management, contrast high and low self-monitoring, and explain the spotlight effect, the illusion of transparency, ingratiation, and self-handicapping.
4.7 Define self-regulation and its relation to willpower and ironic processes; explain self-verification.
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The Many “Me’S” Of The Self
What is “your” self? Pause for 60 seconds and write down the first six to ten thoughts that come to mind. . . . Most likely you wrote down external features of your self, such as your gender, race, university affiliation, family status, and so forth. Although these are undoubtedly important aspects of who you are, social psychologists would urge you to delve more deeply into the mystery of the self and to consider less obvious attributes of the self, to even go as far as to ask if you possess just a single self. Over 100 years ago the famous American poet Walt Whitman (1892) wrote “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Whitman felt that he had multiple selves that, together, constituted “Walt Whitman.” Social psychologists follow Whitman in viewing the self in a more abstract sense that cannot be narrowed down to one noun or adjective. Recently, in the 2015 animated movie Inside Out, the mental life of the main character, Riley, is portrayed as a struggle among her various emotions (anger, disgust, joy, fear, and sadness), each presented as a different self. Although this fictional movie does not reflect how social psychologists view the self, it is consistent with the general idea of multiple selves. As you will see, the self may be more accurately construed as a multiplicity of properties and psychological processes that interrelate in complex and fascinating ways (Sedikides & Gregg, 2003).
One compelling perspective defines the self as that something that allows us to even ask the question, “what is the self?” According to this view, the self is the psychological apparatus that gives a person the capacity to consciously think about him or herself (Leary & Tangney, 2003; MacDonald, 2007). The self is defined as the ability to think about the self! It is almost impossible to imagine that a being can be said to have a self if it lacks the capacity for self-reflection. If a creature can’t ask, “what is the self?” then it doesn’t have one! Because the self lies at the center of our very being, as you’ll see in this chapter, social psychologists have exerted enormous effort toward developing a better understanding of its nature.
Table 4.1
The self, then, is your experience of who you are. This encompasses your beliefs about yourself, what you present to other people, and how you regulate your self (see Table 4.1). These three components of the self are called the self-concept, the interpersonal self, and the executive self (Baumeister, 1987, 2011; Baumeister, Schmeichel, & Vohs, 2007; Cavallo, Holmes, Fitzsimons, Murray, & Wood, 2012). An additional component is self-esteem or how you feel about yourself. In this chapter we will review each of these aspects. We will also revisit several of the core themes of social psychology introduced in Chapter 1, including free will, rationality, sociality, and of course, the self. The self is the place where all of these themes intersect: Each is a constituent of the self, and together they comprise the fundamental dimensions of the self.
Self: The psychological apparatus that gives a person the capacity to consciously think about him or herself
Think Ahead!
1 What is the purpose of the self?
2 How do you come to know yourself?
3 What influences your self-esteem?
What Is The Self: The Self As Thinker And The Thought
Knowing Oneself: The Self-Concept
Over 2,000 years ago the Greek philosopher Socrates encouraged people to “know thyself,” important advice that on its face seems pretty straightforward (although we’ll see later it may not be). As we’ve said, the very fact that we have a self means that we engage in some level of self-reflection. Thus the self is both the thinker and the thought: It is that which ponders the self—the thinker—and that which is pondered by the self—the thought. The self begins to emerge at a very young age, and as we transition through adolescence and into young adulthood, we tend to be much more preoccupied with knowing ourselves (Erickson, 1950). Unfortunately, although the desire to know ourselves is strong, there are limits to our ability to uncover certain aspects of the self, such as our motivations, desires, preferences, and behavioral tendencies, as well as the reasons for our behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; T. D. Wilson, 2002). Before we discuss these, let’s investigate several key features of the self, including our self-concept and possible selves.
Over 2000 years ago Socrates encouraged people to “know thyself.”
©iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt.
The answer to the question “Who am I” is called our self-concept: the set of beliefs we have about the characteristics we possess (Amiot, de la Sablonniere, Smith, & Smith, 2015; Burkley, Curtis, Burkley, & Hatvany, 2015). The self-concept is at the core of everything we think, feel, or do, and it serves as a framework for understanding the social world (Slotter, Winger, & Soto, 2015). For instance, my self-concept includes such elements as father, psychology professor, textbook author, husband, and so on. The set of all of my beliefs about myself is my self-concept, and each of these beliefs is known as a self-schema. Schemas are cognitive structures that serve to organize knowledge about particular objects of thought, such as concepts, experiences, or roles (Brannon, Markus, & Taylor, 2015; H. Markus, 1977). We have schemas for people, things, places, and events that are automatically activated when we think about each of these (H. Markus & Wurf, 1987). For instance, what is your schema for a library? I expect that when you think of a college library you likely imagine the presence of books, computers, students working quietly, and so forth. What is your schema for a grocery store?
Self-schemas are one kind of schema that organize information about yourself with respect to specific domains of your life (such as work, school, family, a sport, etc.) and are particularly important when they are clear and unambiguous (H. Markus, 1977). Self-schemas affect how you process information relevant to you and often guide your behavior. Go back and look at what you wrote down about your self. Did you list any roles that you play? Perhaps a student, store clerk, or restaurant worker? Or a son, daughter, or uncle? Each of these roles serves as a self-schema and, when activated, affects how you think, feel, and act.
Who you are in one domain of your life will in some ways be different from and in others the same as who you are in another domain. In my case, who I am varies depending on whether I am leading discussion in a social psychology class, at home playing games with my daughter, or at a pub playing pool with a friend. These selves are of course interrelated and have much in common (McConnell & Strain,
