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