The Self in a Social World

Chapter 2 – Part 2

Jan 26

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?

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?

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?

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?

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?

Negative Aspects of Self-Esteem

• How is self-esteem linked to aggression?

• To self-serving bias?– Self-serving bias - tendency to perceive

oneself favorably

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?

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?

Impression Management

• Want to project a desired image to others and to ourselves.

• Self-monitoring – what is it?

• How do high self-monitors react?

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?

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