week 7 Perceiving Self & Others

Question 1

What is the self

Answer 1

® OED: a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.
® William James (1890) described the self as I (subject; agent; knower) and Me (object of reflection; known). The self is the entire set of beliefs, evaluations, perceptions and thoughts that people have about themselves.

Question 2

What is the self in social psyc

Answer 2

In social psychology…Self as me: object of self-reflection
Self-concept (self-image)
•Mental representation of all of a person’s knowledge about their self
– Beliefs, thoughts, memories, …
– Roles, relationships, groups,…
Self-esteem
•How a person feels about their self

Question 3

Who am I? Content dimensions

Answer 3

Big Five: OCEAN
“Big Two”
– Communion (warmth): social relationships (friendly, fair)
– Agency (competence): goal attainment (ambitious, capable)

Question 4

Who am I? Self-aspects

Answer 4

Self-aspects: summaries of a person’s beliefs about the self in specific domains, roles or activities
o Personal aspects (personal selves, personal identities, individual selves) are features that distinguish you from others. They are often traits (e.g. warm, extraverted).
o Social aspects (social selves, social identities).
o Roles (relational) are features we possess in virtue of the roles and relationships we have (e.g. boss, sister, friend).
o Domains (e.g. at work, at home, with friends) – sometimes overlap with roles and groups.
o Group/social category memberships (collective) – features we possess because we are group members, that we share with others (e.g. Australian, Ormondian)

Question 5

Self-organization: Schemas

Answer 5

• knowledge structure that links, organizes and ‘weights’ self-concept components.
  -Provides a summary of core, important characteristics that a person believes define them across situations.
  -Self-schemas guide interpretation of the environment and performance of behaviour.

Question 6

Self-organization: narrative

Answer 6

® Narrative self/identity: the story of who I am. The internalized, evolving story of the self that binds, organizes, and provides meaning to self-component aspects across time.

Question 7

Culture and self-construals

Answer 7

self-concepts that are shaped through cultural socializing. For example, people in collectivist cultures view the self as connected to others and beholden to the group

Question 8

The assessible self

Answer 8

=The assessible self is one’s working self-concept – the ‘now’ self that guides acting, thinking and feeling in the moment. Components of the social situation may make some aspects of the self more accessible (e.g. when you are the only woman in a group of men). =The working self-concept guides behaviour.
= For example, Fazio et al. (1981) found that situational cues encourage activation of introversion vs extraversion-related self-knowledge. In turn, this accessible self-knowledge impacted behaviour

Question 9

Where does the self come from?

Answer 9

We construct and know ourselves via a range of processes:
® Social construction of self (interpersonal processes): via social comparison, social feedback.
® Personal construction of self (intrapersonal /intrapsychic processes): via introspection, self-perception

Question 10

Social construct of self: social comparision

Answer 10

® Social comparison: the process of comparing oneself to others.
® Social comparison theory: self-knowledge comes from comparing one’s own traits, abilities, attitudes & emotions to those of others (Festinger, 1954). This is especially so when people are uncertain.
® Social comparison can lead to assimilation or contrast – if we compare to an extreme target, we contrast away from that target. If we compare to a moderate target, we assimilate towards the target.
® Accurate self-concepts come from comparing to similar others.

Question 11

Social construction of the self: social feedback

Answer 11

•Internalize our perceptions of how others see us
•Other people act as mirrors into our own self-concepts
– Looking glass self (Cooley; Mead); symbolic interactionism
Our selves are shaped by how we think others see us

Question 12

Social construction of the self:
social feedback experiment

Answer 12

•Miller et al (1975)
– Control: No information
– Persuasion: ‘be tidy’
– Attribution: ‘you are tidy’ even not
-the attribution group have the highest change and remain there. no change in control. increase in persuation group but not for long

Question 13

Personal construction of self: Introspection:

