Week 7 - The Two Selves Flashcards
The ABCs of the Self
- Affect: How do we evaluate ourselves, enhance our self-images, and defend against threats to our self-esteem;
- Behavior: How do we come to know ourselves, develop a self-concept, and maintain a stable sense of identity
- Cognition: How do we come to know ourselves, develop a self-concept, and maintain a stable sense of identity
Cognitive Basis of ‘The Self’
Self-concept
* The cognitive representation that we have of ourselves
Working self-concept (dynamic self)
* Part of the self that is activated in a context
Self-schema
* Knowledge of a certain domain that is important for the self
Cultural differences in Self-Definition
Individual: unique individual
Relational: relationship with significant other
Social Identity: Group Membership
Individualistic cultures: People strive for personal achievement
Collectivist cultures: People derive more satisfaction from the status of the valued group
Self-Focus (Self-Awareness)
- The extent to which we focus on ourselves vs the context
Public self-awareness
Mirror: private self-awareness
Camera: public self-awareness
* More socially desirable behavior
* Can for instance influence the rather robus Bystander effect
Social Identity Theory
- People base their identity on group membership
- Compare groups with other groups to guage our ‘value’ or worth
- Strife towards obtaining or keeping a positive social identity
- Strong tendency to protect social identity
Zajonc’s kakkerlakken onderzoek
Situation A:
* Control: A glass tube with at the end a sandwich
* Experimental: same as control but with cockroaches outside the tube who are looking
Situation B:
* Control: two glass tubes that make a cross, with at the end of one tube a sandwhich
* Experimental: same as control but with cockroaches
Results:
* In situation A the cockroach was as fast as 33 seconds in getting through the tube when other cockroaches were looking (control: 41 seconds)
* In situation B the cockroach took longer (130 secs) to get through the tube because it had to make a decision while other cockroaches were looking
*
What do Zajonc’s findings say about individuals and audiences
Social facilitation:
* Sometimes the presence of others improves performance (usually easy task)
* Sometimes the presence of others impairs performance (usually difficult task)
Ostracism
Buitensluiten
**
What are consequences of ostracism
- Stress, pain
- Strong emotions (anger, sadness)
- Fight (agression) vs Freeze (numbness) vs. Reconnect (OCB)
- Lower temperature
- Threatens fundamental needs
1. Control
2. Meaningful existence
3. Self-esteem
4. The need to belong
Experiencing self
- Lives in present
- “does it hurt now”
Remembering self
- Keeps score
- Maintains story of life
- “how have you been feeling lately
What is the importance of self-esteem and autobiographical memory?
- Essential for a coherent self-concept
- Typically report more events from the recent than the distant past
- Exceptions are:
1. Reminiscence peak
2. Tendency to remember transitional “firsts”
Autobiographical memory
- They serve as prominent landmarks in our autobiographics
- Autobiographical memory is a vital part of, and can be shaped by, our identity, often motivated to distort the past in ways that are self-inflated.
James Dean Effect
Respondents rated a wonderful life that ended abruptly as better than a life with 5 additional mildy pleasent/negative years
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Effect
Respondents rated a negative life that ended aprubptly as worse than a life with 5 additional pleasant years
Focusing illusion
How much pleasure do you get from your bicycle?
* Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it (WYSIATI)
A bias for goods that are exciting and fancy. We always want a fancy new thing and are few times happy with the bike that we already have
- Time is neglected
- Experiences that will retain their value over the long term are underappreciated
Hot-Cold-Empathy gap
Cognitive bias in which people underestimate the influences of visceral drives on their own attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.
People are unable to relate to feelings they are not currently experiencing
* Calm or cold is hard to imagine in hot states
What can affect the results of ice-water studies?
The peak end rule. At the end your hand becomes very warm. Consequently, people report less pain because they relate to their peak state (the warm hand).
How to measure well-being?
There should be a focus on retrospectiv problems –> ask the remembering self
* Unreliable eyewitness: would underestimate experiences of experiencing self
Day Reconstruction Method (DRM)
1. List intensity of several feelings
2. Positive and negative can exist at the same time!
* Negative experience if negative feelings are more intense thann any of the positive
3. Calculate U-index (percentage negative of waking day)
What did the Gallup-Data say (company Maurice de Hond)
No correlation between ‘how happy are you’ and the general well-being of people.
Higher educated people reported their live as more positive but their well-being
What is the general percentage people report negative episodes over an entire day
50% no negative episode over an entire day
Minority of people experienced emotional distress for much of the day
* Small fraction of the population seems to do most of the suffering
1. Mental illness
2. Unhappy temperament
3. Personal tragedies
Lower in te weekend
How does poverty amplify negative events?
Illness:
* Rich people (top 2/3): headache brings sadness and worry 19 > 38%
* Poor people (low 10%): headache brings sadness and worry 38 -> 70%
Weekend effect on U-index diminishes for poor people
Money and Hapiness
Law of diminshing returns
No correlation between hapiness and money above € 75.000
It allows for more purchases, improved living:
* But it doesn’t elevate emotional experience
* It seems to reduce the ability to enjoy small pleasures
Goals and Money
Money can help achieve a goal
If the goal is important, there is a high correlation with money
If the goal is less important, the correlation with money is lower
What did they find in the experiment of Loveland et al. ‘The need to belong and preference for nostalgic products’
Participants with ‘the need to belong’ as active goal, experience a significantly stronger preference for nostalgic products
This need to belong can be partially satisfied through consumption of nostalgic products
Why is our memory not great?
- We think that the present experience should count for a lot
* We forget the majority of it
* Somehow the remembering self handles time differently
* We remember it wrongly - We only consume our memories very little
- 1 great week vs 2 great weeks
Memories can be wrong
Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong
1. Due to duration neglect and peak-end-rule
2. But also due to:
* Outside factors such as framing
* Inside pressures such as self-esteem
