self schemata experiments

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Front Psychol

Eighty phenomena about the self: representation, evaluation, regulation, and change

Paul thagard.

1 Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Joanne V. Wood

2 Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

We propose a new approach for examining self-related aspects and phenomena. The approach includes (1) a taxonomy and (2) an emphasis on multiple levels of mechanisms. The taxonomy categorizes approximately eighty self-related phenomena according to three primary functions involving the self: representing, effecting, and changing. The representing self encompasses the ways in which people depict themselves, either to themselves or to others (e.g., self-concepts, self-presentation). The effecting self concerns ways in which people facilitate or limit their own traits and behaviors (e.g., self-enhancement, self-regulation). The changing self is less time-limited than the effecting self; it concerns phenomena that involve lasting alterations in how people represent and control themselves (e.g., self-expansion, self-development). Each self-related phenomenon within these three categories may be examined at four levels of interacting mechanisms (social, individual, neural, and molecular). We illustrate our approach by focusing on seven self-related phenomena.

Introduction

Social and clinical psychologists frequently use the concept of the self in their discussions of a wide range of phenomena (e.g., Baumeister, 1999 ; Sedikides and Brewer, 2001 ; Leary and Tangney, 2003 ; Alicke et al., 2005 ; Sedikides and Spencer, 2007 ). However, there is no general, unified psychological theory of the self that can account for these phenomena. Thagard (2014) has proposed a view of the self as a multilevel system consisting of social, individual, neural, and molecular mechanisms. Like James (1890) and Mead (1967) , this view accommodates social, cognitive, and physiological aspects of the self, but provides far more detail about the nature of the relevant mechanisms. Our aim in the current paper is to show the applicability of the multilevel system account of the self to a large range of phenomena.

We will present a new taxonomy that categorizes approximately eighty self-related phenomena according to three primary aspects of the self: representing, effecting, and changing. The representing self encompasses the ways in which people depict themselves, either to themselves or to others (e.g., self-concepts, self-presentation). The effecting self concerns ways in which people facilitate or limit their own traits and behaviors (e.g., self-enhancement, self-regulation). The changing self is less time-limited than the effecting self; it concerns phenomena that involve lasting alterations in how people represent and control themselves (e.g., self-expansion, self-development). After presenting this taxonomy, we will describe how four levels of mechanisms—social, individual, neural, and molecular—are relevant to understanding these phenomena about the self. It would be premature to offer a full theory of the self, because not enough is known about the nature of these mechanisms and how they produce the relevant phenomena. But we hope our taxonomy and outline of relevant mechanisms provides a new and useful framework for theorizing about the self.

A Taxonomy of Self-Phenomena

There are more than eighty frequently discussed topics that we call the self-phenomena. More accurately, each of these topics should be understood as a group of phenomena. For example, there are many empirical findings about self-esteem that should count as distinctive phenomena to be explained, so there are potentially hundreds of findings for which a scientific theory of the self should be able to account.

Fortunately, the task of accounting for all of the self-phenomena, through causal explanations of the large number of empirical findings about them, can be managed by grouping the phenomena according to three primary aspects of the self: representing, effecting, and changing. All of the self-phenomena fall primarily under one of these functional groups, although a few are related to more than one group. Figure ​ Figure1 1 summarizes the proposed organization of self-phenomena that we now discuss in more detail.

Grouping of many self-phenomena into six main classes: self-representing (with three sub-categories), self-effecting (with two sub-categories), and self-changing. Source: Thagard (2014) .

The Representing Self

A representation is a structure or activity that stands for something, and many of the self-phenomena listed in Figure ​ Figure1 1 concern ways in which people represent themselves. The representing self can roughly be divided into three subgroups concerned with (1) depicting oneself to oneself, (2) depicting oneself to others, and (3) evaluating oneself according to one’s own standards.

The most general terms for depicting oneself to oneself are self-knowledge and self-understanding, which seem roughly equivalent. Self-concepts and self-schemata are both mental ingredients of self-knowledge, serving as cognitive structures to represent different aspects of the self. (Later we provide a more detailed account of self-concepts.) Self-interest consists in the collection of one’s personal goals, conscious or unconscious. Self-identity and self-image are also ways in which one represents oneself to oneself, although they may also contribute to how one represents oneself to others. Self-discovery and self-projection are processes that involve self-representation.

Several aspects of depicting oneself to oneself assume conscious experience, as in self-awareness and other phenomena listed in Figure ​ Figure1. 1 . Such experience is not purely cognitive, as it can also involve prominent affective components such as moods and emotions. Another set of phenomena that involve depicting oneself to oneself includes self-deception and self-delusion, in which the representation of self is false. The second division within the group of self-representing phenomena involves depicting and communicating oneself to others.

The third sub-group of self-phenomena in the representing category concerns the evaluation of the self, either as on ongoing process or as the product that results from the evaluation. Phenomena concerned with the process of evaluation include self-appraisal. There are many products that result from this process, including both general assessments such as self-confidence and particular emotional reactions such as self-pity.

The Effecting Self

The self does more than just represent itself; it also does things to itself, including facilitating its own functioning in desirable ways and limiting its functioning to prevent undesirable consequences. Self-phenomena that have a facilitating effect include self-actualization. Self-evaluation can also produce the self-knowledge that unconstrained actions may have undesirable consequences, as in excessive eating, drinking, drug use, and dangerous liaisons. Accordingly, there is a set of important phenomena concerning limits that people put on their own behavior, including self-control. All of these self-effecting phenomena involve people encouraging or discouraging their own behaviors, but they do not bring about fundamental, longer lasting changes in the self, which is the third and probably rarest aspect of the self.

The Changing Self

Over a lifetime, people change as the result of aging and experiences such as major life events. Some self-phenomena such as self-development concern processes of change. The changes can involve alterations in self-representing, when people come to apply different concepts to themselves, and also self-effecting, if people manage to change the degree to which they are capable of either facilitating desired behaviors or limiting undesired ones. Whereas short-term psychotherapy is aimed at dealing with small-scale problems in self-representing and self-efficacy, long-term psychotherapy may aim at larger alterations in the underlying nature of the self.

The proposed grouping of self-phenomena summarized in Figure ​ Figure1 1 is not meant to be exhaustive, as there are aspects of self that are described by words without the “self” prefix, such as agency, autonomy, personhood, and resilience, as well as more esoteric terms that do use the prefix. But the diagram serves to provide an idea of the large range of phenomena concerning the self. Our goal is to show the applicability of the multilevel account of the self to this range of phenomena, by selecting phenomena from each of the six main classes in Figure ​ Figure1. 1 . It would be tedious to apply the multilevel theory to more than eighty phenomena, so we take a representative sampling that includes: self-concepts, self-presentation, self-esteem, self-enhancement, self-regulation, self-expansion, and self-development. Each of these has aspects that need to be understood by considering the self as a system that operates at social, individual, neural, and molecular levels.

Figure ​ Figure2 2 displays the relevant levels and their interconnections. We understand a mechanism to be a system of parts whose interactions produce regular changes ( Bechtel, 2008 ; Thagard, 2012 ). The social level consists of people who communicate with each other. The individual level consists of mental representations and computational procedures that operate on them. The neural level consists of neurons that excite and inhibit each other. Finally, the molecular level consists of genes, proteins, neurotransmitters, and hormones that affect neural operation. For defense of this account of levels of mechanisms, and the occurrence of causal links between social and molecular levels, see Thagard (2014) .

Diagram of the self as a multilevel system. Lines with arrows indicate causality. Thick lines indicate composition. Source: Thagard (2014) .

We do not mean to suggest that there are three separate selves capable of representing, effecting, and changing, any more than we implied that there are separate social, individual, neural, and molecular selves. We especially want to avoid the ridiculous suggestion that a person might consist of twelve different selves combining three different aspects at four different levels. Our goal is to display the unity of the self, not just its amazing diversity. Unification arises first from seeing the interconnections of the four levels described earlier, and second from recognizing how the interconnected mechanisms produce all three of the self’s functions.

