Self-Concept: An Introduction (1/7/99)

Self and Others
Psychology 410
Prof. Bertram Malle
Winter 1999

Self-Concept: An Introduction (1/7/99) Self-Concept:
An Introduction (Jan 7) Basic Building Blocks: Definitions

Self-Concept: The collection of an individual's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about him/herself. An individual's internal representation of who s/he is.

Self: while this term is sometimes used interchangeably with "Self-Concept" the self refers to the agent - the active doer who has thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. The self-concept is different because it is the sum of the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that the person has about him/herself.

Self-Views: Self-perceptions in specific domains, (e.g. your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about who you are as a student). The sum of all your self-views is then your Self-Concept.

Self Esteem: The feelings of worth one has about oneself as a whole.

Affect for Specific Self-Views: The feelings of worth one has about oneself in a particular role.

The "Schema" organization: A schema is a network of interassocaited representation that are stored in memory. We use the schema idea to think about self-views and how they are organized. Recall the overhead about Bob's Florist Self-view. This self-view holds all of Bob's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about himself as a florist and these different pieces are connected to eachother in memory such that activating one piece, for example by reminding Bob about the floral arrangement he made last April, will "prime" other pieces of his florist self-view.

We began class with two questionnaire measures. The first asked you to list the words or short phrases that best describe who you are. The second asked you to form two lists - one that describes who you are as a daughter/son and a second that describes who you are as a student. We decided that the first questionnaire measured the self-concept because it asked for a description of who you are in your entirety. The second task assessed two of your self-views by asking you to partial out how you saw yourself in two specific roles.

Questionnaires, like the ones you completed in class, are common means of assessing the self-concept and self-views. Because we can never directly inspect someone's self-concept we rely on self-description tasks to measure it, (e.g. spontaneous answers to the question "Who are you", adjective rating scales, adjective card-sorting tasks, and yes/no responses to computer presented adjectives.)

Affect: The Self-Concept and Self-Views

The readings for this week examine the role of affect in individuals' self-concepts and self-views. People will do lots of things to maintain their global self-esteem and or more specific feelings of self-worth in particular domains. This week's readings explore how the feelings we have about ourselves impact how we: process information (Malle & Horowitz); interpret information about other people in ways that increase our positive self-views, (Alicke et al.); respond to attacks on our self-views by attacking others, (Bushman & Baumiester); and increase our positive self-views through seemingly illogical means, (Cialdini et al.).

Reading Notes

"Step Design"

When reading remember to notice the "step" methodology employed by the researchers. Researchers conduct an experiment and then ask two questions: 1) Are there any questions left unanswered by this study and 2) Are there alternative explanations to my hypothesis that can account for the results. The researcher then conducts another study to explore any unanswered questions and alternative explanations. Once she finishes the second study she asks the same questions and then conducts a third study if needed. In this way, researchers deliberately research a phenomenon to their fullest ability.

False Feedback Paradigm:

This is a very common methodology among deceptive social psychologists. In the false feedback-testing situation a participant is given a supposedly diagnostic test, (e.g. a test of "perceptual intelligence"). The participant is then given false feedback about their performance on the test and the researchers examine how the tone of the feedback, (negative "You did very poorly on the test" or positive "You did better than average on the test"), impacts the participant's self-views or self-concept.

What are the other people doing?

When you read an article that suggests that most people do X ask yourself what the people who don't do X look like. How might their lives be different? For example, if people typically will boost their assessments of people who out-perform them, then what does a person look like who actually minimizes the outperformer's ability look like?