Transcript of Audio Lecture
Lesson three, module
one. Self-knowledge.
Let’s begin by moving to
slide number two. In order to discuss self-knowledge, you must first
understand the idea of self-concept. Self-concept is defined as all of
an individual’s knowledge about his or her personal qualities. You
might think of your self-concept as the answer to the question who are
you or how would you describe yourself. The I am exercise. What I’d
like for you to do is to write down I am 10 times on a sheet of paper
and then finish the sentence for each of those 10. Pause the audio
while you do this. Now that you have your 10 reasons listed, you’re
likely to find a couple of different things. One, if you’re male,
you’re likely to describe yourself in terms of individual
characteristics. I am intelligent, I am a student, I am an engineering
major and so on. If you’re female, you’re more likely to describe
yourself with regard to group membership or your family. I am a mother,
I am a daughter, I am a sister, and so on. You might list your sorority
membership and other group memberships. This is very typical for gender
differences and how we perceive ourselves. Men perceive themselves as
related to only themselves, whereas females perceive themselves as
related to groups and other social entities.
Let’s move on to slide
three. There are three functions of the self. One is organizational,
the second is emotional and the third is executive. The
organizational function of the self allows us to think of information as
applying to ourselves, that is, the person that is us, or applying to
others or organizations that are not us. It provides some sense of
organization for things that happen to me versus things that have
happened to others. The emotional functions of self allows us to
evaluate ourselves relative to others, relative to ourselves in the past
and relative to our ideal self in order to achieve a positive emotional
state. And finally the executive function of the self. This is things
like self-efficacy, that is the idea that we believe that we ourselves
can do something, so if you believe that you will do well in this
course, that is the executive function of the self and it is based on your
perceptions of how you’ve done in other courses in the past that might
have to do with psychology, other web courses or other courses you may
have taken from me.
Let’s move on to slide
four. Self-awareness. The level of self-awareness develops as we
become adults, we’re not born with self-awareness. The rouge test is a
great example of this. If you take an infant and you put rouge on their
nose, and you show them themselves in the mirror, before we have
self-awareness, they will point to the nose in the mirror, look at that
baby, the one that is not them, they don’t have awareness of self, it
has rouge on it’s nose. However, as a child develops self-awareness,
they will touch their own nose, recognizing themselves in the mirror.
Self-awareness can be both positive and negative. If we think about
religion and addiction and leisure, most of the time it is to decrease
our self-awareness. Being very self-aware can cause anxiety and
self-consciousness, however, being not at all self-aware can make us
less socially skilled.
Let’s move on to slide
five. Self-awareness allows us to develop causal theories. We learn
why we feel the way we do. For example if a child falls down and
they’re not really aware, they don’t have a lot of self-awareness, they
will look to others to determine how to respond. If they look at a
parent who looks panicked if a child has fallen, the child will begin to
cry. However, if the parent appears to be laughing at the child, the
child will also laugh. That is how we learn to feel or learn causal
theories about why we feel the way we do.
Let’s move on to slide
six. Here you see a graph that discusses self-complexity.
You can think
of self-complexity as what has typically been called being a
well-rounded individual. People who are high in self-complexity have
higher self-esteem and have a variety of interests or selves, so if you’re
involved in a lot of activities or define yourself in a variety of ways,
then you would have higher self-complexity. If you see the graph, when
there’s a success experience, individuals with low self-complexity have
a much greater shift in mood, whereas when there’s a failure experience
again, their mood shifts downward further than individuals with high
self-complexity. In order to better understand this, let me give you an
example. An Olympic swimmer has spent their entire life learning to
swim and developing their swimming skills. If this person finds
themselves unable to swim due to perhaps a car accident that has
paralyzed them, they will be devastated. Swimming was their life and
now the one thing that they used to define themselves has been removed.
You will see that their self-esteem will plummet and they will be in a
very negative mood. However, if you take someone who was an Olympic
swimmer but also had a variety of other interests, perhaps was also
going to college or pursuing a movie career or being a parent, a variety
of other things about which they felt valued, then you will see that
they will not be as affected by that devastating car accident.
Let’s move on to slide
seven. Just one me. It’s hard for us to think of ourselves as
multifaceted. But we have the idea that we must be just one person. We
use selective memory to think about this and we make attributions to
circumstances rather than ourselves and we typically define ourselves
with a few key traits. For example if you try to think of yourself as
both a student and a sexual partner and a child and a daughter and a
parent and a granddaughter all at once, it might be very confusing and
disturbing in some cases. So we like to use selective memory to only
recall things about ourselves that are relevant to the task at hand.
Let’s move on to slide
eight. Self-esteem. Pop psychology has been discussing self-esteem for
quite some time and we think we have a general idea of what it means.
But the research definition of it is evaluation of the self-concept.
That is, given everything you know about yourself, how do you feel about
that. Measures of self-esteem often ask you if you’re satisfied with
yourself. Do you believe that you’re a person of worth, and what you
find is that most people feel they are better than average. That’s
because we use self-enhancing bias to maintain our self-esteem. Clearly
no more than half of the people can be better than average. Yet you
have unrealistic optimism, everyone assumes that they are, in fact,
better than average.
