the known self Flashcards
introduction
Close relationships refer to ongoing patterns of interactions that involve affectively strong bonds between individuals and considerable interdependence e.g. romantic and marital relationships, friendships and parent-child relationships. The known self, sometimes referred to as self-concept, is a set of beliefs about ourselves. One of the theoretically rich ideas of social psychology is that the self is a social product, a claim preserved in the idea of the “looking-glass self”. Additionally, other theories suggest that close relationships help us grow and expand the self. This essay will discuss how close relationships partners serve as ‘looking glass self’ and help expand the self, using supportive empirical evidence.
descride The looking glass self
Sometimes, close relationship partners can serve as a ‘looking glass self’, an idea proposed by Cooley, that the self develops in reference to other people in the social environment. He argued that the concept of of the self cannot be separated from social influences and suggested that the self is built by reflecting the views that others hold of the person. Cooley suggested that the person observes how others view oneself, and then incorporates those views into the self-concept. Cooley recognised that close, important members of our social networks are more likely to elicit an effect on the looking-glass self than are strangers. Three elements that are involved in constructing a looking-glass self, have been proposed. First, one has to imagine how one appears to others; second, one has to imagine how other judge or appraise that appearance; and third, one feels some emotional response to the appraisal, such as pride or shame.
evidence for the looking glass self
Cole (1991) conducted a study in which teacher ratings, peer nominations of competence and children’s own evaluations of personal competence (N=360) were obtained near the beginning of the school year. Consistent with the notion of the looking-glass self, Cole (1991) found that both peer appraisals and teacher appraisals affected the self-images of fourth-graders with regard to academic and athletic competence. Peer evaluations also predicted change in self-evaluations of social competence over time. Thus, it seems that perceived and even actual reflected appraisals highly influence people’s self-views. However, the fact that we may internalize the views of others, does not rule out the possibility of individuals persuading others to accept-self presentations.
procedure of opposing evidence for the looking glass self
However, the fact that we internalize the views of others, does not rule out the possibility of individuals persuading others to accept self-presentations. For an example, McNulty and Swann (1993) report two longitudinal studies of new college roommates. Participants completed questionnaires containing ratings of the abilities, personality traits, and global worth of both themselves and their roommate during the second and twelfth weeks of class.
results of opposing study for the looking glass self
It was found that, just as the self-concepts of the participants were shaped by the appraisals of others, they also influenced those appraisals. Through this process, the self and the surrounding social environment are constantly attuning themselves to one another. Additionally, in DePaulo and Kenny’s (1993) review of 8 studies involving 569 subjects, they argue that people determine how others view them not from the feedback that they receive from others but from their own self-perceptions. Consistent with this argument are the findings that (a) people overestimate the degree of consistency in the ways that different targets view them and (b) people are better at understanding how others generally view them than how they are uniquely viewed by specific individuals.
brief intro to Self-Expansion Model
At times, close relationships help ‘expand the self’, a concept of a theory proposed by Aron & Aron in 1986. The self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in close relationships has two fundamental principles: motivational principal and inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principal.
describe The motivational principal
The motivational principal suggests, that people seek to expand their potential efficacy- that is, a major human motive is what has previously been described as effectance, competence, or exploration.
evidence for the motivational principal
The principal was supported by Aron and colleagues (1995) study that examined whether developing a new relationship expands the self. Researchers tested 325 students five times, once every two and a half weeks over 10 weeks. At each testing participants answered a series of questions, including whether they had fallen in love since the last testing, plus a 3-minute timed task in which they listed as many self-descriptive words/phrases as came to mind in response to, ‘Who are you today?’. Responses were coded for 19 self-content domains, such as family roles, occupations and various emotions. As predicted, there was a significantly greater increase in number of self-content domains in the self-descriptions from before to after falling in love, as compared to changes before to after other testing sessions for those who fell in love, or as compared to typical between-test changes for participants who did not fall in love. In a sense, there was a literal expansion of the self.
describe inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principal
inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principal suggests that one way people seek to expand the self is through close relationships, because in a close relationship the others resources, perspective, identities and self-soothing and self-exciting capacities are experienced, to some extent, as one’s own.
supporting study for inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principal
To test this idea, researchers evaluated the patterns of response latencies in making me/not me decisions (does that trait describe me?) about traits previously rated for their descriptiveness for of self and of spouse (Aron et al., 1991, Experiment 3). On traits on which the self matched the partner, me/not me responses were faster than when a trait was mismatched for self and partner. Using the same response-time paradigm Smith et al., (1999) replicated both the overall differences between close and non-close others and the correlation with the magnitude of self-reported closeness to the close other. The researchers explained the results: if mental representations of two persons over-lap so that they are effectively a single representation, reports on attributes of one will be facilitated or inhibited by matches and mismatches with the second.