The scientific value of understanding the self as a multilevel system depends on its fruitfulness in generating explanations of important empirical findings concerning the various self-phenomena. We will attempt to show the relevance of multiple mechanisms for understanding three phenomena that are involved in representational aspects of the self: self-concepts, self-presentation, and self-esteem. Respectively, these involve representing oneself to oneself, representing oneself to others, and evaluating oneself.

Self-Concepts (Representing Oneself to Oneself)

Self researchers distinguish between self-concept, which involves content —one’s thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge about the self—and self-esteem, which involves evaluation —evaluation of oneself as good, bad, worthy, unworthy, and so forth. Here we focus on self-concepts, considering them at individual, social, neural, and molecular levels. Psychologists studying the self no longer think of people as possessing a single, unified self-concept, but as possessing self-views in many domains ( Baumeister, 1999 ). People have various concepts that they apply to characterize themselves with respect to features such as gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, occupation, hobbies, personality, and physical characteristics. For example, a man might think of himself as an intellectual, Canadian, and aging father. Moreover, not all content of those various self-views can be held in mind at once. The part of self-concept that is present in awareness at a given time has been called the “working self-concept” ( Markus and Kunda, 1986 ). What is the nature of the concepts that people apply to themselves, and what are the mechanisms underlying these applications?

The individual level of mental representations is clearly highly relevant to understanding concepts including ones about the self. What kind of mental representations are concepts? Unfortunately, there is no single currently available psychological theory of concepts that can be applied to self-concepts. Debate is ongoing about whether concepts should be understood as prototypes, collections of exemplars, or theoretical explanations ( Murphy, 2002 ; Machery, 2009 ), and all of these aspects are relevant to self-concepts ( Kunda, 1999 , Ch. 2). For example, the concept of extravert carries with it prototypical conditions such as enjoying social interactions, exemplars such as Bill Clinton, and explanations such as people going to parties because they are extraverted. Below we will suggest how all of these aspects of concepts can be integrated at the neural level.

Psychological mechanisms such as priming carried out by spreading activation between concepts explain how different concepts get applied in different situations. For example, people at parties may be especially prone to think of themselves as extraverted. Such explanations require also taking into account social mechanisms such as communication and other forms of interaction. Then the causes of applying the concept extraverted to oneself include social mechanisms as well as the individual mechanism of spreading activation among concepts.

The vast literature on self-concepts points to the interplay of the individual and social levels in a myriad of ways. First is research on social comparison, which shows that one’s working self-concept depends on the other people present ( Wood, 1989 ). Ads with skinny models can make one feel fat, and unkempt people can make one feel well-groomed. When asked to describe themselves, people tend to list characteristics that make them distinctive in their immediate social setting. A woman in a group of men is especially likely to list her gender, and a white man in a group of African–American men is especially likely to list his race (e.g., McGuire et al., 1978 ).

More permanent aspects of one’s social surround can have more consequential effects on self-concept. For example, college graduates’ career aspirations depend on their standing relative to their peers at their own college, regardless of the college’s standing relative to other institutions ( Davis, 1966 ). A student who earns high grades at institutions where grading is easier tends to have higher career aspirations than an equally qualified student at a more competitive college. This phenomenon has been called “the campus as a frog pond”; for the frog in a shallow pond aims his [or her] sights higher than an equally talented frog in a deep pond ( Pettigrew, 1967 , p. 257). According to social identity theory, one psychological basis of group discrimination is that people identify with some groups and contrast themselves with other groups that are viewed less favorably ( Tajfel, 1974 ).

Self-concepts are also influenced by the culture in which one lives. Markus and Kitayama (1991) proposed that whereas Westerners have more “independent self-construals,” in which the self is autonomous and guided by internal thoughts and feelings, Asians have more “interdependent self-construals,” in which the self is connected with others and guided, at least in part, by others’ thoughts and feelings.

Another way that the individual and social levels intersect with respect to self-concept involves the “looking-glass self” or “reflected appraisals”—the idea that people come to see themselves as others see them. This idea has been prominent in social science for some time (e.g., Mead, 1967 ), but research in social psychology in the last few decades leads to a different conclusion: People do not see very clearly how others, especially strangers, see them, and instead believe that others see them as they see themselves (see Tice and Wallace, 2003 , for a review). Instead of others’ views influencing one’s self-view, then, one’s self-view determines how one thinks others view oneself. It is possible, however, that within close relationships, the reflected self plays a greater role in shaping the self-concept ( Tice and Wallace, 2003 ).

Feedback from others can also affect self-concepts, and not just in the way one might expect. For example, although people may think of themselves as more attractive when they have been told they are attractive, people sometimes resist others’ feedback in various ways ( Swann and Schroeder, 1995 ). For example, when people with high self-esteem (HSEs) learn they have failed in one domain, they recruit positive self-conceptions in other domains (e.g., Dodgson and Wood, 1998 ). People are more likely to incorporate others’ feedback into their self-views if that feedback is close to their pre-existing self-view than if it is too discrepant ( Shrauger and Rosenberg, 1970 ).

Self-concepts also change with one’s relationships. Two longitudinal studies showed that people’s self-descriptions increased in diversity after they fell in love; people appear to adopt some of their beloved’s characteristics as their own ( Aron et al., 1995 ). Several studies also indicate that cognitive representations of one’s romantic partner become part of one’s own self-representation (as reviewed by Aron, 2003 ). Andersen and Chen (2002) describe a “relational self” in which knowledge about the self is linked with knowledge about significant others.

Interactions with other people also affect the self-concept through a process called “behavioral confirmation,” whereby people act to confirm other people’s expectations ( Darley and Fazio, 1980 ). For example, when male participants were led to believe that a woman they were speaking to over an intercom was physically attractive, that woman ended up behaving in a more appealing way than when the man thought she was unattractive ( Snyder et al., 1977 ). Presumably, a man’s expectation that a woman is attractive leads him to act especially warmly toward her, which in turn brings to the fore a working self-concept for her that is especially friendly and warm. Evidence suggests that when people believe that others will accept them, they behave warmly, which in turn leads those others to accept them; when they expect rejection, they behave coldly, which leads to less acceptance ( Stinson et al., 2009 ). More consequential results of behavioral confirmation are evident in a classic study of the “Pygmalion” effect, in which teachers were led to have high expectations for certain students (randomly determined), who then improved in academic performance ( Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1968 ).

So far we have considered social effects on the self-concept. In turn, one’s self-concept influences one’s judgments of others in many ways. In his review of this large literature, Dunning (2003) grouped such effects into three main categories. First, in the absence of information about others, people assume that others are similar to themselves. Second, in their impressions of another person, people emphasize the domains in which they themselves are strong or proficient. Third, when judging others on some dimension, such as physical fitness, people tend to use themselves as a benchmark. Given a man who takes a daily 20-min walk, athletes will judge him to be unfit, whereas couch potatoes will judge him to be highly fit.

Finally, researchers have examined not only the content of self-concepts, but their clarity. People with clearer self-concepts respond to questions about themselves more quickly, extremely, and confidently, and their self-concepts are more stable over time ( Campbell, 1990 ). Recent research has pointed to social influences on self-concept clarity. For example, clarity of self-concepts regarding particular traits depends in part on how observable those traits are to others ( Stinson et al., 2008b ). And when people with low self-esteem (LSEs) receive more social acceptance than they are accustomed to, they become less clear in their self-concepts; the same is true when people with high self-esteem encounter social rejection ( Stinson et al., 2010 ). In sum, social factors are as relevant to understanding the operation of self-concepts as are factors involving the operation of mental representations in individual minds.

Moving to the level of neural mechanisms provides a way of seeing how concepts can function in all the ways that psychologists have investigated—as prototypes, exemplars, and theories, if concepts are understood as patterns of neural activity ( Thagard, 2010 , p. 78),

Simulations with artificial neural networks enable us to see how concepts can have properties associated with sets of exemplars and prototypes. When a neural network is trained with multiple examples, it forms connections between its neurons that enable it to store the features of those examples implicitly. These same connections also enable the population of connected neurons to behave like a prototype, recognizing instances of a concept in accord with their ability to match various typical features rather than having to satisfy a strict set of conditions. Thus even simulated populations of artificial neurons much simpler than real ones in the brain can capture the exemplar and prototype aspects of concepts.