Answer 13

Introspection: looking inward at the contents of consciousness (thoughts and feelings)
•Reasonable route to knowing what one is feeling or experiencing, it is less reliable in informing us about why – the reasons we think, feel and act as we do
•When processing deeply, it can improve accuracy of self-knowledge
•When introspection reveals that one meets one’s standards, positive feelings can result
•It can increase self-consistency in behaviour – more likely to act in accordance with one’s values

Question 14

Personal construction of the self: self perspection

Answer 14

– People infer self-knowledge by observing their own behaviours
- This is most likely to occur when knowledge is weak or ambiguous for behaviours that they have freely chosen
-® If people don’t have a good situational explanation, they infer a self-related explanation

Question 15

self perception experiment

Answer 15

• Lepper, Greene & Nisbett (1973), children who were rewarded for performing a behaviour were less likely to continue to do so in the absence of the award,
  -compared to children who did not receive an award at all or those who did receive an award which was not clearly linked to the targeted behaviour.
  -The extrinsic motivation of the award replaced the intrinsic motivation of showing that behaviour, thus diminishing the tendency to show that behaviour as it was not perceived as ‘self-related’/something that comes from within.
  -Those who did not receive an award did self-relate the inclination to show that behaviour, being more likely to continue the behaviour even in the absence of a reward.

Question 16

Functions of the self

Answer 16

Mastery: Our selves guide behavior towards desired goals
Valuing me and mine: Our selves tend to self-enhance
Connectedness: Our selves help us fit in

Question 17

Self and mastery: accuracy

Answer 17

Accuracy ;Seek accurate self-knowledge But also seek confirmation of one’s self views– Self-verification:
– People prefer relationship partners who agree with their own self-image, even if those views are negative (Swann et al., 1992)

Question 18

Self and mastery: control

Answer 18

•People make upward social comparisons to motivate behaviour and seek rewards
•Blanton et al (1999)– Upward comparisons improve grades
This process can:
– Provide info on how the task is done
– Change expectations about what is possible to achieve
– Increase motivation
Important: target must be within reach

Question 19

Self and valuing me and mine: self enhancement motive and self esteem

Answer 19

Self-enhancement motive
•Desire to maximize the positivity of one’s self views
•Define our self-concepts in ways that make us feel better about ourselves
Self esteem: evaluation of the self (do I feel positive about who I am?)
•Trait self esteem: cross-situationally stable
•State self-esteem: temporary, situation-specific

Question 20

Self-enhancement motives

Answer 20

Better than average effect: Most people see themselves as above average
Self-enhancement may be different in different cultures
•Higher self-esteem in the US than Japan
•More tolerance of self-criticism in Japan than the US
High self-esteem can help us cope with threats
•See Smith et al (2015). pp. 125-137 for more on threats to self-esteem and coping
•Although excessively high self-esteem can bleed into narcissism

Question 21

Self-protection

Answer 21

Protecting ourselves from criticism
o For example, self-defensive attributions explain negative behaviours as stemming from the situation, and claim positive behaviours as arising from the self.
o Self-affirmation – when one aspect/domain of the self is under threat, people can protect themselves by affirming the importance of a different aspect/domain.
o Self-defensive social comparisons – when the self is under threat, people make downward social comparisons

Question 22

Self and belonging aka self and social

Answer 22

Just as the self is constructed via social processes, the self operates in a social matrix
Plays a key role in how we define, manage and present ourselves to the social world
 •Self-expression :Presenting and reinforcing one’s true self to others (irrespective of fit)
•Self-presentation: Seeking the acceptance and approval of others through impression management

Question 23

Strategies of self-presentation (Jones & Pittman, 1982):

Answer 23

• Ingratiation (belonging): seeking affection
• Self-promotion (mastery): seeking respect
• Intimidation (mastery): seeking fear in others
• Exemplification (mastery): seeking emulation
• Supplication (belonging): seeking compassion

Question 24

Building blocks & first impressions:
Things that impinge on our senses include

Answer 24

o Physical characteristics (e.g. attractiveness, height, clothing)
o Social category characteristics (stereotypes, gender, nationality)
o Context (environment – we are reflected in the spaces we occupy)
o Behaviours (verbal & non-verbal, intentional (e.g. conspicuous consumption) & unintentional)

