SHDH 3108

SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 2 – THE SELF IN A SOCIAL WORLD
 THE SELF
own perspective

• The self is the center of one’s social world. 2- 7

pre-operation
O
• Remember from Intro Psych: Egocentrism
• But Egocentrism is not limited to childhood. It never
really goes away entirely.
• In adulthood, it can persist due to motivation, situational
factors, etc.

*• Eg., Spotlight effect: People’s tendency to overestimate

how much they are noticed by others.
Social world-self (center thinking
people's sight = own sight
 THE SELF

• When you think about yourself, the right

hemisphere of your brain is more active than
the left.
• Another Intro Psych reminder…
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• The self (i.e., your sense of self) is really a
fantastic creation more than a logical reality.
• Therefore it is subject to illusions (even
delusions) and biases.
 Recall: semantic
network in LTM.
THE SELF

• Information about yourself is stored in self-schemas.

information - > File I for self
• Self-schemas contain ideas you have about yourself.
Eg., I am smart, I am confident, I am a son, I will….
match reality
• These ideas, collectively, is your self-concept.
• The self is not just a singular entity that includes your
present self. Other possible selves (e.g., future selves, past
selves) are included in “The Self”.
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SELF

V
• Genetics, of course, play a part. social
comparing >
-

Self-estee
~
• But social experiences are constantly exerting influence on the self.
~
- Social Roles
- Social Comparisons 正在載入⋯
- Success and Failures / Feedback from others
SELF-KNOWLEDGE

• How well do we know ourselves?

- How accurately can we make predictions about our future selves?
- To a certain extent, we are somewhat accurate but we are vulnerable to biases and errors
(i.e., a discrepancy between self-predictions vs. actual outcomes).
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
• Errors in predicting our futures
1) Planning Fallacy: People tend to underestimate how long they will take to complete an
upcoming task.
Buehler, Griffin, & Ross (1994)
-Asked college students to predict how many days it would take them to finish a thesis
paper.
=> ALL underestimated
-Measured actual number of days they took.
Smooth Condition - APA
Best Estimate Optimistic Pessimistic Actual
Estimate Estimate
Number of 33.9 27.4 48.6 55.5
Days
people
who tend to noticed
their past may least likely
to occur planning fallacy.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
↓
• Why does the Planning Fallacy happen? ① Cognition factor & Motivation
sfocused on future
- People neglect their past records (Buehler et al. 1994). In a think-aloud variation of the
first study, people mentioned their past experiences less than 2% of the time.
- In another additional study, when participants are asked to estimate task completion times
for others, the bias disappears. When predicting for others, people were much more
willing to consider past records than when they were predicting for themselves.
accurate - past records
> predict
-
others : more

better underestimates
of self-focus future (we may change >
-

on
Think
focus past (how he/she be like in the past >
gonna happen Soon
-

of others = on
Think
SELF-KNOWLEDGE

2) Impact Bias: People tend to overestimate how much they will react emotionally to future
events.
- “If negative event X were to happen next week, how sad will you be?” (Gilbert, Pinel,
Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998)
- After the negative event happened, actual sadness was measured.
- Result: Predicted sadness > actual sadness
 SELF-KNOWLEDGE
extreme
• Why does the Impact Bias happen? Predict-> Actural
--Immune Neglect: Defense mechanisms are unconscious processes. Most people are
unaware of their psyche’s ability to use defense mechanisms to protect the ego (i.e., our
psychological immune system) after negative events. > unconscious
-

reffective
-

X only
focus
let others- Focalism (Wilson et al., 2000): When people think ahead to how they will respond to
neg
event X, they focus too much on event X alone, and neglect other things that could affect
their mood as well.
focus both X + rather than X
- Lam et al., 2005: After a defocusing intervention, people made less extreme predictions
and the impact bias disappeared.
x focalism > X
-

impact bias
 SELF-ESTEEM

• Self-esteem is one’s overall self-evaluation.

Conscious unconscious
• Explicit vs. Implicit self-esteem.
• Rosenberg (1965) self-esteem scale measures explicit self-esteem

-
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-

-
SELF-ESTEEM

• Is explicit self-esteem global or domain-specific?