It is trickier to show how neural networks can be used in causal explanations, but current research is investigating how neural patterns can be used for explanatory purposes ( Thagard and Litt, 2008 ). Blouw et al. (forthcoming) present a detailed model of how neural populations can function as exemplars, prototypes, and rule-based explanations.

Another advantage of moving down to the neural level is that it becomes easier to apply multimodal concepts such as ones concerned with physical appearance. People who think of themselves as thin or fat, young or old, and quiet or loud, are applying to themselves representations that are not just verbal but also involve other modalities such as vision and sound. Because much is known about the neural basis of sensory systems, the neural level of analysis makes it easier to see how human concepts can involve representations tied to sensory systems, not only for objects such as cars with associated visual and auditory images, but also for kinds of people ( Barsalou, 2008 ).

Brain scanning experiments reveal important neural aspects of self-concepts. Tasks that involve reflecting on one’s own personality traits, feelings, physical attributes, attitudes, or preferences produce preferential activation in the medial prefrontal cortex ( Northoff and Bermpohl, 2004 ; Mitchell, 2009 ; Jenkins and Mitchell, 2011 ). Neural correlates of culturally different self-construals have also have been demonstrated. When East Asian participants were primed with an independent self-construal, right ventrolateral PFC (prefrontal cortex) activity was more active for their own face relative to a coworker’s face, whereas when primed with an interdependent self-construal, this region was activated for both faces ( Sui and Han, 2007 ).

Once concepts are understood partly in neural terms, the relevance of molecular mechanisms becomes evident too, because of the important role of affect and emotion in self-concepts. For most people, thinking of themselves as young and thin carries positive affect, whereas thinking of themselves as old and fat carries negative valence. When such valences are interpreted neurologically, molecular mechanisms involving neurotransmitters and hormones can be applied. For example, the pleasurable feelings associated with young, thin , and other concepts that people enjoy applying to themselves plausibly result from activity in neural regions rich in the neurotransmitter dopamine, such as the nucleus accumbens. On the negative side, negative feelings such as anxiety are associated with activity in the amygdala, whose neurons have receptors for the stress hormone cortisol as well as various neurotransmitters. Hence if we want to understand why people much prefer to apply some concepts to themselves and different concepts to others, it is helpful to consider the molecular mechanisms that underlie emotion as well as social, individual, and neural mechanisms. Of course, merely knowing about physiological correlates does not provide causal explanations, which requires mechanisms that link physiology to behavior.

Self-concepts illustrate complex interactions among multiple levels, belying oversimplified reductionist views that see causality as only emanating from lower to higher levels. For example, a social interaction such as a job interview can have the psychological effects of applications of particular concepts (e.g., nervous or competent ) to oneself. Activation of these concepts consists of instantiation of patterns of firing in neural populations, attended by increases and decreases in levels of various chemicals such as cortisol and dopamine. Changes in chemical levels can in turn lead to social changes, as when high cortisol makes a person socially awkward, producing counterproductive social interactions that then lead to self-application of negative concepts. Under such circumstances, the four levels can provide an amplifying feedback loop, from the social to the neuromolecular and back again.

Self-Presentation (Representing Oneself to Others)

The modes of self-representing discussed so far largely concern how one thinks about oneself, although some aspects of self-image and self-identity also sometimes concern how one wants others to think about oneself. Self-presentation is the central phenomenon for representing oneself to others. It has been discussed extensively by sociologists such as Goffman (1959) and by social psychologists ( Leary and Kowalski, 1990 ). We want to show that self-presentation involves multilevel interacting mechanisms.

Thirty years of research by social psychologists highlight the interplay of the individual and social levels in self-presentation ( Schlenker, 2003 ). One’s goals, at the individual level, affect the social level. People have a basic need for relatedness, for belonging to groups of people that they care about ( Baumeister and Leary, 1995 ; Deci and Ryan, 2000 ). People know that they are more likely to be accepted by others who have a positive impression of them, so it is natural that people typically want to create a favorable impression. However, people’s goals sometimes lead them to present themselves in socially undesirable ways (for references, see Schlenker, 2003 ). They may self-deprecate to lower others’ expectations, or try to appear intimidating to generate fear.

The social level also affects the individual level. One’s audience influences one’s self-presentation goals. For example, people tend to be more self-aggrandizing with strangers and more modest with friends ( Tice et al., 1995 ). Particularly striking evidence of the social level affecting the individual level comes from studies indicating that one’s self-presentation to others can influence one’s private self-concept (see Schlenker, 2003 ; Tice and Wallace, 2003 ). For example, in one study, participants who had been randomly assigned to present themselves as extraverted were more likely than those who had presented themselves as introverted to later rate themselves as extraverted, and even to behave in a more outgoing fashion, by sitting closer and talking more to others ( Fazio et al., 1981 ). Such self-concept change does not seem to occur unless one’s actions are observed by others ( Tice and Wallace, 2003 ), which again emphasizes the social level. In reviewing the self-presentation literature, Baumeister (1998 , p. 705) stated:

People use self-presentation to construct an identity for themselves. Most people have a certain ideal image of the person they would like to be. It is not enough merely to act like that person or to convince oneself that one resembles that person. Identity requires social validation.

Self-presentation is also dependent on neural mechanisms. People naturally fear not being accepted by others, and a variety of studies have found that the social pain of rejection involves some of the same brain areas as physical pain, such as the periaqueductal gray ( MacDonald and Leary, 2005 ). On the other hand, being accepted by others produces pleasure, which involves activation of brain areas such as the nucleus accumbens ( Ikemoto and Panksepp, 1999 ). Izuma et al. (2009) found that the prospect of social approval activates the ventral striatum, which includes the nucleus accumbens. Of course, these neural processes are also molecular ones, with dopamine and opioids associated with positive social experiences, and stress hormones like cortisol associated with negative ones. For example, when people have to give a public speech, often a painful instance of self-presentation, their cortisol levels increase, which may even produce behaviors that undermine the effectiveness of their attempts to produce a good impression ( Al’Absi et al., 1997 ).

Another substance at the molecular level that is likely to be involved in self-presentation is oxytocin, a neuropeptide that has been linked to various social behaviors (e.g., Carter, 1998 ). Oxytocin is implicated when successful self-presentation requires accurately “reading” other people to understand what would impress or please them, because oxytocin has been linked with social recognition ( Kavaliers and Choleris, 2011 ), empathic accuracy ( Rodrigues et al., 2009 ; Bartz et al., 2010 ), the processing of positive social cues ( Unkelbach et al., 2008 ), and discerning whether others are trustworthy and should be approached or not ( Mikolajczak et al., 2010 ). Thus, self-presentation involves the complex interaction of social, individual, neural, and molecular mechanisms.

Self-Esteem (Evaluating Oneself)

The third major kind of self-representing is self-evaluation, which can involve processes such as self-appraisal and self-monitoring, and result in products that range from self-love to self-loathing. We discuss self-esteem as a sample product.

Self-esteem refers to one’s overall evaluation of and liking for oneself. People differ from each other in their characteristic levels of self-esteem, which remain quite stable over time, yet people also fluctuate in their self-esteem around their own average levels. “State self-esteem” refers to one’s feelings about oneself at the moment. Measures of explicit self-esteem obtained by surveys may differ from measures of implicit self-esteem, which are thought to be based associations that are unconscious, or at least less cognitively accessible ( Zeigler-Hill and Jordan, 2011 ).

At the individual level, self-esteem involves the application of self-concepts with positive or negative emotional valence, for example thinking of oneself as a success or failure in important pursuits such as love, work, and play. When people focus on positive aspects of themselves, their state self-esteem increases (e.g., McGuire and McGuire, 1996 ).

Considerable evidence indicates that social experiences are central to both trait and state self-esteem. According to attachment theory, people begin to learn about their self-worth as infants, in their interactions with caregivers. If the caregiver is loving and responsive to the infant’s needs, the infant develops a model of the self that is worthy of love and responsiveness. If not, the child will develop negative self-models and be anxious in relationships (e.g., Holmes et al., 2005 ). We have already discussed how social comparisons can influence one’s self-concept; comparisons with other people also can boost or deflate one’s self-esteem ( Wood, 1989 ).