Let’s move on to slide
nine. So how do we express ourselves. First we can choose behaviors
that reflect our self-concept and we choose partners that endorse our
self-concept. We also use things or tactics like ingratiation, to make
people believe that we’re likable. Self-promotion to have others
believe that we’re competent. If we go too far with these, people might
feel that we’re boastful, self-centered, or egomaniacs. The important
thing about choosing partners that endorse your self-concept, this means
that even people who have very low self-esteem and a negative
self-concept will choose someone that endorses that belief. In fact if
you have a low self-esteem partner and you try to increase their
self-esteem, they may feel like you do not know the real them and they
will thus end the relationship to find someone who will reinforce or
endorse their self-concept, even though it’s very negative.
Let’s move on to slide ten.
Self-monitoring. This is the extent to which you can fit into a
situation. The extent to which you are sensitive to the demands of
a social situation. If you’re low in self-monitoring, you’re very
consistent across situations. These are people who dress the same
regardless of where they’re going, wearing jeans to a high class
restaurant or shorts to dinner on a cruise ship. This would be low
self-monitoring. Also if you look at people who may do things that are
not socially desirable when in a car because they don’t care; what you
see is what you get. People who are high in self-monitoring. That is, they
can fit into any situation, blending in naturally to almost any
setting. Which one is better? For most people somewhere in the middle
is best, leaning toward high. People are very low in self-monitoring
often lack friends because of the lack of social skills.
Let’s move on to slide eleven.
We also have to defend ourselves, so once we’ve developed the
self-esteem and self-conflict, that's relatively positive, we’re probably
going to still encounter threats; failures, people who point out
inconsistencies in our identity, and stressors. So we defend the
self by using control. This is a very important motivator.
We try to control things in our lives that allow us to choose behaviors
that illustrate ourselves as we would like to be. Learned helplessness. This is when
the threat has overwhelmed us. We feel like it doesn’t matter what we
do, we will always be seen in this light and finally self-handicapping.
We will tell people that we’re worse at something than we really are so
that we don’t raise our expectations and have something to live up to,
or rather set the expectations low and always exceed them. Mortality
selling. Greenberg and others in 1990 had Christian students
participate in an experiment. They either made their mortality very
salient,
that is emphasizing that one is going to die and it is unavoidable or no
mortality salience. The students were then asked to evaluate a Christian or a
Jewish stranger. The Christian student was evaluated more positively
only when mortality was made salient.
Let’s move to slide
thirteen and look at the graph. Here you see there’s a two way
interaction. That is, in the control group where mortality was not
salient, there is no difference between needs, thus we have the
sub-script C. However, when mortality was salient, the Jewish stranger
was evaluated poorly while the Christian student was evaluated more
positively.
Let’s move to slide
fourteen. So how do we cope with stress? Even stress that is mortality
salient, that is someone is making us very aware that we’re going to
die. One we can escape threats, leave the situation, stop listening to
that person. We can ignore the threat, trying to escape self-awareness.
There are healthy ways to do this and less healthy ways to do this.
Some people choose to exercise or to go play a sport; others may choose
to drink or do other things that decrease self-awareness. Going to the
movies is another option. We can also downplay those threats,
accentuate the positive. These would be people who would say sure I’m
going die, but everyone’s going to die and when I do, I’m going to go to
a more positive place. We can also work through the threats. This is
very healthy, it’s an emotional expression of the threat, so when you
become concerned, for example, after a disaster, many people have
salient mortality, that is they’ve been shown how easy it would be that
they could die. How fragile they are as humans, Pennebaker did a
series of studies in which he had people write about these threats.
There were immediate costs, that is during the few weeks when these
students were writing, they were more depressed. However, there were
long term rewards. They had fewer hospital visits and higher immune
system functioning in the months that followed their writing about the
traumatic events.
Let’s move to slide
fifteen. We discussed emotion-focused coping now let’s discuss problem-focused
coping. One, we can
decide to take on a biased evaluation, so if we fail a test, we say the
test was a bad one. We can make excuses, "It’s not my fault, the
professor is overly harsh." We can self-handicap, that is sabotage our
own performance by perhaps going out or staying out late the night
before a test and not studying. Or we can take control of the problem.
In nursing homes where elderly people have a high degree of mortality
salience because their friends are dying, they found that having a plant
in the nursing home gave the people a sense of control over something
else. The sense of control allowed them to cope with the problem of
dying much better, and in fact decrease the death rate among those who
own plants.
Let’s move on to slide
sixteen. Self-efficacy. This is relevant to failures, that is if you
fail something you may have a decrease in your self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is the extent to which you believe you can or cannot do
something. Ability is uncontrollable, that is if you feel that you don’t
have the ability to do something, then there it is. It’s like having no
talent. If you can’t do it, you just can’t do it. Whereas if you make
an effort attribution for your self-efficacy, that is if I try it, I can
do it, that’s more controllable and will allow you to cope better with
whatever the situation may be.
This concludes lesson
three, module one. Thank you.
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