The Self in a Social World

1
The Self in a Social World

• Chapter 2 Part 2
• Jan 26

2
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?

3
Self Culture

• Implications Americans use dispositional
  explanations of behavior
• Compared with collectivists?
• 70 of the worlds population lives in
  collectivist cultures.
• but most research done in U.S.
• Concerns about generalizations?

4
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?

5
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?

6
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?

7
Negative Aspects of Self-Esteem

• How is self-esteem linked to aggression?
• To self-serving bias?
• Self-serving bias - tendency to perceive oneself
  favorably

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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?

9
Self-Serving and Groups

• Cialdinis 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 teams victory?
• How do we respond when our team loses?
• Links to self-esteem changes?

10
Impression Management

• Want to project a desired image to others and to
  ourselves.
• Self-monitoring what is it?
• How do high self-monitors react?

11
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?

12
Ch 2 Big Picture

• Self is partly a social construction, shaped by
  our groups culture
• Negative aspects of self-protection gt sometimes
  were bad judges of things related to ourselves
• We also have a tendency to make many perceptual
  errors