1 -
x
- We have high self-esteem when we feel good about the domains important to our self-
esteem (such as looks or intelligence)
- In turn, when we have high self-esteem, we are more likely to value those domains (e.g.,
looks, abilities, etc.)
SELF-ESTEEM

• There is a general tendency, at least among westerners (I’ll say more about this in the
culture lecture), to maintain or enhance self-esteem.
• i.e., self-esteem motivation maintain/enhance the self-esteem
-
• This motivation can activate many kinds of self-serving biases:
- Self-serving attributions
- Overestimation of one’s ability/contributions ~

- False Consensus and Uniqueness ~

SELF-SERVING BIASES

• Self-serving attributions
• We attribute success to our own dispositions and failure to external forces.
• Johnson, Feigenbaum, & Weiby (1964)
- Participants: 80 teachers
- Teachers were asked to teach a student math skills.
-

- Teachers were told the student either did well or did poorly on a test.
- -

⑤
- Teachers were more likely to make take credit when told the student did well.
- Teachers were more likely to blame the student’s limited ability when told the student did
poorly.
SELF-SERVING BIASES
~

• Overestimation of one’s ability -

-Better-than-average effect (Alicke, 1985)
-On average, people rated themselves as better than
average
-This is, of course, mathematically impossible in reality
-Obviously some people overrated themselves on
desirable traits and underrated themselves on
undesirable traits.
SELF-SERVING BIASES

• Overestimation of one’s contribution

- Savitsky et al., 2005
- Participants had to complete a group task.
-

- Each group member then estimated the percentage they had contributed to the task.
- The sum of group members' estimates often exceeded the logically allowable 100%.
SELF-SERVING BIASES

• False Consensus / Uniqueness (substance abuse

F
- False Consensus: overestimating how many people hold the same opinion as you. Or how
common an undesirable behavior of yours is. 1X doest exsist)
#]HE
- False Uniqueness: underestimating how common one’s ability or one’s desirable behavior
is. ( special > ↑ Self-esteem
-

Eg., Suls et al. 1988

- Participants: People who regularly wear seat belts in cars (desirable behavior) and who
smoke weed (undesirable behavior).
- They estimated the percentage of people in the general population who would wear seat
belt and smoke weed, respectively.
- For the desirable behavior (seat belt), they underestimated the percentage. For the
 undesirable behavior (smoke weed), they overestimated.

SELF-ESTEEM

• Implicit self-esteem = Your unconscious feelings about yourself

• Can’t be measured with a questionnaire
↓
• Measured by a computer-based task: Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald &
Farnham, 2000)
- Participants are presented with Pleasant (e.g., joy) /Unpleasant (e.g., vomit) words
- They must react as quickly as possible to indicate whether each word is associated with
“me” or “not me”
- High implicit self-esteem = pair pleasant words with “me” and unpleasant words with “not
OISE
me” very quickly.
SELF-ESTEEM diverse ESE
ISE
↓
• Implicit self-esteem does not always agree with explicit self- ↓I
esteem. (Jordan et al. 2003)
• One particular kind of people, those with high explicit SE ↑Z
and low implicit SE, is very interesting: They tend to be
narcissists. ↑2
N]
• Narcissism (a maladaptive personality trait):
-Very inflated sense of self.
-Deep seated insecurity.
-Very defensive; sensitive to criticism
-Often seen in Psychopaths
SELF-EFFICACY

• Vs. Self-esteem, what’s the difference?

• Self-efficacy: AO
sense that one is competent and effective; a sense of belief that you can
successfully complete a task.
• It’s possible to have one but not the other.
• E.g, a low-ranking soldier might have low self-esteem but high self-efficacy
• Research has shown that increased self-efficacy can enhance task performance.
• Therefore some support for the saying “if you think you can, you can”.
• But the relationship between self-efficacy and task performance might be moderated by
other factors.
 LOCUS OF CONTROL (LOC)

• The extent to which people perceive outcomes as internally controllable by their own
efforts or as externally controlled by chance.
• An individual difference variable; but also can be manipulated (for specific task).
effort
own
by chance
LOCUS OF CONTROL (LOC)

S
• Internal LoC tend to be more adaptive than external LoC
• People with internal LoC do better on a number of psychological outcomes (e.g., do better
in schools, make more money) than those with external LoC.
• Why? Because people with internal LOC are more likely to persist and persevere in the
face of difficulty.
SELF-EFFICACY X LOCUS OF CONTROL

• Litt (1988) Task

:
g * X :PLy
*
-

Self-efficacy -
Locus of Control

Result : SE TLOL =>↑

① Q

↑ SE NIOC = -Ye

② ↓ SE ↑ Loc => ↓ 3

↓ SE NLOC =
③
ASSIGNED READINGS

• Textbook page 35-42 (top part); 47 – 50 (top part); 52-69.