Social Psychology Chapter 4 - Self and Identity

Question 1

What is a reflexive thought/reflexive thinking?

Answer 1

Means we can think about ourselves, about who we are, how we would like to be and how we would like others to see us.

Question 2

What are constructs?

Answer 2

Abstract or theoretical concepts or variables that are not observable and are used to explain or clarify a phenomenon.

Question 3

What was the self like in medieval times?

Answer 3

Social relations were:

• fixed
• stable
• legitimised in religious terms.

People lives and identities were mapped out according to their position in the social order ascribed by:

• family membership
• social rank
• birth order
• place of birth

Question 4

What were the forces for changes in the view of the self in the 16th century?

Answer 4

• secularisation
• industrialisation
• enlightenment
• psychoanalysis

Question 5

How was secularisation a force of changes to the view of the self in the 16th century?

Answer 5

Idea that fulfilment occurs in the afterlife related by idea that you should actively pursue personal fulfilment in this life.

Question 6

How was industrialisation a force of changes to the view of the self in the 16th century?

Answer 6

People increasingly seen as units of production that moved from place to place to work and so had a portable identity that wasn’t locked onto static social structures.

Question 7

How was enlightenment a force of changes to the view of the self in the 16th century?

Answer 7

people felt they could organise and construct different, better, identities and lives for themselves by overthrowing orthodox value systems and oppressive regimes.

(e.g. French and American revolutions in 18th century)

Question 8

How was psychoanalysis a force of changes to the view of the self in the 16th century?

Answer 8

Freud’s theory of the human mind said that the self was unfathomable as it lurked I the unconscious/

Question 9

What does it mean by the individual self?

Answer 9

When what you are saying about yourself and not a group of others as well.

Question 10

What does it mean by the collective self?

Answer 10

Means that what we say about ourselves is also true for a group of others as well.

‘we’ ‘us’

e.g. I am from Bristol.

Question 11

Who was the founder of psychology as an experimental science?

Answer 11

Wilhelm Wundt

Question 12

What is symbolic interactionism?

Answer 12

Theory of how the self emerges from human interaction which involves people trading symbols (through language and gesture) that are usually consensual and represent abstract properties rather than concrete objects.

Question 13

What did William James do for the self?

Answer 13

Distinguished between self as a stream of consciousness (‘I’) and as object of perception (‘me’).

Question 14

What is the looking glass self?

Answer 14

Mead - our self concept derives from seeing ourselves as others see us.

Question 15

Who came up with the looking glass self?

Answer 15

Mead

Question 16

Who did studies to test whether the looking glass self theory was true? How?

Answer 16

Shrauger and Schoeneman (1979).

Reviewed 62 studies.

Question 17

What did Shrauger and Schoeneman (1979) find about the self?

Answer 17

People didn’t tend to see themselves as others saw them but instead saw themselves as they thought others saw them.

Question 18

What was Dianne Tice’s research on the self?

Answer 18

• Undergrad students asked to act as ‘stimulus persons’ for postgrad clinical psychology trainees.
• Had to use an intercom system to answer verbal questions which would reflect an aspect of their personality.
• his was to make them come across as either consistently emotionally stable (not responsive) r emotionally responsive.
• 2 conditions : a) Private condition where students believed no one was watching them, b) public conditions where they believe the trainee was monitoring their behaviour (no one actually was).
• Then had to rate themselves in terms of their responsiveness on a 25-point scale from 1 (stable = not responsive) to 25 (responsive).
• Subsequent descriptions of self more radically altered under public conditions suggesting students saw themselves as they thought others saw them and not how they actually did see them.

Question 19

What is the self-enhancing triad?

Answer 19

People normally overestimate their good points, overestimate their control over events and are unrealistically optimistic (Sedikides and Gregg (2007).

Question 20

What is self-awareness according to Duval and Wickland (1972)?

Answer 20

A state in which you are aware of yourself as an object.

Question 21

What do you do when you are objectively self-aware?

Answer 21

Make comparisons between how you actually are and how you would like to be (ideal).

Question 22

What did Scheier (1981) do to the self-awareness theory?

Answer 22

Distinguished between 2 types of self.

Question 23

What were the 2 types of self proposed by Scheier in 1981?

Answer 23

The private self and the public self.

Question 24

What does Scheier mean by the private self?

Answer 24

Your private thoughts, feelings and attitudes.

Question 25

What does Scheier mean by the public self?

Answer 25

How other people see you, your public image.

Question 26

What does private self-awareness lead to?

Answer 26

Trying to match your behaviours to your internalised standards.

Question 27

What does public self-awareness lead to?

Answer 27

Presenting yourself to others in a positive light.

Question 28

What is reduced objective self-awareness identified as a key component of?

Answer 28

Deindividuation.

Question 29

What is deindividuation?

Answer 29

Process where people lose their sense of socialised individual identity and engage in unsocialised often antisocial behaviours.

Question 30

What is a schema?

Answer 30

Cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes.

Question 31

How do we store information about the self?

Answer 31

As separate context-specific nodes where different contexts activate different nodes and therefore different aspects of self.

Question 32

Where in the brain is the experience of the self located?

Answer 32

No single brain system/area - widely distributed brain activity across the medial prefrontal and medial precuneus cortex.

Question 33

What’s part of your self-schema?

Answer 33

Things that are important to you - e.g. being sophisticated.

Question 34

What is Higgins’s (1987) self-discrepancy theory about?

Answer 34

The consequences of making actual-ideal and actual-ought self-comparisons that reveal self-discrepancies.

Question 35

What are the 3 components of Higgins’s self-discrepancy theory?

Answer 35

Actual self
Ideal self
Ought self

Question 36

What is the actual self?

Answer 36

How we currently are

Question 37

What is the ideal self?

Answer 37

How we would like to be

Question 38

What is the ought self?

Answer 38

How we think we should be

Question 39

What is self-regulation?

Answer 39

Strategies we use to match our behaviour to an ideal or ought standard.