Lectures 1 and 2 | Self and Self-Esteem

• Self-Awareness:

  • Our sense of self begins when we recognize we are a being
  • As we grow, we start thinking of our sense of self and how others view us
  • It's how we think, feel, and how we want others to think and feel about ourselves
  • These thoughts and feelings predict and guide behaviors
• Self-psychology is phenomenological

  • Our behavior depends on subjective perceptions based on what we're experiencing
  • Example: Children may mistakenly confuse the length of a candy cane and celery stick and say one is longer. This is purely based on subjective value
• "I":

  • Aspect of ourselves we experience
  • Your sense of self is separate from others
  • Reveals what we can and can't control
  • Provides unity of experience over time
• "Me":

  • Ideas of what we are like
  • Affects our information processing, behavior, motivation factors, and images of our future selves
  • Example: Looking in the mirror and noticing what we like about ourselves
• Introspectionism:

  • Started in the early 1900s by Willhelm Wundt
  • All about being in touch with conscious experiences and how we come up with different senses
  • More of a philosophical movement
• Behaviorist Movement:

  • Started between 1915-1955 by John Watson
  • All about objectivity; pushed more toward being a science than a philosophy
  • Example: The Skinner Box Theory was part of the behaviorist movement. A pigeon was fed every time it engaged in a behavior until it eventually learned to push a lever
• Assumptions of the Behaviorist Movement:

  • Positivism: Concrete, observable measurements. Something we know for a fact
  • Mechanism: Stimulus-respond bonds lead to our behavior
  • Experiments: Measure the self through questionnaires, behaviors linked to emotions, physiology, etc.
  • Example: One study noticed that people who experienced rejection from an individual would move their chairs farther away from the person. This helped measure withdrawal behaviorals
• Decline of Behaviorism and Return to Self:

  • Led more by sociologists (Rogers, Maslow, Erikson)
  • All about how human behavior is orientated toward future behaviors
  • 20th-21st Century: Interest in self-related topics and was considered revolutionary for the time
• Meaning of the "I":

  • Aristotle believed the "I" referred to the essence of a person
  • John Locke believed "I" stands for identity and memory
  • David Hume believed identity is an illusion
  • William James agreed with Locke that memory is part of our identity, but also our feelings impact our identity too
• Who are you? How do we describe ourselves?

  • Material Self: Bodily Self and Extended Self
  • Social Self: Social Roles
  • Spiritual Self: Inner Self
  • Self-Feelings: William James focused on self-feelings - our emotions with our self as a reference point
• Individualism:

  • Belief in which we find out who we are and chase after our passions
  • The U.S. focuses heavily on this belief
  • Messages like "don't limit yourself" and "follow your dreams"
• Jean Twenge:

  • Noticed how self-focused phrases increased over time
  • Discovered that the new generation was more confident but there were also higher rates of narcissistic tendencies and lower depression