Self in a Social World

Chapter 6

THE SELF

• Self = our impressions + thoughts + feelings

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

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

• Activity: Now take out a piece of paper and fold it into 4 sections. Write your name in one section.

PHYSICAL SELF

• Physical Self: Ones’ psychological sense of one’s physical being (ex. height, weight, hair color, race, and physical skill).

• How is it linked to self-esteem?

• Our adjustment to traits that are mostly permanent, such as height, sex & race, is closely linked to self-acceptance/esteem.

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

• What are your “Physical Self” traits?

SOCIAL SELF

• Social Self: The social roles one plays— student, worker, husband, mother, citizen, leader, and etc.

• 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.

• What are some of the social roles you play?

PERSONAL 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 are some of your values and ethics?

• Now write your name or a name you identify with in the last section of your paper.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

• Names can influence many things…such as physical attractiveness and assumptions people may place on us.

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

SELF-CONCEPT

• Self-Concept: 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.

IDENTITY STATUSES

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

• Identity Foreclosure: 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 STATUSES

• Identity Moratorium: individuals who are in the throes of an identity crisis—an intense examination of alternatives.• Who feels that they are either in this

status or have been in this status?

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

DIVERSITY AND IDENTITY

• Something to reflect on:

• 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 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.

Body Language

• Body language is an important contributor to forming person schemas and first impressions. Examples: 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 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.

PREJUDICE

• 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, classism and ageism.

Discrimination 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

Discrimination• Dissimilarity: tend 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.

Attribution Theory

• Attribution Process: The process by which people draw conclusions about the factors that influence behavior.

• Dispositional Attribution: Ascribe a person’s behavior to internal factors, such as personality traits and free will.

• Situational Attributions: Attribute a person’s actions to external factors, such as the social pressure found in a situation.

Attribution 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.

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