The Self

Jonathon Brown

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136871993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Although social psychology has been traditionally focused on interpersonal relationships, the cognitive revolution in psychology has had the effect of refocusing some social psychology on intra-psychic processes. This area of psychology has become very popular in recent years, yet there is currently no other textbook available for the study of the self. Republished in its original form by Psychology Press in 2007, this book carefully documents the changing conceptions and the value accorded the self in psychology over time. It further outlines the many alternative conceptions of this increasingly central domain in social psychology. New research and conceptions are juxtaposed with the classic and traditional, providing the reader with a comprehensive introduction to the study of the self.

CHAPTER 1

_____________________

Introduction

By the slimmest of margins, the citizens of Quebec voted recently not to secede from Canada. Although the referendum failed, over 60 percent of French-speaking Quebeckers voted for separation, despite evidence that secession would bring economic, political, and social instability. What fuels such intense devotion to ethnic identity? Why would people be willing to risk so much for the chance of establishing a separate French-speaking country?

Naturally, there are many answers to these questions, including years of anger at the British stemming from the battles on the Plains of Abraham. But there is a more psychological issue involved as well. Many French Canadians are concerned that their French identity is being compromised by the dominant Anglo culture they see encroaching upon them. They want to retain their identity, even if doing so entails sacrifice and strife. In short, they want to think of themselves as French.

In a general sense, this book is concerned with understanding issues of this sort. It is concerned with understanding how people think and feel about themselves, how they want to think and feel about themselves, and how these thoughts and feelings develop and guide behavior. Questions like these are among the most interesting and important ones we can ask in our struggle to understand who we are. Questions like these form the heart of a psychological analysis of the self.

Chapter 1 is designed to acquaint you with the way psychologists study the self. In the first section of the chapter, we will define our terms and examine how the study of the self fits in with other areas of psychology.

The second section of this chapter places the study of self in a historical context. Here we will see that most American psychologists ignored the study of the self for many years. This neglect occurred because the behaviorist movement (which ruled American psychology) believed that people’s thoughts and feelings about themselves were too subjective and too unimportant to study. Ultimately, various developments led psychologists to reconsider their opposition to the study of the self, and the self returned as an important topic of psychological inquiry.

The final section of this chapter previews the rest of this book, highlighting the many areas of psychology that now include a consideration of the self. Of course, psychologists are not the only ones who study the self. Philosophers, theologians, cultural anthropologists, and sociologists also consider such matters. Poets and novelists, too, explore the essence of selfhood, and numerous works on the topic can be found in libraries and bookstores. Although we will draw on many of these perspectives throughout this book, our emphasis will be on theoretically derived and empirically tested ideas regarding the nature of the self. Particular attention will be paid to the work of personality and social psychologists, as these researchers have actively studied the self in recent years.

WHAT PSYCHOLOGISTS MEAN BY SELF

… self-awareness is … most illusive. You … find yourself as between the two mirrors of a barber-shop, with each image viewing each other one, so that as the self takes a look at itself taking a look at itself, it soon gets all confused as to the self that is doing the looking and the self which is being looked at. (Hilgard, 1949, p. 377)

The I and the ME

We’ll begin by noting that the self has a unique quality, a quality we will refer to as a reflexive property. Consider the statement “I see Pat.” The self is implicated in this statement by the use of the personal pronoun I. I am doing the seeing. Now consider the statement “I see me.” Here, the self is implicated in two ways. I am still the one doing the seeing, and the thing I am seeing is ME. In more formal terms, we can say that people are able to take themselves as an object of their own attention. They look back on themselves, much as when they see their reflection in a mirror (hence the use of the word reflexive).

William James (1890) was one of the first psychologists to recognize this duality. He recommended using different terms, the I and the ME, as a means of distinguishing between these two aspects of the self. Following his suggestion, we will use the term I to refer to that aspect of self that is actively perceiving, thinking, or in our example above, seeing. We will use the term ME to refer to that aspect of self that is an object of our attention, thought, or perception. When I say “I see Pat,” only the I is implicated. When I say “I see me,” both uses of the term are implicated. I am doing the seeing, and what I see is me.

Defined in this manner, it might seem as if the I is synonymous with all basic psychological processes (e.g., perception, sensation, thought). This is not really so. It is not these processes, per se, but our subjective awareness of them that comprises the I. The I refers to our awareness that we are thinking or our awareness that we are perceiving, rather than to the physical or psychical processes themselves.

The ME is also very much a subjective, psychological phenomenon. As we use the term, the ME refers to people’s ideas about who they are and what they are like. For example, I think I am athletic and I think I am impatient. Psychologists call these beliefs self-referent thoughts. Self-referent thoughts are simply thoughts that refer to oneself. They are people’s ideas about what they are like. A variety of terms have been used to refer to these beliefs, including self-views, self-images, identities, and self-conceptions. For our purposes, these terms are interchangeable; they all refer to people’s ideas about who they are or what they are like.

In addition to having thoughts about themselves, people also have feelings toward themselves. I may like myself as a person or feel bad about my perceived impatience. These are both examples of self-referent feelings—feelings that refer to oneself.

Psychologists generally use different terms to refer to these two aspects of the ME. The term self-concept refers to the way people characteristically think about themselves; the term self-esteem refers to the way people characteristically feel about themselves. The term self is used more broadly. It refers not only to how we think and feel about ourselves but also to processes we earlier identified as being aspects of the I (e.g., our awareness of our thinking and perceiving).

