Psychology Lesson : Self ?

S'up all...

This post is based on my lesson in social psychology subject in University Malaya. The original title of the lesson is "The Self". Let's get started.

I bet that all of you already familiar with word "Self". We usually used it in some words like myself, self confidence, selfie, etc. But have you ever think about what is the meaning of Self? Is it the same with name? or is it something inside us? Before I explained it all, i want you to think about something. Please take a time to think about how has yourself changed since you were a child and how has it remained the same? compare yourself in the present to yourself in the past.

After you think about it, lets start about the explanation. Self is the totality of our impressions, thoughts, and feelings, such that have conscious, continuous sense of being in this world. In other words, Self is all things that create us as an individual being in this world. 

There are 3 parts of the self :

• Physical Self : Ones' psychological sense of one's physical being, ex. height, weight, sex, race, and physical skills
• Social Self : The composite of the social roles one plays in life, ex. student, worker, husband, mom, citizen, etc.
• Personal Self : One's private, continuous sense of being oneself in the world, ex. values, ethics, name, self-concept, self-esteem, etc.

As we can see from the points above, name is classified as personal self, because an individual name is not a thing that born with, but it is determined by human being. Names can influence many things such as physical attractiveness. research has found that women with names such as Jennifer, Kathy, and Christine are rated significantly more attractive than Ethel, Harriet, and Gertrude.

Next question that need to be answered is who makes the self? is it the individual itself? or society? from the lesson I got, self actually created from both inner biological process and social relation. For example, someone who growing up in deserted island, this person won't have a name, reputation, values, neither role in a family. but, even without social relation, some sense of self would exist like their physical self and sense of wanting to survive. This theory can be divided into 2 points of view, which are independent view of self and interdependent view of self. you can get the point from these figure below.

Other question would be what is the purpose of the self? There are many theories and arguments about what exactly the purpose of self and why is it needed. but from all the arguments and theory I agree with the purpose of self for social needs. It means that the main reasons are to gain social acceptance and play social roles. As we already know that human is a social culture, which means a social achievement is one of the most important thing that should be achieved in one's life.

Now we all know about the basic knowledge of self. I will continue this post with a deeper explanation about self, especially about personal self.

1. Self-Awareness : attention directed to the self, there are 2 main kinds of self-awareness :

• Private self-awareness, this kind of awareness have a situation where we are attending to our inner states such as emotion, thoughts, or desire

• Public self-awareness, as the name, this kind of awareness have a situation where we are attending to how we are perceived by others such as what others might think about us

Self-awareness have a close relation with behavior. Self-awareness theory that proposed by Duval and Wicklund (1972), suggests that some situations, such as looking in a mirror or hear a name, lead to self-awareness. Self-aware people feel badly when they notices any discrepancies between who they are and some standard. They can either "shape up" by matching the behavior to the standard or "ship out" by trying to escape the self-aware state. by this theory it means that if we can manipulate self-awareness of an individual, we can surely manipulate their behavior. In the theory it says that people can escape the self-aware state, what does it mean? it means that people can forget about themselves by doing something. The example is the condition when  people do something wrong, really really wrong, they try to avoid self-awareness, usually with alcohol or cigarette. Self-awareness may exist because it is essential for self-regulation, which allows individuals to controls and change themselves.

2. Self-Knowledge

I have a way to understand the meaning of self-knowledge easier. I think you all are familiar with command "Tell me about yourself". From this command, we will answer what we know about ourselves and all of that knowledge that we know about ourselves called self-knowledge. There are 3 perspectives about how we get the information to describe ourselves.

