The Self and Identity

Question 1

What is self-concept?

Answer 1

• The self-concept encompasses both our internal characteristics and our social roles. It includes roles in society, personality, qualities you use to describe yourself, things you are good at or bad at, social identity vs private identity, how we compare ourselves to others, values and beliefs. In addition to our thoughts about who we are right now, the self-concept also includes thoughts about our past self—our experiences, accomplishments, and failures—and about our future self—our hopes, plans, goals, and possibilities.

Question 2

What are the determinants of self?

Answer 2

• social identities in groups
• social comparisons we make when we compare ourselves to others (looking glass self)
• roles we play in everyday life

Question 3

What are the 2 world cultural views?

Answer 3

cultures that emphasize individuality and the others that emphasize sociality (Separated vs relational selves)

Question 4

What are the three central metaphors according to McAdams concept of self?

Answer 4

the self may be seen as social actor, motivated self and autobiographical self.

Question 5

Define “Social actor”?

Answer 5

“The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of self-ascribed traits and social roles”

Question 6

Define “ Motivated Self”?

Answer 6

“The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, programs and gives behavior its direction and purpose

Question 7

Define “Autobiographical self”?

Answer 7

“The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose”

Question 8

Why the self is inherently reflexive?

Answer 8

Because it reflects back on itself.

Question 9

How psychologist William James (1892/1963) define the self?

Answer 9

The self is what happens when “I” reflects back upon “Me.”

Question 10

“The self is both the I and the Me”. What that means ?

Answer 10

it is the knower, and it is what the knower knows when the knower reflects upon itself.

Question 11

How the philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) describes the self ?

Answer 11

Taylor describes the self as a reflexive project. He agues, we often try to manage, discipline, refine, improve, or develop the self. We work on ourselves, as we might work on any other interesting project.

Question 12

What happens when children turns 2 year?

Answer 12

Most toddlers recognize themselves in mirrors and begin to express social emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride. These emotions tell the social actor how well he or she is performing in the group.

Question 13

What Freud says about the development of the self?

Answer 13

• the emergence of an autonomous ego happens on the second year. Freud used the term “ego” to refer to an executive self in the personality.

Question 14

What Erikson says about the development of the self?

Answer 14

• Erikson (1963) argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second.

Question 15

What Mead says about the development of the self?

Answer 15

Mead (1934) suggested that the I comes to know the Me through reflection, which may begin quite literally with mirrors but later involves the reflected appraisals (judgments) of others.

Question 16

What happens in the development of the self as a social actor?

Answer 16

• In the development of the self as a social actor, other people function like mirrors—they reflect who I am back to me.

Question 17

Which kind of attributions young children is able to make about themselves ?

Answer 17

they start with simple behavioral traits such as “nice,” or “helpful,” or “good”.

Question 18

Which kind of attributions children by the age of 10 is able to make about themselves ?

Answer 18

By the age 10, they see themselves in more complex ways attributing traits to the self such as “honest,” “moody,” “outgoing,” “shy,” “hard-working,” “smart,”

Question 19

What happens by late childhood and early adolescence in terms of self-conception?

Answer 19

• Besides self-conceptions will likely include important social roles, by late childhood and early adolescence, the personality traits that people attribute to themselves, as well as those attributed to them by others, tend to correlate with each other.

Question 20

What are the Big Five?

Answer 20

The Big five are the personality traits that people attribute to themselves, associated with those traits attributed to them by others. They are:

(1) extraversion,
(2) neuroticism,
(3) agreeableness,
(4) conscientiousness, and
(5) openness to experience.

Question 21

What are the main features of social reputation?

Answer 21

Personality traits and social roles make up the main features of social reputation. Trait terms convey what I reflexively perceive to be my overall acting style, based in part on how I think others see me as an actor in many different social situations and roles capture the quality, as I perceive it, of important structured relationships in my life.

Question 22

How to become a more effective social actor?

Answer 22

By taking aim at the important roles you play in life and doing concrete things that enrich your performances in important social roles.

Question 23

Is it possible to know the social actor values and desires just by seeing them acting? Why?

Answer 23

No. We cannot know for sure what they want or what they value, unless they tell us straightaway.
As a social actor, a person may come across as friendly and compassionate, or cynical and mean-spirited, but in neither case can we infer their motivations from their traits or their roles.

Question 24

Human beings are agents even as infants. What happens by age 1 year?

Answer 24

By age 1 year, infants show a strong preference for observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors. it is quite another for the I to know itself (the Me) as an intentional and purposeful force who moves forward in life in pursuit of self-chosen goals, values, and other desired end states.

