IBP Social Psychology Summary - The self- ch 4

Social and Organizational Psychology

IBP 2017-2018

 

The self

Often, others are better at predicting our behavior than us, because we know all our intentions and motives, they only see the outcome

How we present ourselves:

  • Self-promotion: present our most favorable self-aspects
  • Self-verification: having others agree with us about ourselves, even the negative qualities
  • Ingratiation tactics: conveying our respect for others
  • Self-depreciation: imply that we are not as good as the other person

Self-knowledge

  • Introspection: the examination of one's own mental and emotional processes

    • Tricky because we often don’t have conscious access to the emotional factors that affect our behavioral choices, or to what actually brings us happiness
    • We may have difficulty predicting how we will feel in the future
  • Think of ourselves by taking an observer’s perspective
    • We see the self in more trait terms and less responsive to situations, as observers do

Personal-versus-social identity continuum

  • Personal identity level: based on intragroup comparison, we think of ourselves in terms of attributes that differentiate ourselves from other individuals
  • Social identity level: based on intergroup comparison, perceptions of ourselves are based on attributes that are shared with other group members

Self-definitions

  • What aspect of the self is influential at any moment in time depends on:

    • Context
    •  distinctiveness of the attribute
    • importance of the identity
    •  how others refer to us
  • If we expect others to reject us for an aspect of ourselves:
    • We try to alter the part of the self that brings rejection, or
    • We rebel against those rejecting us by making that feature even more self-defining

Future possible selves

  • Can motivate us to attempt self-change
  • Role models: can represent future possible selves that we can attain
  • Autobiographical memory: when people compare their present self to their past self, the further in the past that self is the more we downgrade it relative to our present self
  • Dreaded possible selves can lead us to give up certain behaviors
  • Desired possible selves can lead us to work hard to attain a behavior

Self-control

  • Ego depletion: the process in which self-control is temporarily used up, which makes it more difficult to self-regulate
  • Self-control can be more difficult when:
    • the initial control effort was longer
    • when no rest period is given
    •  when people lack training in self-regulation

Self-esteem

  • Self-esteem changes in response to life events
  • Implicit self-esteem measures: assess self-feelings of which we are not consciously aware
  • Explicit self-esteem measures: assess self-feelings of which we are aware
  • Initially, students who migrate show lower self-esteem, but that improves over time
  • Women on average have lower self-esteem than men

Social comparison

  • Upward social comparisons: at the personal level can be painful
  • Downward social comparisons: at the personal level can be comforting
  • We dislike an ingroup member who performs poorly but respond positively to an ingroup member who performs better than us because that person makes our group look good

Self-serving biases

  • Above average effect: where we see ourselves more positively than we see most other people
  • Even unrealistic optimism is predictive of positive mental and physical health

Prejudice and discrimination

  • When the self is seen as a target of pervasive discrimination, it is more harmful for self-esteem than when it is seen as reflecting an isolated outcome
  • People with concealable stigmatized identities have lower self-esteem than people whose stigmatized identities cannot be concealed because they are hiding their identitiy

Stereotype threat

  • Effects can occur in historically devalued groups when they are simply reminded of their group membership and fear they might confirm negative stereotypes about their group
  • Can undermine performance in dominant group members, when they fear a negative comparison with members of another group that is expected to outperform them
  • Can be prevented by:
    • affirming the self in another way
    • exposure to a stereotype defying role model
    • distancing from aspects of the stereotype that are incompatible with high performance

 

 

References: 

Baron, R., & Branscombe, N. (2016). Social psychology (14th edition) Harlow: Pearson Education Limited

--Chapter 4

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