1. Understanding Ourselves in a Social Context
Chapter 5: The Self
Understanding Ourselves in a Social Context

2. Facts about the Self You have a “sense of self” The self is private
William James said that the self is based on knowledge you have about your own experiences
Surgency – You may be high or low on a trait. But is the trait important?
In our culture, we are taught to view ourselves as unique and independent

3. Gender Identity Gender identity is part of the self-concept.
Sex or biological differences are more obvious than gender differences.
Gender is culturally defined.
Feminists minimize aspects of gender identity.
The genders, as humans, are more similar than different.

4. Social Role Theory
Gender differences in behavior, personality, and self-definition rise from the history of role distribution.
How well do role and biology suit one another Are there stable, self-defining characteristics of gender?
How about women in combat, or on football teams?
How about men as cooks, designers, cosmetologists?

5. SELF All the Characteristics of the Person
Self-concept: everything the person believes to be true about him/herself
Includes traits, preferences, social roles, values, beliefs, interests, self-categorization
Self-understanding develops throughout the lifespan

6. Self-Awareness in Infancy
Dot-of-rouge experiment
Recognize selves in mirror at months
15-23 months
Personal pronoun use
Picture recognition
Self-referencing, ownership, self-monitoring

7. Self in Early Childhood
Confusion of self, mind, and body
Concrete descriptions
Physical descriptions
Activities – what they do
Overestimation of abilities

8. Self – Middle & Late Childhood
Shift to internal traits and abilities
Social role descriptions
Real and ideal selves
More realistic about abilities

9. Perspective Taking
Opposite of egocentrism – the ability to assume another’s perspective
Children who are good at this are popular
Development progresses through stages (Selman)

10. Self in Adolescence Abstract-idealistic Self-conscious/ preoccupied
Contradictions within self
Fluctuating picture across time/situations
Possible selves
Self-integrations as they get older

11. Self in Adulthood Self-awareness (emotional intelligence)
Accept own good and bad qualities
Possible selves become more realistic
Life review – evaluation of successes & failures; more likely as you get older

12. Self-Esteem: What is it?
Evaluative part of the self-concept
emotional
Difference between the real and ideal self
Have you realized your potential?
Do you value the trait, but have little potential?
Ideal self includes the “ought” and the “wish” selves
Measure of our sense of meaning in life
This includes purpose
Self-respect (Have you lived up to who you are?)

13. Self-Esteem: What is it?
Influenced by the reactions of others
Generalized other, great ubiquitous “they”
People are susceptible to flattery
It is tougher to accept criticism
Basis for conformity

14. Self-Esteem: What is it?
Self-serving bias
Overrate ourselves
Blame our failures
Claim our victories
As a rule, only depressed people truly have low self-esteem

15. The Self-Esteem Movement
Thank you to Dr. Tracey Zinn, on whose conference presentation this section is based.
Organizations asking why their new college graduate employees fall apart at criticism
There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of years about new college graduates and feedback
Many managers say that students get very defensive at criticism, can’t handle negative feedback, and expect to get raises and promotions immediately. 15

16. What’s the problem? “
This comment on a discussion list pretty much sums up why I’m interested in this topic.
Why are students afraid of making mistakes and is being wrong, in classes or otherwise, socially traumatic? 16

17. The Self-Esteem Movement
Propagated primarily in the educational system
Curricula aimed at increasing students’ self-esteem
Affects Everyone born after 1970…
Focus has been on increasing self-esteem that is not rooted in reality
Researchers now suggesting that students need to be able to identify their talents
The Psychology of Self-Esteem Branden (1969)
Self-esteem was viewed as vital to success
Journal articles on SE doubled in the 70s & 80s, increased another 50% in 90s, # books doubled
Schools developed self-esteem enhancing curricula 17

18. What Was Taught “Keep your head up, feel good about yourself”
but not “take responsibility for your work”.
Forsyth et al (2007)
“You can do anything!”
No use of the word “failure”
Everyone got all As in HS, doing little work
Unrealistic expectations of success
Students report being bored in class
Researchers attempted a self-esteem manipulation with D & F students after a test and told them either to “keep your head up, feel good about yourself” vs. “take responsibility for your work”.
Students who were told to feel good about themselves actually ended up doing worse 18