Question 25

Constructing first impressions

Answer 25

things that impinge our sense are integrated with our existing knowledge structures – attitudes, self-schemas, beliefs, … – in automatic first impressions
-Our existing knowledge structures (esp. that info which is accessible) give meaning to sense data
-Salient cues get more weight in the impression

Question 26

Accessibility

Answer 26

-Accessibility of knowledge structures is dependent upon whether an observation is highly associated with a certain concept.
This is influenced by :
•Concurrent activation (the association)
•Frequent activation(how frequent is it activated)
•Recent activation (how recent is it activated)

Question 27

Cue salience

Answer 27

Cue salience: ability of a cue to attract attention
•Unpredictability - stand out from context

Question 28

Explaining other peoples’ behaviour

Answer 28

® Fritz Heider labelled people as naïve, lay, everyday psychologists.
® We attribute others’ behaviours to causes located in the person – internal, dispositional causes; or in the situation – external, situational causes.
® Attribution is the process of attributing behaviours to cause

Question 29

Causal attributions

Answer 29

refer to the retrospective explanation of behaviour by internal factors such as effort or ability and external factors such as task difficultly or luck.
® First impressions are often grounded in dispositional explanations of behaviour.
® We see behaviours as reflecting something about the person (rather than the situation)

Question 30

Correspondent inference:

Answer 30

the assumption that other people’s behaviours correspond to their traits (and not situational factors).
• Some conditions warrant (garentee) correspondent inferences (including free choice, unique effects, unexpectedness (e.g. socially undesirable behaviour)).
• However, people also tend to form such inferences even in the absence of such conditions (i.e. suffer from a correspondence bias)

Question 31

fundamental attribution error

Answer 31

the tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental influences

Question 32

Beyond first impressions

Answer 32

•Impressions can be formed rapidly, with minimal information via automatic, superficial processes
•With more motivation, ability and time, we can gather more information and engage in deeper processing
•We may overcome our initial, automatic tendencies towards the correspondence bias

Question 33

Beyond mere correspondence

Answer 33

When we process more deeply we can go beyond mere assumptions about correspondence and look at more complex information about covariation

Question 34

Kelly covariation theory

Answer 34

•Consensus: does everyone else perform the same behaviour towards the same stimulus?
•Distinctiveness: does the person perform the same behaviour towards other stimuli?
•Consistency: does the person always perform this behaviour to this stimulus?

Question 35

A critique of attribution theories

Answer 35

Malle (1999) claimed that there is more to explaining behaviour than merely assigning situational vs personal cues – generating factors, behavioural explanations, reasons, mere cases and reason explanations

Question 36

Forming global impressions

Answer 36

Anderson (1974) algebraic model of weighted average
® Overall, people have a positivity bias – they tend to form positive impressions about people.
® However, we do have a negativity bias too – we tend to evaluate negative information as being more important (more diagnostic & more consequential) versus positive information

Question 37

Inter-trait relationships

Answer 37

Trait gestalts •a whole that is more than the sum of it’s parts
•Trait meanings are dependent upon inter-trait context (Asch, 1946)
– Intelligent and cold: intelligent = sly
– Intelligent and warm: intelligent = wise

Question 38

is there only agency and comunion

Answer 38

Traits we use to summarize others’ behaviours organize along two major dimensions
•Communal (social)
•Agentic (intellectual)
•A third? – Moral (Goodwin)?

Question 39

Perceiving others and goals

Answer 39

Mastery •People seek accurate impressions when they will be held accountable or when their own outcomes depend on the other person (Neuberg & Fiske, 1987)
Belonging •People evaluate others differently depending on whether this evaluation threatens or strengthens their existing relationships (Simpson, Ickes, & Blackson, 1995)
Me and mine •People formed positively biased impressions to make themselves feel good or when we want to see good outcomes (Klein &Kunda, 1992)

Question 40

Belonging goals

Answer 40

People with affiliation goals are more likely to assume that others have positive traits