• Looking Outside : The Looking-Glass Self, this perspective has an idea that people learn about themselves by imagining how they appear to others. even though it is heard like the idea of this perspective come from social (others) thought about us, but its not. Actually this perspective is based on our own thinking but others thought about us as the object to mediate our self-knowledge. there are 3 main components in this perspective, which are our image of how others see us, our image of how others will judge us, and our emotional response to that potential judgement (pride/shame)
• Looking Inside : Introspection, the idea of this perspective is doing an introspection inward ourselves to get the self-knowledge. Introspection is the process by which a person examines the content his or her mind and mental states. People can know things about themselves others can't know, but there are limits, such as People do seem to know what they think and feel, but their explanations for why are somewhat less reliable or if a trait is hard to observe, a person maybe the best judge of this in themselves; however, if the trait has strong good-bad dimension, others may be better judges of that trait.
• Looking at Others : Social Comparison, this perspective has an idea to compare ourselves with others to know more about ourselves, or called social comparison. there are 2 types of social comparison that usually done by people which are upward social comparison and downward social comparison. upward social comparison is comparing ourselves to people better than us, which can inspire us to want to do better. Otherwise, downward social comparison is comparing  ourselves to people worse off than us, which make us feel good.

After all that, why people seek self knowledge? I will give you an example to open your mind about it. Just pretend the situation that you are not really good at sports. so, what will self-knowledge do for that information? there are 3 main things done by seeking self-knowledge in this situation. first, you want to get more information about your sports ability, regardless of what that information might say. second, you want to learn that you do have some talent at sports after all. last, make you prefer to gain further evidence that you are bad at sport because that is what you already think. From the main 3 reasons in this case, we can divided why people seek self-knowledge into 3 motives :

• Appraisal motive : the simple desire to learn the truth about oneself, whatever it is
• Self-enhancement motive : the desire to learn favorable or flattering things about the self
• Consistency motive : a desire to get feedback that confirms what the person already believes about himself or herself  

3. Self-Handicapping 

Unlike the previous 2, I think self-handicapping is less familiar word. Self-handicapping refers to putting obstacles in the way of one's performance, so that anticipated or possible failure can be blamed on the obstacle instead of on lack of ability. In simple word, scapegoat. Early success may create a situation where an individual, or a group of individuals, self-handicap so later failures could be blamed on the handicapping behavior (e.g. substance abuse) rather than on lack of talent or ability.additional credit can be gained if the individual does well despite the handicapping behavior.

4. Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to how favorably someone evaluates himself or herself to be. self-esteem is full of self-concept of an individual. The question is are self-concepts accurate or filled with illusion?. the answer is it's all filled with positive illusion. Positive illusion that mentioned in this post is that non-depressed people usually overestimate their good qualities, claiming they are better than the average, overestimate their control over events, and unrealistically optimistic. To maintain these positive illusions, people have a variety of self-deception strategies, such as self-serving bias. self-serving bias is a pattern in which people claim credit for successes but deny blame for failure. for example, a student who get a good score tends to think that it's the outcome of their ability and hard work, but if he/she get a bad score, he/she tends to find a scapegoat to blame like the exam question is too hard or the time is not enough to do all the questions.

The words low self-esteem does not seem to be the opposite of high self-esteem. Low self-esteem doesn't involve negative views but the absence of strong positive views of the self. people with low self-esteem are less confident, less consistent, more likely to look to avoid failure and rejection than to enhance themselves, more highs and lows with their emotion, and more vulnerable to mood swings.Otherwise, high self-esteem provides confidence that one can do the right thing (more willing to meet up new people, speak up for oneself, but also more likely to experiment with sex and drugs) and related to good feelings, even in the face of failure.

High self-esteem usually gives a positive feedback for the person. But, there are some negative things to high self-esteem. first, the person with high self-esteem tends to have Narcissism, which is excessive self-love and selfish orientation. second, there is a possibility that the person with high self-esteem will become bully. And last, person with high self-esteem tends to persist longer than those with low self-esteem, usually with good consequences.

5. Self-Presentation

Self-presentation is any behavior that seeks to convey some image of self or some information about the self to other people. Facebook provides an outlet for self-presentation.The importance of self-presentation is illustrated by   the fact that many behaviors are different if others are   present. Desire to maintain consistency is strongly influenced   by self-presentation motives.For example, researchers found that women were more likely   to wash their hands after using the restroom if there were   others there than if they were alone.

Another example is of patients at a mental hospital who   presented themselves differently depending on what they   believed the purpose was of an interview with the head   psychiatrist. 

That's all for the lesson about self. If this post or this blog is really useful to you, please share. Thank you for reading, and If you want to know more about me and my experience you can check out my previous posts or follow these two links :

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