Social acceptance may be the chief determinant of self-esteem. Leary’s sociometer theory proposed that the very existence of self-esteem is due to the need to monitor the degree to which one is accepted and included by other people ( Leary and Baumeister, 2000 ). Indeed, the more people feel included by other people in general, as well as accepted and loved by specific people in their lives, the higher their trait self-esteem ( Leary and Baumeister, 2000 ). Numerous experimental studies indicate that rejection leads to drops in state self-esteem (e.g., Wood et al., 2009a ). Interpersonal stressors in the everyday lives of university students are associated with declines in state self-esteem ( Stinson et al., 2008a ). In contrast, being in a long-term relationship with a loving partner can raise the self-esteem of people with low self-esteem ( Murray et al., 1996 ).

The connection between the individual and social levels of self is also evident in research on how individuals’ self-esteem-related goals influence their social lives. A vast social psychological literature reveals that motivations to maintain, protect, or improve self-esteem can, for example, guide how people present themselves to others (e.g., Baumeister et al., 1989 ), lead people to compare themselves with others who are less fortunate so as to boost their own spirits ( Wood et al., 1985 ), and lead them to stereotype other people in order to feel better about themselves ( Fein and Spencer, 1997 ; Sinclair and Kunda, 2000 ).

We have repeatedly described the neural and molecular underpinnings of self-representations involving emotions, and the account of self-concepts as patterns of neural activity associated with particular kinds of neurochemical activity applies directly to self-esteem. Self-esteem is connected with depression, which has been examined at the neural level. Depression and self-esteem are substantially inversely correlated (e.g., with r s reaching –0.60 and –0.70 s; Watson et al., 2002 ); low self-esteem is even one of the symptoms of depression. Depression is well known to have neurotransmitter correlates and to be associated with brain changes.

Evidence is mounting that social acceptance and rejection are accompanied by changes at the neural level (e.g., Eisenberger et al., 2003 , 2007 ; Way et al., 2009 ). For example, in one study, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed words (e.g., boring, interesting) that they believed to be feedback from another person. The rejection-induced drops in self-esteem that we described earlier were accompanied by greater activity in rejection-related neural regions (dorsal ACC, anterior insula; Eisenberger et al., 2011 ). Neuroimaging studies suggest that the social pain caused by rejection involve the same brain areas as does physical pain (namely, dorsal ACC activity), whereas signs of social acceptance have been associated with subgenual ACC activity ( Somerville et al., 2006 ), and ventral striatum activity ( Izuma et al., 2008 ), neural regions associated with reward (see Lieberman, 2010 ).

Social threats not only lead to changes in the neural level, but also elicit a host of physiological responses, which point to the links between the social and molecular level. Dickerson et al. (2011) reviewed evidence of cardiovascular (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate), neuroendocrine (e.g., cortisol reactivity), and immune (e.g., inflammatory activity) changes, as well as ways in which social threats “influence the regulation of these systems” (p. 799).

Connections between the social level (rejection and acceptance by others) and the neural level (anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex) have also been associated with the individual level (self-esteem). People who were low in self-esteem differed in their neural responses from those high in self-esteem when others evaluated them ( Somerville et al., 2010 ) or others excluded them ( Onoda et al., 2010 ).

Similarly, individual differences in traits that have been associated with trait self-esteem, rejection sensitivity and attachment styles, have also been linked with differences in neural responses to rejection. Burklund et al. (2007) found that rejection-sensitive people had increased dorsal anterior cingulate activity in response to disapproving facial expressions. Zayas et al. (2009) found that women who differed in attachment styles (which are associated with self-esteem) differed in their neural responses to partner rejection, as reflected in event-related potentials. There is some evidence that the causes of low self-esteem may be genetic as well as social ( Roy et al., 1995 ; Neiss et al., 2002 ), which provides another reason for moving down to the molecular level in order to consider how genes affecting neural processing might be involved in self-esteem. The operation of the molecular level also may underlie self-esteem differences in responses to stress. Taylor et al. (2003) found that people who had positive self-appraisals had lower cardiovascular responses to stress, more rapid cardiovascular recovery, and lower baseline cortisol levels than people with negative self-appraisals. Furthermore, additional research by Taylor et al. (2008) links these findings with the neural level. Participants with greater psychosocial resources, including higher self-esteem along with other characteristics such as optimism and extraversion, exhibited lower amygdala activity during threat regulation, which appeared to account for their lower cortisol reactivity ( Taylor et al., 2008 ). These psychosocial resources appear to be linked with the oxytocin receptor gene ( Saphire-Bernstein et al., 2011 ).

The interplay of three levels—social, individual, and molecular—is suggested by research by Stinson et al. (2008a) . Two studies of university students yielded evidence consistent with their prediction that low self-esteem (individual level) led to interpersonal problems (social level), which in turn resulted in health problems (e.g., missed classes due to illness and visits to the physician). Health problems indicate changes at the molecular level as they imply physiological changes. Dickerson et al. (2011) have made a compelling case that the physiological responses brought about by social threats can worsen physical health.

Considering self-esteem at the neural and molecular levels may provide explanations for why self-esteem in some individuals is less influenced by life experience than learning theories would explain. For example, not all successful people have high self-esteem (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2003a ), and it is possible that the exceptions may arise from underlying neural and molecular differences that the individual level does not capture.

In addition to the dozens of self-phenomena concerned with self-representation, there are many phenomena concerned with the self attempting to modify its own states and behavior. These self-effecting phenomena fall into two groups, self-facilitating cases in which one attempts to foster positive aspects of oneself, and self-limiting cases in which one attempts to prevent the behavioral expression of negative aspects of oneself. We will discuss self-enhancement as an important kind of self-facilitation, and self-regulation as an important kind of self-limitation.

Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement, the motive to develop and maintain a positive self-view, has been a dominant topic in the social psychological literature for decades. Self-enhancement has been seen as a motivation guiding much of human behavior, with some researchers concluding that it is the paramount self-related motive, overriding other goals such as self-accuracy and self-consistency (e.g., Baumeister, 1998 ; but see Kwang and Swann, 2010 ). However, a wealth of self-verification studies have provided compelling evidence that people also want to confirm their self-views and to get others to see them as they see themselves ( Swann, 2012 ). Hence self-verification can sometimes be self-limiting and sometimes self-facilitating.

Research has identified many strategies of self-enhancement. To cope with failure, for example, people may attribute the failure externally (e.g., say the test is unfair), minimize the failure, focus on other positive aspects of themselves, derogate other people, or make downward comparisons—that is, compare themselves with others who are inferior (e.g., Blaine and Crocker, 1993 ; Dodgson and Wood, 1998 ). Over and over again, research has found that the people who engage in such self-enhancement strategies are dispositionally high in self-esteem, rather than low in self-esteem (e.g., Blaine and Crocker, 1993 ). This self-esteem difference may occur because people with high self-esteem are more motivated than people with low self-esteem to repair unhappy moods ( Heimpel et al., 2002 ); or because HSEs are more motivated than LSEs to feel good about themselves (e.g., Baumeister et al., 1989 ); or because LSEs are equally motivated to self-enhance, but cannot as readily claim or defend a positive view of themselves (e.g., Blaine and Crocker, 1993 ).

One self-enhancement strategy deserves mention because it is a mainstay of self-help books and the popular press: positive self-statements. People facing a stressor, cancer patients, and people chronically low in self-esteem are encouraged to say to themselves such things as, “I am a beautiful person” and “I can do this!” Despite the popularity of positive self-statements and the widespread assumption that they work, their effectiveness was not subjected to scientific scrutiny until recently. Wood et al. (2009b) found that repeating the statement, “I am a lovable person” improved people’s moods only for those who already had high self-esteem. For people with low self-esteem, the statement actually backfired, worsening their moods and their feelings about themselves.

A strikingly different self-enhancement strategy is “self-affirmation” ( Steele, 1988 ). As studied by social psychologists, self-affirmation does not refer to saying positive things to oneself, but to much more subtle methods involving the expression of one’s values. Self-affirmation strategies have included writing a paragraph concerning a value one cherishes (e.g., politics, social connections), or even merely completing a scale highlighting such values. Such strategies seem to be self-enhancing in that they reduce defensiveness (e.g., Crocker et al., 2008 ), reduce stereotyping ( Fein and Spencer, 1997 ), make people more open to self-evaluation ( Spencer et al., 2001 ), and can substitute for other methods of self-enhancement (e.g., Wood et al., 1999 ).