19. What Resulted
This book discusses what the author sees as generational differences between previous generations and today’s college-aged students
She attributes a great deal of the issues to the self-esteem movement and describes 19

20. What Resulted: Attitudes
“Being happy is the most important thing”
We should always feel good about ourselves
Increase in narcissism (debated)
Don’t say “I’m a good soccer player” (Just say “I’m good.”)
Generation Me discusses many of the changes that occurred during the self-esteem movement
There is a debate about whether there has been an increase in the narcissism scores of kids who grew up in the self-esteem movement, but not a lot of debate about the fact that there were these changes
One of the biggest issues was that kids were encouraged to not focus on their real skills, because that resulted in “contingent” self-esteem.
Decrease in negative feedback in schools; some disallowed red pens for correcting mistakes, some stopped correcting certain mistakes
Thought that any negative feedback would result in the crumbling of children’s self-esteem 20

21. What Resulted: Attitudes
Carol Dweck’s research Effort is considered a sign of stupidity When children are told that they are smart, they choose an easier task. Panic when they are challenged or think they are engaging in “a lot of effort”.
Effort vs. Ability
When children are told that they are smart (brilliant), choose easier task
Effort is a sign of stupidity
Panic when they are challenged
I’m supposed to be good at everything!
Often think of effort as much less than what we would (Zinn et al, under review)
This doesn’t hold across all cultures 21

22. Result – Confused Parents
Encouraged delicate handling of children
Shielded them from negative emotions, criticism
Praised kids regardless of what they did
Carol Dweck’s research
Parents often think that helping their kids build self-esteem is done by shielding them from criticism and praising their talents
Protecting kids from hurt, failure, criticism, & disappointment has made them more vulnerable
Parents think SE is something you give to kids by shielding them from criticism and praising their talents
“In the old days, the parents would be driving kids home from Little League saying ‘when you struck out, you didn’t keep your eye on the ball.’ Now they say, ‘the ref robbed you.’”
Protecting kids from hurt, failure, criticism and disappointment has made them more vulnerable. 22

23. What Resulted - Behaviors
Thin skinned undergraduates, defensive when they miss questions or are challenged
Generation X Goes to College (Peter Sacks)
Students seem to be incapable of handling negative feedback.
New hires are asking for raises and promotions almost immediately after being hired.
When students with high SE are criticized
Unfriendly, rude, and uncooperative.
Entitlement regularly cited as an issue in college.
Being told that you can and will be able to do anything results in young adults who feel jipped when they discover that this may not be the case (no one has ever told them that this shouldn’t be the case)
When students are confronted by something that may be difficult for them they are surprised and don’t know how to react 23

24. What Failed to Result
[High self-esteem] Isn’t associated with improved grades, career achievement, reduced alcohol usage, lower violent behavior, etc. Baumeister and colleagues (2003)
Baumeister (2003): of the 200 studies that were decent on SE, none showed positive benefits of just SE 24

25. Educational Outcomes of the Self-Esteem Movement
Susan Jacoby The Age of American Unreason
Are our students (people) hostile to knowledge?
Self-esteem movement = I’m the smartest kid!
“I’m supposed to be happy!”
Now, I don’t know if this is any different from any other time, but some are arguing that because students today have been taught to be so self-focused, they are hostile to knowledge or challenge that states otherwise.
If you’ve been taught that you are the smartest kid and can do no wrong, why should you bother learning?
Would you listen to reports that American kids were falling behind other countries in intellectual markers? Would you care?
There is an idea related to this that by focusing on “being happy” all the time, we’ve given students the impression that discomfort of any kind 25

26. Backlash against Self-Esteem
John Hewitt’s The Myth of Self-Esteem: Finding Happiness and Solving Problems in America “Why do you feel good about yourself?” “Because of self-esteem”
Students don’t like the to discuss self-esteem as a problematic concept 26

