Self in a Social World

Chapter 6

The Self: The Core of Your Psychological Being

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Perception of Others

Self-Concept, Identity Self-Concept, Identity Status and DiversityStatus and Diversity

Prejudice and Prejudice and DiscriminationDiscriminationAttribution Theory and Personal Adjustment

THE SELFTHE SELF

• Self: The totality of our impressions, thoughts, and feelings, such that we have a conscious, continuous sense of being in the world.

• Parts of the Self: Physical, Social, and Personal.

SCHEMASSCHEMAS

• SCHEMA: A set of beliefs and feelings about something. Examples include stereotypes, prejudices and generalizations.

• ROLE SCHEMA: a schema about how people in certain roles (e.g., boss, wife, teacher) are expected to behave.

• PERSON SCHEMA: a schema about how a particular individual is expected to behave.

• SELF-SCHEMA: the set of beliefs, feelings and generalizations we have about ourselves

PHYSICAL SELFPHYSICAL SELF

• Physical Self: Ones’ psychological sense of one’s physical being—for example, one’s height, weight, hair color, race, and physical skills.

• Adjustment to traits that are permanent, such as height, sex & race, is closely linked to our self-esteem and self-acceptance.

• However, other traits such as weight, fitness and hair style can be modified.

SOCIAL SELFSOCIAL SELF

• Social Self: The composite of the social roles one plays—suitor, student, worker, husband, wife, mother, father, citizen, leader, follower, and so on.

• Roles and masks are adaptive responses to the social situation.

• However, when our entire lives are played behind masks, it may be difficult to discover true inner selves.

PERSONAL SELFPERSONAL SELF

• Personal Self: One’s private, continuous sense of being oneself in the world. Personal Self includes values, ethics, your name, self-concept, self-esteem and the ideal-self.

• Ethics: Standards for behavior. A system of beliefs from which one derives standards for behavior.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?WHAT’S IN A NAME?

• Names can influence many things…such as physical attractiveness. Research has found that women with names such as Jennifer, Kathy and Christine are rated as significantly more attractive than Gertrude, Ethel, and Harriet.

• Nicknames can reflect our attitudes towards ourselves…Robert versus Bob versus Bobby.

SELF-CONCEPTSELF-CONCEPT

• Self-Concept: One’s perception of oneself including one’s traits and an evaluation of those traits. The self-concept includes one’s self-esteem and one’s ideal self.

• Self-Esteem: Self-approval. One’s self-respect or favorable opinion of oneself. Self-esteem is neither fixed nor unchangeable. Though relatively stable over time, self-esteem can fluctuate, for better or worse.

• Ideal self: One’s perception of what one ought to be and do. Also called the self-ideal.

SELF-ESTEEMSELF-ESTEEM

IDENTITY STATUSESIDENTITY STATUSES

• Identity Achievement: The identity status that describes individuals who have resolved an identity crisis and committed to a relatively stable set of beliefs or a course of action.

• Identity Foreclosure: The identity status that describes individuals who have adopted a commitment to a set of beliefs or a course of action without undergoing an identity crisis. Often, they have adopted the views of their parents without seriously questioning them.

IDENTITY STATUSESIDENTITY STATUSES

• Identity Moratorium: The identity status that describes individuals who are in the throes of an identity crisis—an intense examination of alternatives.

• Identity Diffusion: The identity status that describes individuals who have neither arrived at a commitment as to who they are and what they stand for nor experienced a crisis.

DIVERSITY AND IDENTITYDIVERSITY AND IDENTITY

• Being European American or African American, or both, is part of one’s identity. As is being male or female, Christian, Muslim or Jew.

• Researchers have found that identity formation is often more complicated for adolescents from ethnic minority groups. These adolescents may be faced with two sets of cultural values: those of their ethnic group and those of the dominant culture.

Perception of OthersPerception of Others

• Social Perception: The process by which we form understandings of others in our social environment, based on observations of how others act and information we receive.

• Primacy Effect: The tendency to evaluate others in terms of first impressions.

• Recency Effect: The tendency to evaluate others in terms of the most recent impression.