Although self-enhancement may seem to be a private matter, operating at the individual level, the social level is clearly influential. Most threats to self-esteem arise in social contexts when feedback from others or others’ behavior leads people to doubt their preferred view of themselves, or to feel devalued or rejected. Hence self-enhancement results from the process of self-evaluation, whose social causes and context we have already discussed. In addition, self-enhancement processes may enlist the social level. Some of the self-enhancement strategies identified above, such as downward comparisons and derogating other people, involve using the social realm to boost oneself at the individual level. Another example comes from research on the triggers of stereotyping. Fein and Spencer (1997) showed that after they fail, people were especially likely to seize on a stereotype of Jewish women. Similarly, after receiving negative feedback, people derogated the person who delivered the feedback, if that person was a woman rather than a man ( Sinclair and Kunda, 2000 ). Other social strategies of self-enhancement can include being boastful and overconfident (e.g., Colvin et al., 1995 ), helping others (e.g., Brown and Smart, 1991 ), and aggressing against others ( Twenge and Campbell, 2003 ). People may also enhance themselves through their group memberships and social identities ( Banaji and Prentice, 1994 ). Self-enhancement research, then, reveals links between the individual and social levels of self because the social world often elicits the need for self-enhancement, and certain self-enhancement strategies involve the interpersonal realm. In addition, because self-enhancement can encourage or diminish stereotyping, aggression, and prosocial behavior, self-enhancement clearly has many potential social consequences.

That self-enhancement also operates at the molecular level is shown by a study of self-affirmation. Participants who engaged in a values-affirmation task before they faced a stressor had lower cortisol responses to stress than did participants who had not engaged in values-affirmation ( Creswell et al., 2005 ).

Self-enhancement also operates at the neural level as it involves applications of concepts such as loveable which, as we argued earlier, can be understood as patterns of activation in populations of neurons. The study by Wood et al. (2009a) showed that self-statements can alter positive and negative moods, which plausibly involves alteration of activities of neurotransmitters such as dopamine. Better understanding of the neural and genetic determinants of low self-esteem could provide the basis for explaining why positive self-statements can have negative effects on people with low self-esteem.

Self-Regulation

Although self researchers were long preoccupied with the topics of self-concept and self-esteem, they have come to appreciate that “self-regulation is one of the most important functions of the self” ( Gailliot et al., 2008 , p. 474). Self-regulation concerns how people pursue their goals or try to control their own behavior, thoughts, or feelings. An idea discussed earlier in the section on self-evaluation—that people continually compare themselves with standards—is central to many theories of self-regulation (e.g., Carver and Scheier, 1990 ). Such theories posit that when people experience a discrepancy between a standard and their own standing (behavior, thoughts, or feelings) on the relevant dimension, they deliberately or even automatically attempt to reduce that discrepancy, in one of three ways. They can try to adjust their behavior (or thoughts or feelings) so that it meets the standard, change their standards, or exit the situation. Self-regulation is successful when the discrepancy is eliminated or reduced (e.g., Carver and Scheier, 1990 ).

The biological aspects of the self are most obvious in the self-limiting phenomena aimed at controlling or managing excessive desires for food, alcohol, drugs, sex, or inactivity. Such desires are all rooted in neural and molecular mechanisms that must be counteracted in order to overcome self-destructive behaviors such as overeating. We will not attempt a comprehensive account of all the phenomena concerned with limiting the self, but discuss three main foci of self-regulation research in recent years: goal pursuit, emotion regulation, and ego-depletion—how exercising self-control in one domain diminishes one’s capacity to do so in a second domain.

Research on social comparison establishes a basic connection between the individual and social levels. To meet such goals as self-evaluation, self-improvement, and self-enhancement, individuals compare themselves with other people ( Wood, 1989 ). In this case, other people serve as the standards for meeting one’s goal progress.

Other people can even influence which goals we adopt. Fitzsimons and her colleagues have found that observing a stranger’s goal-directed behavior can lead people to pursue the same goals themselves, or to synchronize their goal pursuits with others, with interesting consequences. For example, people who observe others fail work harder, and people who observe others succeed take it easy ( McCullough et al., 2010 ). Even being in the presence of someone who was a stranger a few minutes before, but who shares similarities such as tastes in movies, can lead one to adopt the other’s goals as one’s own ( Walton et al., 2012 ). Such effects can even occur subconsciously. For example, when participants who had a goal to achieve to please their mother were primed with their mother, they outperformed control participants on an achievement task ( Fitzsimons and Bargh, 2003 ).

One’s own goals also affect one’s relationships with others. People draw closer to others who are instrumental in helping them to progress toward their goals, and distance themselves from others who do not promote such progress ( Fitzsimons and Shah, 2008 ). People seem to cultivate a social environment for themselves that promotes their goals, especially when their progress toward their goals is poor ( Fitzsimons and Fishbach, 2010 ).

Regulation of emotions is an important topic in clinical, social, and cross-cultural psychology ( Vandekerckhove et al., 2008 ). Research on emotion regulation—which concerns how people try to manage their emotional states—has amply demonstrated the interplay between the individual and social levels. For example, people try to adjust their moods in preparation for an upcoming social interaction, according to the social requirements expected ( Erber and Erber, 2000 ). In addition, social events affect one’s emotion regulation: Rejection experiences appear to lead people with low self-esteem to feel less deserving of a good mood, which in turn dampens their motivation to improve a sad mood ( Wood et al., 2009a ).

A specific example of emotion regulation, anger management, shows the need for multilevel explanations. The strategies for anger management recommended by the American Psychological Association ( APA, 2012 ) operate at all four levels: social, individual, neural, and molecular. Social strategies including expressing concerns with a sympathetic person and moderately communicating with the sources of anger. Humor involving pleasant social interactions can be a potent way of defusing anger. Temporary or permanent removal from anger-provoking social environments can also be helpful.

Psychological strategies for managing anger include the revisions of beliefs, goals, and attitudes. Cognitive therapy aims to help people by changing dysfunctional thinking, behavior, and emotion. Dysfunctional aspects of anger can be addressed by examining whether the beliefs and goals that underlie angry reactions are inaccurate and modifiable. According to the theory of emotions as cognitive appraisals, anger is a judgment that someone or something is thwarting one’s goals, so that anger should be reduced by realization either that the goals are not so important or by revision of beliefs about whatever is thought to be responsible for goal blocking.

Emotions such as anger, however, are not merely cognitive judgments, but also simultaneously involve brain perception of physiological states ( Thagard, 2006 ; Thagard and Aubie, 2008 ). Hence it is not surprising that anger management techniques include various methods for reducing physiological arousal, such as exercise and relaxation through deep breathing, mediation, and muscle tensing and release. Reducing physiological arousal reduces perception of body states performed by the insula and other brain areas, thereby reducing the overall brain activity that constitutes anger. Similarly, when oxytocin is administered to couples discussing a conflict, their positive verbal and non-verbal behaviors increase ( Ditzen et al., 2009 ).

In severe cases of anger, pharmaceutical treatments may be useful, including anti-depressants such as Prozac that affect the neurotransmitter serotonin, anti-anxiety drugs that affect the neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-Aminobutyric acid), and sometimes even anti-psychotics that affect various other neurotransmitters. The onset of anger can also be exacerbated by recreational use of drugs such as alcohol whose effects on brain chemistry are well known. Hence anger management is an aspect of self-regulation that operates at the molecular level as well as the higher ones.

Ego-depletion studies demonstrate that when people override their emotions, thoughts, impulses, or automatic or habitual behaviors, they have trouble doing so a second time ( Baumeister et al., 2007 ). For example, in one study, research participants had to resist freshly-baked chocolate-chip cookies; they were allowed to eat only radishes instead. When they then faced an impossible puzzle, they gave up more rapidly than participants who had not been required to resist the tempting cookies ( Baumeister et al., 1998 ). In another study, participants who were asked to suppress certain thoughts subsequently had more trouble resisting free beer than did control participants, even when they expected to take a driving test ( Muraven et al., 2002 ).