Question 25

What is the theory of mind and when it emerges?

Answer 25

The theory of mind Emerges around the age of 4, when the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior. Once a child understands that other people’s behavior is often motivated by inner desires and goals, it is a small step to apprehend the self in similar terms.

Question 26

What happens at the age 5-to-7 shift?

Answer 26

Children begin to construct the self as a motivated agent in the elementary school years, layered over their still-developing sense of themselves as social actors. Schooling reinforces the shift and their relative success in achieving their most cherished goals, furthermore, goes a long way in determining children’s self-esteem.

Question 27

Why goals and values become even more important for the self in adolescence?

Answer 27

Because teenagers begin to confront the developmental challenge of identity.

Question 28

What is the conception of identity according to Erik Erikson’s ?

Answer 28

• According to Erikson, developing an identity involves the exploration of and commitment to life goals and values (the self as motivated agent), the commitment to new roles and re-evaluating old traits (the self as social actor). - and a reflexive understanding of how my past self has developed into my present self, and how my present self will, in turn, develop into an envisioned future self (the self as Autobiographical Author).

Question 29

What is the greatest achievement for the self as motivated agent?

Answer 29

Committing oneself to life goals and values.

Question 30

Why identity achievement is always provisional?

Answer 30

Because according to Erikson, adults continue to work on their identities as they move into midlife and beyond.

Question 31

What is the difference between changing yourself as a social actor and as a motivated agent?

Answer 31

When you try to change your traits or roles, you take aim at the social actor. By contrast, when you try to change your values or life goals, you are focusing on yourself as a motivated agent.

Question 32

How Erickson describes the development of a mature identity in young adulthood?

Answer 32

According to Erickson, the development of a mature identity in young adulthood involves the I’s ability to construct a retrospective and prospective story about the Me .

Question 33

To find a meaningful identity for life, young men and women begin “to selectively reconstruct” their past or what psychologists today often call as a narrative identity. What that means?

Answer 33

narrative identity is an internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the past and anticipates the future in such a way as to provide a person’s life with some degree of unity, meaning, and purpose over time.

Question 34

Why the self becomes an autobiographical author in the early adult years?

Answer 34

Because the story helps to explain, for the author and for the author’s world, why the social actor does what it does and why the motivated agent wants what it wants, and how the person as a whole has developed over time, from the past’s reconstructed beginning to the future’s imagined ending.

Question 35

What is autobiographical reasoning?

Answer 35

Adolescents and young adults author a narrative sense of the self by telling stories about their experiences to other people, monitoring the feedback they receive from the tellings, editing their stories in light of the feedback, gaining new experiences and telling stories about those, and on and on, as selves create stories that, in turn, create new selves.

Question 36

How occur the development of storytelling skills in human beings ?

Answer 36

• By the time they are 5 or 6 years of age, children can tell well-formed stories about personal events in their lives. By the end of childhood, they usually have a good sense of what a typical biography contains and how it is sequenced, from birth to death. But it is not until adolescence that human beings express advanced storytelling skills or what is call autobiographical reasoning.

Question 37

Does culture has effect on narrative identity ?

Answer 37

Yes as it provides a menu of favored plot lines, themes, and character types for the construction of self-defining life stories.

Question 38

What is redemptive narratives ?

Answer 38

Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state.

Question 39

” The prominence of redemptive narratives in American culture is one example of the tight link between culture and narrative identity”. Explain it.

Answer 39

American adults who enjoy high levels of mental health and civic engagement tend to construct their lives as narratives of redemption, tracking the move from sin to salvation, rags to riches, oppression to liberation, or sickness/abuse to health/recovery. However, these same stories may not work so well in cultures that espouse different values and narrative ideals.

Question 40

Why same narrative forms may not work so well in all cultures ?

Answer 40

Because each culture has different values and narrative ideals and no single narrative form captures all that is good (or bad) about a culture.

Question 41

How the self and identity are developed on human beings?

Answer 41

• For human beings, the I first sees itself as an embodied actor in social space; with development, however, it comes to appreciate itself also as a forward-looking source of self-determined goals and values, and later yet, as a storyteller of personal experience, oriented to the reconstructed past and the imagined future.

Question 42

What we should do to “know thyself” in mature adulthood?

Answer 42

• (a) to apprehend and to perform with social approval my self-ascribed traits and roles
• (b) to pursue with vigor and (ideally) success my most valued goals and plans,
• (c) to construct a story about life that conveys, how I became the person I am becoming, integrating my past as I remember it, my present as I am experiencing it, and my future as I hope it to be.