MANAGING FIRST IMPRESSIONSMANAGING FIRST IMPRESSIONS

• Be aware of the first impressions you make on others.

• Your resume is your first impression.

• Plan and rehearse your first few remarks.

• Smile.

• Be aware of your style of dress and physical mannerisms.

• Ask yourself, what type of clothing is expected for this occasion?

• When you answer essay questions, attend to your penmanship.

• In class, seek eye contact with your instructors.

Body LanguageBody Language

• Body language is an important contributor to forming person schemas. It provides important cues about a person’s thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. Examples of body language are eye contact patterns, body posture, touching, gazing and staring.

• Body language does vary by culture. The same gesture may have a different meaning in one culture than it does in another. For example, people in Bulgaria shake their heads up and down to signal “no”.

Using Body LanguageUsing Body Language

• Be aware of what other people are telling you with their body language.

• Pay attention to your own body language as a way of helping to make the desired impressions on other people.

• Pay attention to your own body language as a way of learning about yourself.

PREJUDICEPREJUDICE

• Prejudice: The belief that a person or group, on the basis of assumed racial ethnic, sexual, or other features will possess negative characteristics or perform inadequately.

• Types of prejudice include sexism, racism, and ageism.

Discrimination and StereotypesDiscrimination and Stereotypes

• Discrimination: The denial of privileges to a person or group on the basis of prejudice

• Stereotypes: Fixed, conventional ideas about a group that can lead us to process information about members of the group in a biased fashion.

Sources of Prejudice and DiscriminationSources of Prejudice and Discrimination

• Dissimilarity: We are apt to like people who share our attitudes and we tend to assume that people of different races have different attitudes.

• Social Conflict: People of different races and religions often compete for jobs, giving rise to feelings of prejudice.

• Social Learning: Children often acquire some of their attitudes by observing other people, especially their parents.

• Information Processing: Prejudices serve as cognitive schemes, filters through which people see the social world. It is easier to attend to and remember instances of behavior that fit with our prejudices.

• Social Categorization: People tend to divide their social world into “us” and “them.” People tend to view others in their group more favorably than those out of their group.

Combating Prejudice and DiscriminationCombating Prejudice and Discrimination

• Role Reversal: Experiencing prejudice and discrimination first hand may lead children to believe that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of color. Being discriminated against may make an individual more sensitive to the feelings of members of outgroups.

• Intergroup Contact: Four conditions need to be met for intergroup contact to reduce prejudice and tension. (1) Social and institutional support (2) Acquaintance potential (3) Equal status (4) Intergroup cooperation.

• Seeking compliance with the law: It is appropriate to demand legal support if we have been discriminated against. People can be compelled to modify illegal behavior.

• Self-Examination: We should be mindful that when someone disappoints or disturbs us, that we attribute the behavior to them as individuals, not as group representatives.

• Raising Tolerant children: Reducing prejudice may begin with helping our children develop more tolerant attitudes.

Attribution TheoryAttribution Theory

• Attribution Process: The process by which people draw inferences about the motives and traits of themselves and others.

• Dispositional Attribution: An assumption that that a person’s behavior is determined by internal causes, such as personal attitudes or goals.

• Situational Attributions: An assumption that a person’s behavior is determined by external circumstances, such as the social pressure found in a situation.

Attribution TheoryAttribution Theory

• Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to assume that others act on the basis of choice or will, even when there is evidence suggestive of the importance of their situations.

• Actor-Observer Effect: The tendency to attribute our own behavior to external, situational factors but to attribute the behavior of others to internal, dispositional factors such as choice or will.

• Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to view one’s successes as stemming from internal factors and one’s failures as stemming from external factors.

Enhancing Self-EsteemEnhancing Self-Esteem

To the Instructor:To the Instructor:

• The preceding slides are intended to provide you a base upon which to build your presentation for Chapter 6 of Nevid’s Psychology and the Challenges of Life.

• For further student and instructor resources including images from the textbook, quizzes, flashcard activities and e-Grade plus, please visit our website: www.wiley.com/college/nevid

CopyrightCopyright

Copyright 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the copyright owner.