Psyc 3315 - Ch.2

• Spotlight effect - Belief that others are paying more attention to one's appearance and behavior than they really are
• Illusion of transparency - Illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others
• We tend to see ourselves at center stage

  True or False?

  True
• Social relationships help define our self

  True or False?

  True
• Schema - Mental templates by which we organize our worlds
• Self-schema - Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information
• Possible selves - Images of what we dream of or dread becoming in the future
• Self-concept - person’s answers to the question, “Who am I?”
• self-concept helps organize our thinking and guide our social behavior
• What determines self concept?

  Genetic influences, social experience, surrounding culture, successes and failures, etc
• Social relationship

  • how we think is linked to the person we’re with at the moment
• Looking-Glass Self - how we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves
• Self-esteem - a psychological gauge by which we monitor and react to how others appraise us
• Social Comparisons - Evaluating one’s abilities and opinions by comparing oneself with others
• The Roles we Play

  • Others around us help to define the standard by which we define ourselves
  • Much of life revolves around social comparisons
  • Can also diminish our satisfaction
• Social surroundings affects our self-awareness

  ▪ only member of our race, gender, or nationality in a group

  
  

  Self-interest clouds our social judgment

  ▪ attribute more responsibility to others than to ourselves.

  
  

  Self-concern motivates our social behavior

  ▪ agonize about our appearance for a positive impression

  
  

  Social relationships help define our self

  ▪ how we think is linked to the person we’re with at the moment
• SUCCESS AND FAILURE

  • Self-concept is fed also by daily experiences
  • Success feeds self-esteem
  • undertake challenging yet realistic tasks and to succeed is to feel more competent
  • To do one’s best and achieve is to feel more confident and empowered
• What matters for our self-concept is not how to others actually see us but the way we imagine they see us

  
  

  Who said this?

  George Herbert Mead
• Self-esteem - a psychological gauge by which we monitor and react to how others appraise us
• self-concept – what we know and believe about ourselves
• medial prefrontal cortex – neuron path located in a cleft just behind our eyes, helps stitch together our sense of self
• Which part of the brain is important ofr our sense of self

  Right or Left hemisphere?

  Right hemisphere
• Self-knowledge - Sometimes we think we know, but our inside information is wrong
• Predicting our behavior

  • If we want to predict our behavior like daily routine, don’t ask yourself ask somebody you know
• Planning Fallacy – it Is the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task
• Affective forecasting - reveals that we have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and duration of their emotions
• Impact bias – overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events
• Dual attitude system – differing implicit(automatic) and explicit (conscious) attitudes toward the same object
• The limits of our self-knowledge have two implications:

  • Self-reports are often untrustworthy - Errors in self-understanding limit the scientific usefulness of subjective personal reports

  
  

  • Personal testimonies are powerfully persuasive, but they may be wrong even if people report their experiences with complete honest
• Self-esteem – a person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth; sum of all our self-views across all domain
• terror management theory – proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of their morality
• Self-compassion – leaving behind comparisons and instead treating oneself with kindness
• High self-esteem people usually react to self-esteem threat by blaming other people or trying harder next time because it preserves their positive feeling for themselves
• • Low self-esteem people are likely to blame themselves and give up
  • Self-esteem gauge alert us to threatened social rejection motivating us to greater sensitivity to others expectation
  • Social rejection lowers self-esteem and makes people eager for approval
• terror management theory – proposes that people exhibit self-protective emotional and cognitive responses when confronted with reminders of mortality
• Self-compassion – leaving behind comparisons and instead treating oneself with kindness
• Low on self-esteem – vulnerable to anxiety, loneliness, and eating disorders. When they are feeling bad or threatened, they take a negative view of thing
• Longitudinal study – research on the same people over a period of time or as they grow older
• High self-esteem becomes problematic when it branches over to narcissism or inflated sense of self

  • They say today, young people aren't focused on empathy because we are too focused on our paths to success
• Self-efficacy - Our competence and efficiency in doing a task - Belief that you can do something