Ego-depletion research has shown connections between the individual and social levels in two ways. First, difficult social interactions can deplete one’s self-regulatory resources ( Vohs et al., 2005 ). Interracial interactions, for example, can be taxing if one tries not to appear prejudiced. Richeson and Shelton (2003) found that after prejudiced white participants interacted with a black participant, they performed more poorly on a cognitive control task, compared to participants who interacted with a white participant or participants scoring low in prejudice. Social interactions also can be depleting if one is required to engage in atypical self-presentation, such as being boastful to strangers ( Vohs et al., 2005 ). And in yet another example of the harmful consequences of social rejection, studies have indicated that it too can impair self-regulation (see Gailliot et al., 2008 , for references).

Second, ego-depletion makes it difficult to navigate social interactions. Participants who had engaged in previous acts of unrelated effortful self-regulation later were more egotistical in their self-descriptions and less able to choose topics for discussion with a stranger that were appropriate in their level of intimacy ( Vohs et al., 2005 ). Self-regulatory depletion also may encourage sexual infidelity and acts of discrimination ( Gailliot et al., 2008 ). Successful self-regulation, then, may smooth one’s interpersonal interactions and make one’s close relationships more harmonious. It is unclear, however, whether ego-depletion is the result of fundamental neural mechanisms of will, or rather individual mechanisms of self-representation: Job et al. (2010) report studies that support the view that reduced self-control after a depleting task or during demanding periods may reflect people’s beliefs about the availability of willpower rather than true resource depletion.

People who have sustained damage to the prefrontal cortex exhibit various self-regulatory deficits, such as impulsivity and poor judgment (see Gailliot et al., 2008 , for references). The anterior cingulate is involved in tasks that deplete self-regulatory resources via the coordination of divided attention, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex affects the activation, maintenance, and modification of goal-directed responses ( Baumeister et al., 2003b ). Attempts at self-control recruit a network of brain regions including the lateral and posterior dorsomedial prefrontal cortex ( MacDonald et al., 2000 ). The consensus across thirty neuroimaging studies of emotion regulation in particular is that right ventrolateral PFC and left ventrolateral PFC activity are involved. Other areas also are implicated, including the presupplementary motor area, the posterior dorsomedial PFC, left dorsolateral PFC, and rostral ACC, and their involvement appears to depend on whether the emotion regulation is intentional or incidental to the participants’ task (see Lieberman, 2010 , for a review).

Research by Richeson et al. (2003) elegantly links the neural, individual, and social levels of self-regulation. They found that for White participants who held especially negative unconscious attitudes toward Blacks, interacting with a Black person led them to perform poorly on a subsequent self-regulatory task. This effect was mediated by the extent to which these White participants’ dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was activated while they viewed Black faces (in a separate session).

Molecular mechanisms are also undoubtedly involved in self-regulation, although few have been identified. Blood glucose has been thought to underlie ego-depletion phenomena ( Gailliot et al., 2008 ), but recent evidence has challenged that idea (e.g., Molden et al., 2012 ). Oxytocin may well promote self-regulation in the interpersonal sphere. It appears to lead mothers to tend to their offspring ( Taylor, 2002 ; Feldman et al., 2007 ), lead people in general to seek and provide social support in stressful circumstances ( Taylor, 2002 ), and to promote helping behavior ( Brown and Brown, 2006 ).

In sum, self-effecting phenomena such as self-enhancement and self-regulation are best understood at multiple mechanistic levels.

Self-effecting phenomena involve local changes and behavior, but there is a final group of phenomena that involve more permanent changes to the self ( Brinthaupt and Lipka, 1994 ). We cover two change phenomena: self-expansion and self-development.

Self-Expansion

According to Aron’s self-expansion theory, human beings have a central desire to expand the self—to acquire resources, perspectives, and identities that enhance their ability to accomplish goals. Self expansion is a motivation to enhance potential efficacy ( Aron et al., 2004 , p. 105).

This motivation to self-expand at the individual level influences the social level: Aron et al. (2004) argue that self-expansion motives lead people to enter and maintain close relationships with others. In close relationships, each partner includes the other in the self, meaning that each takes on the other’s resources, perspectives, and identities to some extent. Evidence for such processes is illustrated by findings of a study by Aron et al. (1995) , who asked university students to respond to the open-ended question “Who are you today?” every 2 weeks for 10 weeks. When respondents had fallen in love during the preceding 2 weeks, their answers to this question revealed increases in the diversity of their self-concept, compared to periods when they had not fallen in love and compared to other respondents who had not fallen in love. They also showed increased self-efficacy and self-esteem. These results remained significant even after mood changes were controlled statistically.

Falling in love also seems to be accompanied by changes in the brain. fMRI studies show that when people who have recently fallen intensely in love look at a photo of or think about their beloved, they have increased activity in the caudate nucleus, which is a central part of the brain’s reward system, as well as in the right ventral tegmental area, a region associated with the production and distribution of dopamine to other brain regions ( Aron et al., 2005 ). Even subliminal priming with a beloved’s name has similar effects ( Ortigue et al., 2007 ). These results suggest that passionate romantic love is associated with dopamine pathways in the reward system of the brain. These dopaminergic pathways are rich in oxytocin receptors ( Bartels and Zeki, 2004 ; Fisher et al., 2006 ). When women talk about a love experience, oxytocin release is associated with the extent to which they display affiliation cues such as smiles and head nods ( Gonzaga et al., 2006 ).

Recent research offers exciting evidence of possible brain changes with self-expansion. Ortigue and Bianchi-Demicheli (2010) found that when people were primed with their romantic partner’s name (and not a friend’s), they showed more intense activation of the left angular gyrus, the same region that is activated when people think of themselves.

Self-Development

Self-development refers to the changes that people naturally undergo over the course of their lives. Major developmental periods include early years when infants and toddlers begin to acquire identities ( Bloom, 2004 ; Rochat, 2009 ), adolescence when teenagers establish increasing independence from parents ( Sylwester, 2007 ), and old age when physical decline imposes new limitations on the self. Each of these periods involves extensive social, individual, neural, and molecular changes, but we will focus on old age, drawing on Breytspraak (1984) and Johnson (2005) .

Social relations and the aspects of the self dependent on them change dramatically as people get older. Major changes can include the completion of child-rearing, retirement from employment, diminishing social contacts resulting from physical disabilities, and loss of friends and family to death or infirmity. These changes can all affect the quantity and quality of social interactions that are causally associated with a person’s behaviors and representations.

At the individual level, there are changes in processes, representations, and emotions. Cognitive functioning measured by processing speed and short-term memory capability declines steadily from people’s thirties, and more precipitously in their sixties and later ( Salthouse, 2004 ). Self-conceptions may be stable in some respects, but often alter in others, as people define themselves increasingly in terms of health and physical functioning rather than work roles. People in early stages of old age tend to be happier than those in middle age, but infirmities can bring substantial difficulties ( Stone et al., 2010 ).

Neural causes of changes in the self are most evident in extreme cases like Alzheimer’s disease, when brain degeneration progressively eliminates anything but a minimal sense of self. There are also age-related disorders such as fronto-temporal dementia that can drastically diminish self-effecting phenomena such as self-control ( Eslinger et al., 2005 ). Aging also brings about molecular changes, for example in reduction of levels of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen that affect neural processing. Hence for a combination of social, individual, neural, and molecular reasons, self-development takes on important directions in old age. Similar observations could be made about other crucial stages of personal development such as adolescence. The changing self, like the representing and effecting self, operates through multilevel interacting mechanisms.

We have shown the relevance of social, individual, neural, and molecular levels to seven important phenomena: self-concepts, self-presentation, self-esteem, self-enhancement, self-regulation, self-expansion, and self-development. These seven are representative of three general classes (self-representing, self-effecting, and self-changing) that cover more than eighty self-phenomena important in psychological discussions of the self.

A full theory of the self will need to specify much more about the nature of the mechanisms at each level, and equally importantly, will need to specify much more about the relations between the levels. Thagard (2014) argued against the common reductionist assumption that causation runs only upward from molecular to neural to individual to social mechanisms. A social interaction such as one person complimenting another has effects on individuals’ mental representations, on neural firing, and on molecular processes such as ones involving dopamine and oxytocin. Fuller explanation of the more than eighty self-phenomena that we have classified in this paper will require elucidation of how they each result from multilevel interactions.

