psychology
• They use insights from social psychology to increase worker productivity, predict customer behaviour and change customer behaviour.
• organisations around the world including governments and tech companies use insights from social psychology to fight misinformation and fake news.
• The WHO uses social psychology to predict and change health-related beliefs, attitudes and behaviours

Question 2

Describe what the self is.

Answer 2

• Self: the impressions we have of who we are.
• Actual Self: how we actually are.
• The more similar the self and actual self are, the more self-aware a person is.
• There is also how others see us.
• The self is viewed as a reflection of individuality; “When someone says ‘I am…’ they are describing what makes them different from other human beings.” (Hogg & Vaughan, 2011, p. 113) “.
• many of the categorisations we identify with, e.g., “I am female” = shared by other individuals.

Question 3

Describe the 3 components of self.

Answer 3

• Individual self: “Their unique traits… by differentiating from others… relies on interpersonal comparison” (Brewer & Gardner (1996), e.g., black haired, good cook.
• Relational self: “their dyadic relationships… based on personalized bonds of attachment”
  (Brewer & Gardner (1996)) (relationship between 2 people), e.g., your son. your teacher.
• Collective self: “in terms of group membership… the collective self contains those aspects of the self-
  concept that differentiate in-group members from members of relevant out-
  groups” Brewer & Gardner (1996).
  e.g., male, british.

Question 4

Describe the self-comparisons theory of self-concept maintenance (Higgins, 1987)

Answer 4

There are 3 types of self-schema:
- Actual self: how we currently see ourselves.
- Ideal self: how we would like to see ourselves.

• Ought self: how we think we should be (based on duty and responsibility).
• when there are inconsistencies between the actual and ideal/ought self it can harm self-esteem and wellbeing e.g., sadness/disappointment.
• when there are inconsistencies between the actual and ought selves it causes annoyance/threat.

Question 5

Describe the individual comparisons theory of self-concept maintenance (Festinger, 1954).

Answer 5

Social comparison theory
- When things cannot be measured objectively, we look to others for cues.

• We learn about ourselves by comparing ourselves with other people.
• Whether we are “good” or “bad” depends on whether we are “better” or “worse”.
• e.g., Whether I am a good cook depends on whether those around me are more or less good at cooking.

Question 6

Describe the group comparisons theory of self-concept maintenance (Tajfel and Turner, 1979).

Answer 6

• We also think of ourselves as members of certain groups, and so compare with other groups.
• The Social Identity approach (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987)
• Social categories provide us a sense of identity.
• When a group membership becomes important, our self-perception becomes depersonalised, such that we think and act according to the group identity.

Question 7

Describe increased discrepancies in relation to self-comparisons.

Answer 7

• female students with high-discrepancy were more likely to compare themselves with thin models.
• increased the discrepancy between their ideal and ought self.
• lead to negative emotions, lowered self esteem (Bessenoff, 2006)

Question 8

Describe decreased discrepancies in relation to self-comparisons.

Answer 8

• we are motivated to reduce self-discrepancies, using self-regulation strategies.
• changing our behaviour by exercising self-control
• changing our self-evaluations

Question 9

Describe methodology of Wilson and Ross (2001)

Answer 9

• research study
• participants told to rate themselves on these 10 attributes” (e.g., socially skilled, self-confident…).
• Then, they were asked to either:
  Think of a point in time in the recent past, the beginning of this term. What were you like then?
  OR
  Think all the way back to the beginning of this term. What were you like all the way back then?

Question 10

Describe the results of Wilson & Ross (2001).

Answer 10

-

Question 11

Explain what is meant by downward social comparisons.

Answer 11

• comparing ourselves to someone
  who seems worse, which makes us feel good.

Question 12

Describe the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Answer 12

Kruger & Dunning, 1999

• low-skilled people systematically over-rate their skill, e.g. students in the bottom 12% of test-scores believed they outperformed 62% of their peers.

Question 13

Describe what is meant by upwards social comparisons.

Answer 13

• comparing with someone who seems better.
• this can harm our self-esteem.

Question 14

Explain how self-regulation strategies can help to maintain high self-esteem.

Answer 14

• Tesser, 1988.
• they can exaggerate the ability of the better person (so comparison is meaningless).
• Balance with downward social comparisons.
• Avoid the source of comparison.

-Devalue the dimension of comparison (e.g. if someone is better at cooking then decide cooking is unimportant).

Question 15

Describe Gleibs et al. (2013)

Answer 15

• asked people to fill in a questionnaire measuring:
• Their income
• Their life satisfaction
• asked people to rate their life satisfaction at different times
• People’s income predicted their life satisfaction when they were travelling home from work (i.e., when their work identity was salient)
• But on their way to work (i.e., when their family identity was salient), people’s income was unrelated to their happiness
• Group memberships may or may not be salient (i.e. in someone’s awareness/thinking about them/easily remember them) when we think about who we are and this