Although the I and the ME are both important aspects of the self, psychologists are most concerned with understanding the nature of the ME. They focus on how people think and feel about themselves, and how these thoughts and feelings develop and affect other aspects of psychological life. Philosophers, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with understanding the nature of the I. They have sought to understand that aspect of self that seems to directly experience the world. We will have an opportunity to consider both approaches in this book, but we will devote most of our attention to understanding the nature of the ME.

Self-Psychology and Personality

A focus on the way people think and feel about themselves distinguishes self-psychology from other areas of psychology. One of these areas is personality psychology. Self-psychology is concerned with subjective experience (with what people think they are like); personality psychology is more concerned with objective experience (with what people are actually like).

To illustrate this distinction, let’s reconsider my belief that I’m athletic. This is a self-referent thought—a belief I hold about what I am like. Whether or not I am athletic is an entirely different matter. Unfortunately, thinking I’m athletic doesn’t necessarily make it so. If you saw me on a tennis court, you might not agree. The larger point here is that self-psychology is concerned with our picture of the self—our ideas about what we are like (Rosenberg, 1979). But our pictures may not be entirely accurate; they may not capture what we are really like.

In this book, we will think of personality psychology as the study of what people are actually like. Rather than focusing on people’s ideas about themselves—which is the domain of self-psychology—personality psychology is concerned with what people are really like. It would not be uncommon, for example, to hear someone say “Jack is an extrovert” or “Jill is conscientious.” These phrases suggest that we are referring to what the person is truly like, not simply to what the person thinks he or she is like.

Having said this, it should be noted that the distinction between self-psychology and personality psychology blurs. There are at least four reasons for this (McCrae & Costa, 1988).

1. What we really are influences how we think about ourselves. First, aspects of personality affect our thoughts about ourselves. In theory, people are free to think whatever they want about themselves. But in reality, people’s ideas about what they are like are usually at least loosely tied to objective criteria. People with low intelligence—a personality characteristic—are unlikely to regard themselves as brilliant. It can happen, but it’s unlikely. Similarly, people who are seven feet tall are unlikely to think of themselves as short. Again, it can happen, but it’s unlikely. These examples show that although no one is born with a conception of the self as unintelligent or tall, people are born with certain physical and psychological characteristics that influence how they think about themselves.

This is not to say that our thoughts about ourselves are identical with what we are actually like. All of us know people who think they are smarter than they are (or at least smarter than we think they are). We’ve also met people who strike us as obnoxious yet regard themselves as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Throughout this book we will see that although people’s views of themselves are influenced by what they are really like, they are not faithful representations of their true characteristics. Most people think of themselves in overly positive terms—as somewhat better than what they are really like.

2. What we really are influences how we feel about ourselves. Another way in which self-psychology and personality are related is that personality affects how we feel about ourselves. Some important aspects of personality are inherited. For example, temperament refers to a person’s general activity level and usual mood. This is an inheritable characteristic: From the moment they are born, some infants are more emotionally distressed than are other infants (Kagan, 1989). This personality variable influences self-esteem. People who are prone to experience negative emotions tend to feel more negatively about themselves (Watson & Clark, 1984). After all, it’s hard to feel good about yourself when you’re agitated or sad all the time. In this manner, a personality variable, temperament, can influence self-esteem.

3. Self is one aspect of personality. A third intersection between self-psychology and personality is that people’s thoughts and feelings about themselves are one aspect of their personality. For example, some people think of themselves as attractive; other people think of themselves as unattractive. Although these thoughts don’t tell us whether these people really are attractive or not, it is still the case that the people differ with respect to what they think they are like. These individual differences can be treated as personality variables.

We can also distinguish people according to how they feel about themselves. This is self-esteem research. Self-esteem research divides people into two categories: Those who feel good about themselves are designated as having high self-esteem; those who do not feel as good about themselves are designated as having low self-esteem. In this manner, individual differences in how people feel about themselves are treated as personality variables.

When we treat self-referent thoughts and feelings as individual difference variables, we are treating the self as one aspect of personality. In this sense, personality is a broader term that refers to the entire psychological nature of the individual (McCrae & Costa, 1988). Self-referent thoughts and feelings are a subset of personality.

4. Self-report is often used to measure personality. A fourth way in which self-psychology and personality are related is that personality researchers often use self-report to assess personality. Many personality tests ask people to indicate what they think they are like. For example, a test of extraversion might ask people “How sociable are you?” or “How shy are you?” Strictly speaking, tests like these are measuring people’s ideas about what they are like, not what they are actually like.

To summarize, self-psychology and personality represent distinct, though related, approaches. Self-psychology is concerned with what people think they are like; personality psychology is concerned with what people are really or actually like. But the line between these two perspectives is often blurred.

When comparing self-psychology and personality, then, the question is really one of emphasis. Self-theorists believe that the psychological act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Nature of the Self
• 3. The Search for Self-Knowledge
• 4. Self-Development
• 5. The Self from a Cognitive Perspective
• 6. Self-Regulation of Behavior
• 7. Self-Presentation
• 8. Self-Esteem
• 9. Depression
• 10. Illusion and Well-Being
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index