Explanations of complex systems often identify emergent properties, which belong to wholes but not to their parts because they result from the interactions of their parts ( Findlay and Thagard, 2012 ). This basic idea of emergence concerns only the connections of two levels, where the properties of wholes at the higher level (e.g., consciousness) emerge from interactions of parts at the lower levels (neurons). Thinking of the self as resulting from multiple interacting mechanisms points to a more complicated kind of emergence that has gone unrecognized. Multilevel emergence occurs when the property of a whole such as the self results from interactions in mechanisms at several different levels, in this case molecular and social as well as neural and cognitive. What you are as a self depends on your genes and your social influences as well as on your semantic pointers and mental representations. Major changes in the self such as religious conversions, dramatic career shifts, and recovery from mental illness are critical transitions that result from interactions among multiple levels. For example, recovery from severe depression often requires (1) changes in neurotransmitters through medication operating at the molecular and neural levels and (2) changes in beliefs and goals through psychotherapy operating at the mental and social levels. Future theoretical work on the self will benefit from more detailed accounts of the interactions of individual, social, neural, and molecular mechanisms.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

• Al’Absi M., Bongard S., Buchanan T., Pincomb G. A., Licinio J., Lovallo W. R. (1997). Cardiovascular and neuroendocrine adjustment to public speaking and mental arithmetic stressors . Psychophysiology 34 , 266–275. 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1997.tb02397.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Alicke M. D., Dunning D. A., Krueger J. I. (2005). The Self in Social Judgment . New York, NY: Psychology Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Andersen S. M., Chen S. (2002). The relational self: an interpersonal social-cognitive theory . Psychol. Rev. 109 , 619–645. 10.1037/0033-295X.109.4.619 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• APA. (2012). Controlling Anger Before it Controls You Available at: http://www.apa.org/topics/anger/control.aspx [accessed March 18, 2015].
• Aron A. (2003). “Self and close relationships,” in Handbook of Self and Identity , eds Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 442–461. [ Google Scholar ]
• Aron A., Fisher H., Mashek D. J., Strong G., Li H., Brown L. L. (2005). Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love . J. Neurophysiol. 94 , 327–337. 10.1152/jn.00838.2004 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aron A., McLaughlin-Volpe T., Mashek D., Lewandowski G., Wright S. C., Aron E. N. (2004). Including others in the self . Eur. Rev. Soc. Psychol. 15 , 101–132 10.1080/10463280440000008 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Aron A., Paris M., Aron E. N. (1995). Falling in love: prospective studies of self-concept change . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 69 , 1102–1112 10.1037/0022-3514.69.6.1102 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Banaji M. R., Prentice D. A. (1994). The self in social contexts . Annu. Rev. Psychol. 45 , 297–332 10.1146/annurev.ps.45.020194.001501 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Barsalou L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition . Annu. Rev. Psychol. 59 , 617–645. 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bartels A., Zeki S. (2004). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love . Neuroimage 21 , 1155–1166. 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2003.11.003 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bartz J. A., Zaki J., Bolger N., Hollander E., Ludwig N. N., Kolevzon A., et al. (2010). Oxytocin selectively improves empathic accuracy . Psychol. Sci. 21 , 1426–1428. 10.1177/0956797610383439 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. (1999). The Self in Social Psychology . Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F. (1998). “The self,” in The Handbook of Social Psychology , Vols. 1 and 2 , 4th Edn, eds Gilbert D. T., Fiske S. T., Lindzey G. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; ), 680–740. [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Bratslavsky E., Muraven M., Tice D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: is the active self a limited resource? J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 74 , 1252–1265. 10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Campbell J. D., Krueger J. I., Vohs K. D. (2003a). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychol. Sci. Public Interest 4 , 1–44 10.1111/1529-1006.01431 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Vohs K. D., Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (2003b). Self-Regulation and the Executive Function of the Self Handbook of Self and Identity . New York, NY: Guilford Press, 197–217. [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Leary M. R. (1995). The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation . Psychol. Bull. 117 , 497–529. 10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Tice D. M., Hutton D. G. (1989). Self-presentational motivations and personality differences in self-esteem . J. Pers. 57 , 547–579 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1989.tb02384.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Baumeister R. F., Vohs K. D., Tice D. M. (2007). The strength model of self-control . Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 16 , 351–355 10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00534.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Bechtel W. (2008). Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience . New York, NY: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
• Blaine B., Crocker J. (1993). “Self-esteem and self-serving biases in reactions to positive and negative events: an integrative review,” in Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard , ed. Baumeister R. F. (New York, NY: Plenum; ), 55–86. [ Google Scholar ]
• Bloom P. (2004). Descartes’ Baby . New York, NY: Basic Books. [ Google Scholar ]
• Blouw P., Solodkin E., Thagard P., Eliasmith C. (forthcoming). Concepts as semantic pointers: a theory and computational model. Cogn. Sci. [ PubMed ]
• Breytspraak L. M. (1984). The Development of Self in Later Life . Boston, MA: Little, Brown. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brinthaupt T. M., Lipka R. P. (1994). Changing the Self: Philosophies, Techniques, and Experiences . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Brown J. D., Smart S. A. (1991). The self and social conduct: linking self-representations to prosocial behavior . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 60 , 368–375 10.1037/0022-3514.60.3.368 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Brown S. L., Brown R. M. (2006). Selective investment theory: recasting the functional significance of social relationships . Psychol. Inq. 17 , 1–29 10.1207/s15327965pli1701_01 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Burklund L. J., Eisenberger N. I., Lieberman M. D. (2007). The face of rejection: rejection sensitivity moderates dorsal anterior cingulated activity to disapproving facial expressions . Soc. Neurosci. 2 , 238–253. 10.1080/17470910701391711 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Campbell J. D. (1990). Self-esteem and clarity of the self-concept . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 59 , 538–549. 10.1037/0022-3514.59.3.538 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Carter C. S. (1998). Neuroendocrine perspectives on social attachment and love . Psychoneuroendocrinology 23 , 770–818. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Carver C. S., Scheier M. F. (1990). Origins and functions of positive and negative affect: a control-process view . Psychol. Rev. 97 , 19–35 10.1037/0033-295X.97.1.19 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Colvin C. R., Block J., Funder D. C. (1995). Overly positive self-evaluations and personality: negative implications for mental health . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 68 , 1152–1162. 10.1037/0022-3514.68.6.1152 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Creswell J. D., Welch W. T., Taylor S. E., Sherman D. K., Gruenewald T. L., Mann T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses . Psychol. Sci. 16 , 846–851. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2005.01624.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Crocker J., Niiya Y., Mischkowski D. (2008). Why does writing about important values reduce defensiveness? Self-affirmation and the role of positive other-directed feelings . Psychol. Sci. 19 , 740–747. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02150.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Darley J. M., Fazio R. H. (1980). Expectancy confirmation processes arising in the social interaction sequence . Am. Psychol. 35 , 867–881 10.1037/0003-066X.35.10.867 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Davis J. A. (1966). The campus as a frog pond: an application of the theory of relative deprivation to career decisions of college men . Am. J. Soc. 72 , 17–31 10.1086/224257 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Deci E. L., Ryan R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: human needs and the self-determination of behavior . Psychol. Inq. 11 , 227–268 10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dickerson S. S., Gruenewald T. L., Kemeny M. E. (2011). “Physiological effects of social threat: implications for health,” in Handbook of Social Neuroscience , eds Cacioppo J., Decety J. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press; ), 787–803. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ditzen B., Schaer M., Gabriel B., Bodenmann G., Ehlert U., Heinrichs M. (2009). Intranasal oxytocin increases positive communication and reduces cortisol levels during couple conflict . Biol. Psychiatry 65 , 728–731. 10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.10.011 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dodgson P. G., Wood J. V. (1998). Self-esteem and the cognitive accessibility of strengths and weaknesses after failure . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 75 , 178–197. 