The Social Self

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The (Social) Self

• Day 6

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Foundations of The Self-Concept

• Self-Concept - an understanding of the existence
  and properties of a separate self and its
  characteristics
• You and I are separate and different

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Foundations of The Self-Concept

• The self is socially constructed
• Looking-glass self
• Distinctiveness from others
• Culturally dependent
• Fuzzy boundaries

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Looking-glass self social comparison theory
Thinking about other social psychologists makes
me feel important
But thinking about historys great scientists
makes me feel a little diminished

• Looking-glass self (Cooley, 1902) We learn who we
  are by watching others react to us
• Social Comparison Theory (Festinger)
• Absent an objective standard of comparison, we
  learn who we are and what we are good at through
  comparing ourselves to others
• Define self relative to others
• No standard comparison group

Leon Festinger
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Defined by Disposition

• People often define themselves in terms of traits
• Trait Consistent ways that people think, feel,
  and act across classes of situations
• The 5-factor model is the dominant way of
  characterizing peoples traits
• 3-factor model overlaps 5-factor considerably

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Big Five
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Heritability

• Are you born who you are?
• Considerable evidence suggests some of the Big 5
  are heritable, that is, determined by genes and
  inherited from parents

Notice that environment is still important
traits correlate only .5 in identical twins
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Speaking of Siblings

• Does birth order really have an effect on our
  personalities?
• Seems to be result of early environment
• Reared apart reared together disparity
• Diversification Principal that siblings develop
  into different people in order to fill unique
  niche in family
• This leads to development of different traits

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Birth order and traits

• First Born
• Assertive
• Dominant
• Achievement-oriented
• Conscientious
• More likely to adhere to status quo

• Later Borns
• More agreeable
• More open to new experience

Extraversion
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Acceptance of Revolutionary Ideas

• Sulloways Born to rebel hypothesis
• Instigators of scientific revolutions their
  adherents tend not to be 1st born

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Foundations of The Self Concept

• 3. Context and the Sense of Self
• a. Social Context
• b. Distinctiveness
• c. Social Comparison
• Social Comparison Theory - we compare ourselves
  to other people in order to evaluate our
  opinions, abilities, and internal states
• 4. Culture and the Self-Concept
• 5. Gender and the Self-Concept

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Defined by Others

• We tend to focus on aspects of the self/ traits
  that differentiate us from others

What we highlight depends on the context, so our
self-concept is situation-dependent (even though
were talking about relatively stable traits!)
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Cultural Difference in Distinctiveness

• The motivation to be perceived as distinct varies
  from culture to culture
• Recent research by Hazel Markus suggests social
  classdifferences as well
• Pen studies

College is an important determinant in whether an
individual asserts her distinctiveness
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Others in the Self-Concept

• For some, our roles in relationships are more
  central to how we think of ourselves
• This is more true of
• People in interdependent societies
• Women

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Self in Cognition

• The self is a salient comparison standard
• Self-image bias tendency to judge others in
  light of traits central to your own personality
• Standards based on self
• Is she athletic? Is he smart?
• Self-serving biases
• Optimistic Bias (Weinstein, 1980)

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Table 5.3
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Self in Cognition

• Self-reference effect- tendency to elaborate upon
  and recall information that is integrated into
  our self-knowledge

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Self Topics Not Yet Covered

• We will get to these at another time
• Motivational aspects of self-knowledge
• Self-evaluation
• Self esteem
• Self-presentation

These are interesting topics that will not be on
tomorrows test
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Questions on Self?