1. The Self in a Social World
Chapter 2 – Part 2
Jan 26

2. Self & Culture Video Clip
Social psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama
Self-construals – like individualism/collectivism, but at individual level
Independent: definition?
Interdependent: definition?
Differences in Olympic coverage U.S./Japan – what do they report finding in research?

3. Self & Culture
Implications – Americans use dispositional explanations of behavior
Compared with collectivists?
70% of the world’s population lives in collectivist cultures….
but most research done in U.S.
Concerns about generalizations?

4. Perceived Self-Control
Self-efficacy: sense that one is competent
Leads to challenging goals and persistence.
Does it differ from self-esteem?
Partly depends on…
Locus of Control (LOC): what is it?
internal LOC –
External LOC –
What are outcomes of each?

5. Is LOC situational?
Do people feel more or less ‘internal’ or ‘external’ depending on situation?
What childhood experiences/family aspects might contribute to locus of control?

6. Threats to Self-Esteem
Self-esteem – evaluation of your self-concept
How is it linked to clarity of self-concept?
Individualists value high self-esteem
Sibling relationships (Tesser).
What did he find?

7. Negative Aspects of Self-Esteem
How is self-esteem linked to aggression?
To self-serving bias?
Self-serving bias - tendency to perceive oneself favorably

8. False Consensus
False consensus = tendency to overestimate how much others share our opinions or negative traits
Leads to excuses for failures – why do we do this?
However, we also exhibit false uniqueness
When/How so?

9. Self-Serving and Groups
Cialdini’s research on self identity and sport team identification
When group important to our identity succeeds, respond w/pride
Termed “basking in reflected glory (BIRGing)”
How do we describe a team’s victory?
How do we respond when our team loses?
Links to self-esteem changes?

10. Impression Management
Want to project a desired image to others and to ourselves.
Self-monitoring – what is it?
How do high self-monitors react?

11. The Self, Suicide, and Poetry
Pennebaker (2001) study
Randomly chose poems from 9 poets who committed suicide, 9 who did not.
Hypothesis: Predicted suicidal poets would use more negative emotion words
What were the results?

12. Ch 2 – Big Picture
Self is partly a social construction, shaped by our groups & culture
Negative aspects of self-protection –> sometimes we’re bad judges of things related to ourselves
We also have a tendency to make many perceptual errors