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| Chapter 17: What You Know About You: The Self |
- According to William James, the self includes the me, the object of self-knowledge, and the I, the mysterious entity that does the knowing. Psychology has much more to say about the me than the I.
- Some cross-cultural analyses have concluded that the idea of the "self" is a Western cultural artifact; other research has compared the ways the self is conceptualized in different cultures, including issues of self-regard and self-determination.
- In terms of the me, the self comprises everything we know, or think we know, about what we are like, including both declarative and procedural self-knowledge.
- The declarative self includes self-esteem, which is one's opinion of one's own worth. Self-esteem can cause problems when it is too low or too high because, according to Leary's sociometer theory, it serves as a useful gauge of one's social standing.
- Psychologists have theorized that the wide range of knowledge one has about one's psychological attributes is located in a cognitive structure called the self-schema. The self-schema can be assessed via S data (e.g., questionnaires, including traditional personality questionnaires such as the CPI) or B data (e.g., reaction time studies).
- Case studies of brain-damaged individuals suggest that one's sense of self and personality can remain intact even when all the specific memories that created it are lost.
- A good way to remember something is to consider what it has to do with one's self; this effect on memory is called the self-reference effect.
- Your view of your own capabilities—your self-efficacy—influences what you will attempt to do.
- Discrepancies between one's real self and ideal self can lead to depression, whereas discrepancies between one's real self and ought self can lead to anxiety.
- The Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) described in Chapter 6 can be used to explain the basis of self-knowledge, especially at the relevance, detection, and utilization stages.
- Aspects of the procedural self are not typically available to conscious awareness, but they can still drive behavior by means of deeply ingrained styles of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
- One theory about the procedural self is the notion of relational selves, the habitual ways one interacts with different kinds of people.
- Implicit selves—notions of what we are like that affect our behavior but that we may not be consciously aware of—can be measured through an instrument called the Implicit Associations Test (IAT).
- Even self-consciousness may sometimes operate unconsciously, and some highly self-conscious people are especially likely to be affected by information that is potentially relevant to the self without realizing the effect. Implicit shyness affects different behaviors than the shyness we are consciously aware of.
- The procedural self—or selves—can probably only be changed slowly through practice and feedback, like other procedural knowledge.
- While many theorists suggest that individuals have changing or even multiple selves, a constant sense of self is a hallmark of psychological health, and the social learning theorist Albert Bandura has pointed out that the idea of multiple selves raises philosophical difficulties.
- The inner observer that William James called the I appears to be the part of the self that remains constant across situations and throughout life.
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