27. Backlash against Self-Esteem
Generation Me Risk of depression & anxiety higher for young people today “Our growing tendency to put the self first leads to unparalleled freedom, but it also creates an enormous amount of pressure on us to stand alone.”
Generation me discusses a different take on the increase in antidepressant and anti-anxiolytic drugs
Today, the lifetime rate of major depression is 10 times higher than for people born before 1915—15-20%, some say higher
Some argue that it’s not just an increase in diagnosis or acceptability of depression/anxiety, but a real increase in the disorder
“Normal” schoolchildren in the 1980s reported higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s (Twenge)
Focus on the self and independence, “our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on”
Generation me has been taught to expect more out of life at the very time when good jobs and nice houses are increasingly difficult to obtain
We are supposed to be able to do and be anything; any disappointment suggests that we will not 27

28. Are Negative Emotions Normal?
Against happiness: In praise of melancholy Eric Wilson Loss of sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder Alan Horwitz & James Wakefield The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders Peter Conrad
Medicating normal emotions: Does this suggest that we shouldn’t ever feel sad, depressed, anxious, etc?
If we are suggesting that students should always be content and happy, is that doing them a disservice?
Several books have come out suggesting that we are turning normal conditions into disorders.
Obviously, this does not mean that medication is bad, per se, or that it does not have it’s place; however, our culture could be implying to students that negative emotions or experiences are always abnormal.
One discussion on TIPs recently involved the new data about the less than stellar effectiveness of antidepressants and one discussant wrote: “with finding new things to medicate ("limerence" as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago), but treating all kinds of ordinary sadness and normal healthy grief as needing to be medicated”
I like to tell students that part of my job is to make them feel uncomfortable and to challenge them.
Can we show students that experiencing sadness, difficulty, frustration, etc are normal? 28

29. External Influences on the Self
Culture
Gender
Stable vs. malleable aspects of the self
The working self-concept
Situational influences

30. How do we come to know the self?
Reflected appraisals
Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others
Social Comparisons
Self-perception
Observing our own behavior

31. How do we come to know the self?
Reflected appraisals
What we think others think of us
Charles Cooley – 1902
Looking-glass self
George Herbert Mead – 1934
generalized

32. How do we come to know the self?
Social comparisons
Upward comparisons
Downward comparisons
Better than average error (I am higher than most people on this attribute.)

33. How do we come to know the self?
Self-perception: Observing our own behavior
Like a personal application of attribution theory

34. Self-Regulation
The behind-the-scenes executive function of the self (ego)
Self-awareness theory: as we focus on the self, our attitudes, values, and goals are most likely to influence our behavior
Compare to our own internal standards (activate the superego)

35. Resolving Discrepancies
If self-awareness leads us to positive feedback it helps us to accomplish our goals
If it leads to negative feedback, it arouses anxiety and guilt
Self-discrepancy theory says that this is like a Freudian conscience If we fear punishment, we are using the ought self.
The ego ideal or ideal self carries a fear of disappointing self/parents.

36. Variety of Responses D you think bad behavior or bad person?
Do you have an ought or ideal wish focus?
Large discrepancies lead to discouragement.
People who tend to feel guilt have more empathy.
People who feel ashamed tend to become depressed, angry, hostile and suspicious.

37. Response to Negatives
Distract yourself.
Adjust your behavior.

38. Goals To adjust your behavior, you often set a goal.
You must choose the goal and allot energy to it.
Goals meet needs & lead to feelings.
If you have two equally attainable goals, the harder one will seem more desirable.
You subjectively asses s the desirability of attaining the goal and the likelihood of reaching it. Some goals may turn out to be more trouble than they are worth.

39. Goals What activates or turns on a goal?
You can do this consciously and deliberately.
It can be primed.
There can be unconscious pursuit of a goal.
Auto-motive theory subtle exposure to goal-related stimuli can prime a goal.
Affective forecasting (not so accurate). May be the wrong factors are salient. (College housing study)