Personal Development

• Self-schemas


  How you define yourself
• Self-schemas


  • Affect how you perceive, remember, and evaluate yourself and others
• Possible self


  Who you might become
• Possible self


  • Include the self we dream of becoming someday
• Social comparisons


  Comparing yourself to others and seeing how you differ
• Self-concept is also determined by how others think of us
• Culture


  Also plays a role in defining one's identity
• Self-esteem


  Overall sense of self-worth that we use to evaluate traits or abilities
• Social rejection


  Motivates us to meet other's expectations, therefore maintaining or increasing our self-esteem
• Narcissism


  Inflated sense of self
• Self-efficacy


  How competent and effective we feel when doing a task
• Locus of control


  The extent to which people perceive control
• Internal locus of control


  Refers to the belief that you are in control of your own destiny
• External locus of control


  Refers to the feeling that outside forces determine your fate
• Learned helplessness


  Occurs when multiple attempts to improve a situation have no effect and there is a subsequent sense of resignation
• Self-determination


  Is developed when you are successfully able to practice personal control and improve your situation
• Self-serving Bias


  Tendency to see yourself in a favorable light
• self-serving attribution


  Taking credit for our success and attribute failure to external factors
• Unrealistic optimism


  Lead us to believe we are Immune to misfortune
• Defensive pessimism


  Anticipating problems and lowering expectations to prepare for the worst
• Self-presentation


  Refers to our desire to present a favorable image to other people and ourselves
• Self-handicapping


  You protect your self-esteem with behavior that will conveniently excuse failure
• Priming


  A phenomenon in which exposure to one stimulus influences how a person responds to a submitted sequent, related stimulus
• Priming


  • It can unconsciously affect how people think as well as how they would act
• Belief perseverance


  Refers to the tendency to maintain held beliefs even when the evidence supporting such beliefs is fully invalidated
• Ziad K. Abdelnour: '"Don't promise when you're happy, Don't reply when you're angry, And don't decide when you're sad."'
• Dispositional attribution


  We attribute people's behavior to internal cause
• Situational attribution


  we attribute people's behavior to External causes
• Spontaneous trait inference


  Traits are easily inferred from people's actions
• Fundamental attribution error or Correspondence bias


  The tendency to write off situations in favor of dispositions
• Harold Kelley's Theory of Attributions


  Consistency, Distinctiveness, Consensus
• Three dimensions of Attributions

  • Stability
  • Locus
  • Control
• Prejudice


  Is a preconceived negative attitude towards a group and its individuals members
• Stereotypes


  Are beliefs about another group that may be accurate, inaccurate, or overgeneralized
• Discrimination


  Unjustified, negative behavior towards a group or its members, and often rooted in prejudicial behavior
• Racism and sexism


  Are institutional discriminatory behavior, but there may be instances that they aren't intentionally prejudices
• Just-world phenomenon


  The tendency to believe that the world is just and that people get what they deserve
• Forms of Prejudice

  • Race
  • Religion
  • Obesity
  • Sexual orientation
  • Gender identity
  • Age
  • Immigrant status
• Aggression


  Is physical or verbal behavior that is intended to cause harm
• Hostile aggression


  Springs from anger with the goal to injure