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Spotlights and Illusions
 Spotlights
 Spotlight effect
 Belief that others are paying more attention to one’s appearance and behavior than they really are
 Illusions
 Illusion of transparency
 Illusion that our concealed emotions leak out and can be easily read by others
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Research Close-Up: On Being
Nervous about Looking Nervous
 Examples of interplay between our sense of self and our social world
 Social surroundings affect our self-awareness
 Self-interest colors our social judgment
 Self-concern motivates our social behavior
 Social relationships help define our self
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Self-Concept: Who Am I?
 A person’s answers to the question, “Who am I?”
 Take time to answer this question…
 Are your answers more relational (collectivist) or about self
(individualist)?
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At the Center of Our Worlds: Our
Sense of Self
 Schema
 Mental templates by which we organize our worlds
 Self-schema
 Beliefs about self that organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information
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Development of the Social Self
 What Determines Our Self-Concept?
 Roles we play
 Social identities we form
 Comparisons we make with others
 How other people judge us
 Surrounding culture
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Development of the Social Self
 The Roles We Play
 New roles begin as playacting then become reality
 Social Comparisons
 We compare ourselves with others and consider how we differ
 We tend to compare upward
 Can diminish satisfaction
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Development of the Social Self
 Success and Failure
 Our daily experiences cause us to have empowerment or low self-esteem
 Other People’s Judgments
 Looking-glass self
 How we think others perceive us as a mirror for perceiving ourselves
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Self and Culture
 Individualism
 Concept of giving priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defining one’s identity in terms of personal attributes rather than group identifications


Independent self
Western cultures
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Self and Culture
 Collectivism
 Giving priority to the goals of one’s group and defining one’s identity accordingly


Interdependent self
Asian, African, and Central and South American cultures
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Self and Culture
 Culture and Cognition
 Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought (2003)
 Contends that collectivism results in different ways of thinking
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
Asians tend to think more in relationships than Americans
Americans see choices as expressions of themselves.
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Culture and Self-Esteem
 Culture and Self-Esteem
 In collectivist cultures
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Self-concept is context-specific rather than stable
Conflict takes place between groups
 In individualistic cultures
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Self-esteem is more personal and less relational
Conflict takes place between individuals


Crime
Divorce
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Self-Knowledge
 Predicting Our Behavior
 Planning fallacy
 Tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task
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Self-Knowledge
 Predicting Our Feelings
 Studies of “affective forecasting” reveal people have the greatest difficulty predicting the intensity and the duration of their future emotions
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Impact bias
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Overestimating the enduring impact of emotion-causing events
Immune neglect

Tendency to neglect the speed and strength of the
“psychological immune system” which enables emotional recovery and resilience after bad things happen
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Self-Knowledge
 The Wisdom and Illusions of Self-Analysis
 Dual attitude
 Automatic implicit attitudes regarding someone or something often differ from our consciously controlled, explicit attitudes
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What is the Nature and Motivating
Power of Self-Esteem
 Our overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth
 Specific self-perceptions have some influence
 Feedback is best when it is true and specific
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Self-Esteem Motivation
 Self-esteem maintenance
 Self-esteem threats occur among friends whose successes can be more threatening than that of strangers
 Terror Management Theory states humans must find ways to manage their fear of death.
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The Trade-off of Low vs High Self
Esteem
 Narcissism: Self-Esteem’s Conceited Sister
 Delroy and Williams (2002)
 “The Dark Triad” of negative traits

Narcissism
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Self-Efficacy
 How competent we feel on a task
 Leads us to set challenging goals and to persist
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 Tendency to perceive oneself favorably
 Explaining positive and negative events
 Self-serving attributions

Tendency to attribute positive outcomes to oneself and negative outcomes to other factors

Contribute to marital discord, worker dissatisfaction, and bargaining impasses
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Self-Serving Bias
 Can We All Be Better than Average?
 Most people see themselves as better than the average person on the following dimensions
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
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Subjective
Socially desirable
Common dimensions
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Self-Serving Bias
Areas in which we believe we are above average
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Ethics
Professional competence
Virtues
Intelligence
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Parental support
Health
Attractiveness
Driving
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Self-Serving Bias
 Unrealistic Optimism
 Is on the rise
 Illusory optimism increases our vulnerability
 Defensive Pessimism
 Adaptive value of anticipating problems and harnessing one’s anxiety to motivate effective action
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Self-Serving Bias
 False Consensus Effect
 Tendency to overestimate the commonality of one’s opinions and one’s undesirable or unsuccessful behaviors
 False Uniqueness Effect
 Tendency to underestimate the commonality of one’s abilities and one’s desirable or successful behaviors
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Self-Serving Bias
 Explaining Self-Serving Bias
 Self-serving bias is a by-product of how we process and remember information about ourselves
 Self-Serving Bias may be
 Adaptive
 Protects people from depression
 Maladaptive
 Group-serving bias
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How Do People Manage Their Self-
Presentation
 Wanting to present a desired image both to an external audience (other people) and to an internal audience
(ourselves)
 Self-Handicapping
 Protecting one’s self-image with behaviors that create a handy excuse for later failure
 Impression Management
 Tendency to act like social chameleons
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What Does it Mean to Have Self-
Control
 People exert self-control
 Effortful self-control
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