10.1037/0022-3514.75.1.178 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Dunning D. (2003). “The relation of self to social perception,” in Handbook of Self and Identity , eds Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 421–441. [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenberger N. I., Gable S. L., Lieberman M. D. (2007). fMRI responses relate to differences in real-world social experience . Emotion 7 , 745–754. 10.1037/1528-3542.7.4.745 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenberger N. I., Inagaki T. K., Muscatell K. A., Byrne Haltom K. E., Leary M. R. (2011). The neural sociometer: brain mechanisms underlying state self-esteem . J. Cogn. Neurosci. 23 , 3448–3455. 10.1162/jocn_a_00027 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Eisenberger N. I., Lieberman M. D., Williams K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An FMRI study of social exclusion . Science 302 , 290–292. 10.1126/science.1089134 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Erber R., Erber M. W. (2000). The self-regulation of moods: second thoughts on the importance of happiness in everyday life . Psychol. Inq. 11 , 142–148 10.1207/S15327965PLI1103_02 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Eslinger P. J., Dennis K., Moore P., Antani S., Hauck R., Grossman M. (2005). Metacognitive deficits in frontotemporal dementia . J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 76 , 1630–1635. 10.1136/jnnp.2004.053157 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fazio R. H., Effrein E. A., Falender V. J. (1981). Self-perceptions following social interaction . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 41 , 232–242 10.1037/0022-3514.41.2.232 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fein S., Spencer S. J. (1997). Prejudice as self-image maintenance: affirming the self through derogating others . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 73 , 31–44 10.1037/0022-3514.73.1.31 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Feldman R., Weller A., Zagoory-Sharon O., Levine A. (2007). Evidence for a neuroendocrinological foundation of human affiliation: plasma oxytocin levels across pregnancy and the postpartum period predict mother-infant bonding . Psychol. Sci. 18 , 965–970. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02010.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Findlay S. D., Thagard P. (2012). How parts make up wholes . Front. Physiol. 3 :455. 10.3389/fphys.2012.00455 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fisher H. E., Aron A., Brown L. (2006). Romantic love: a mammalian system for mate choice . Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 361 , 2173–2186. 10.1098/rstb.2006.1938 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fitzsimons G. M., Bargh J. A. (2003). Thinking of you: nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 84 , 148–164. 10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.148 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fitzsimons G. M., Fishbach A. (2010). Shifting closeness: interpersonal effects of personal goal progress . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 98 , 535–549. 10.1037/a0018581 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Fitzsimons G. M., Shah J. Y. (2008). How goal instrumentality shapes relationship evaluations . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 95 , 319–337. 10.1037/0022-3514.95.2.319 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Gailliot M. T., Mead N. L., Baumeister R. F. (2008). “Self-regulation,” in Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research , eds John O. P., Robbins R. W., Pervin L. A. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 472–491. [ Google Scholar ]
• Goffman E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . New York, NY: Anchor Books. [ Google Scholar ]
• Gonzaga G. C., Turner R. A., Keltner D., Campos B., Altemus M. (2006). Romantic love and sexual desire in close relationships . Emotion 6 , 163–179. 10.1037/1528-3542.6.2.163 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Heimpel S. A., Wood J. V., Marshall M. A., Brown J. D. (2002). Do people with low self-esteem really want to feel better? Self-esteem differences in motivation to repair negative moods . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 82 , 128–147. 10.1037/0022-3514.82.1.128 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Holmes J. G., Cameron J., Baldwin M. W. (2005). An Integrative Review of Theories of Interpersonal Cognition: An Interdependence Theory Perspective Interpersonal Cognition . New York, NY: Guilford Press, 415–447. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ikemoto S., Panksepp J. (1999). The role of nucleus accumbens dopamine in motivated behavior: a unifying interpretation with special reference to reward-seeking . Brain Res. Rev. 31 , 6–41. 10.1016/S0165-0173(99)00023-5 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Izuma K., Saito D. N., Sadato N. (2008). Processing of social and monetary rewards in the human striatum . Neuron 58 , 284–294. 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.03.020 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Izuma K., Saito D. N., Sadato N. (2009). Processing of the incentive for social approval in the ventral striatum during charitable donation . J. Cogn. Neurosci. 22 , 621–631. 10.1162/jocn.2009.21228 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• James W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology . New York, NY: H. Holt. [ Google Scholar ]
• Jenkins A. C., Mitchell J. P. (2011). Medial prefrontal cortex subserves diverse forms of self-reflection . Soc. Neurosci. 6 , 211–218. 10.1080/17470919.2010.507948 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Job V., Dweck C. S., Walton G. M. (2010). Ego depletion—is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation . Psychol. Sci. 21 , 1686–1693. 10.1177/0956797610384745 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Johnson M. L. (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Age and Ageing . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kavaliers M., Choleris E. (2011). Sociality, pathogen avoidance, and the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin . Psychol. Sci. 22 , 1367–1374. 10.1177/0956797611420576 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kunda Z. (1999). Social Cognition: Making Sense of People . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Kwang T., Swann W. B., Jr. (2010). Do people embrace praise even when they feel unworthy? A review of critical tests of self-enhancement versus self-verification . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Rev. 14 , 263–280. 10.1177/1088868310365876 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Leary M. R., Baumeister R. F. (2000). “The nature and function of self-esteem: sociometer theory,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 32, ed. Zanna M. P. (San Diego, CA: Academic Press; ), 1–62. [ Google Scholar ]
• Leary M. R., Kowalski R. M. (1990). Impression management: a literature review and two-component model . Psychol. Bull. 107 , 34–47 10.1037/0033-2909.107.1.34 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (2003). Handbook of Self and Identity . New York, NY: Guilford. [ Google Scholar ]
• Lieberman M. D. (2010). “Social cognitive neuroscience,” in Handbook of Social Psychology , 5th Edn, eds Fiske S. T., Gilbert D. T., Lindzey G. (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill; ), 143–193. [ Google Scholar ]
• MacDonald A. W., Cohen J. D., Stenger V. A., Carter C. S. (2000). Dissociating the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulated cortex in cognitive control . Science 288 , 1835–1838. 10.1126/science.288.5472.1835 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• MacDonald G., Leary M. R. (2005). Why does social exclusion hurt? The relationship between social and physical pain . Psychol. Bull. 131 , 202–223. 10.1037/0033-2909.131.2.202 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Machery E. (2009). Doing without Concepts . Oxford: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Markus H., Kunda Z. (1986). Stability and malleability of the self-concept . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 51 , 858–866. 10.1037/0022-3514.51.4.858 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Markus H. R., Kitayama S. (1991). Culture and the self: implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation . Psychol. Rev. 98 , 224–253 10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• McCullough K. C., Fitzsimons G. M., Chua S. N. (2010). Vicarious Goal Satisfaction . Moscow, ID: University of Idaho. [ Google Scholar ]
• McGuire W. J., McGuire C. V. (1996). Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thinking tasks: cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 70 , 1117–1125. 10.1037/0022-3514.70.6.1117 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• McGuire W. J., McGuire C. V., Child P., Fujioka T. (1978). Salience of ethnicity in the spontaneous self-concept as a function of one’s ethnic distinctiveness in the social environment . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 36 , 511–520. 10.1037/0022-3514.36.5.511 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mead G. H. (1967). Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Mikolajczak M., Gross J. J., Lane A., Corneille O., de Timary P., Lumine L. (2010). Oxytocin makes people trusting, not gullible . Psychol. Sci. 21 , 1072–1074. 10.1177/0956797610377343 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Mitchell J. P. (2009). Inferences about other minds . Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B 364 , 1309–1316. 10.1098/rstb.2008.0318 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Molden D. C., Hui C. M., Scholer A. A., Meier B. P., Noreen E. E., Agostino P. R., et al. (2012). The motivational versus metabolic effects of carbohydrates on self-control . Psychol. Sci. 23 , 1137–1144. 10.1177/0956797612439069 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Muraven M., Collins R. L., Neinhaus K. (2002). Self-control and alcohol restraint: an initial application of the Self-Control Strength Model . Psychol. Addict. Behav. 16 , 113–120. 10.1037/0893-164X.16.2.113 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Murphy G. L. (2002). The Big Book of Concepts . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Murray S. L., Holmes J. G., Griffin D. W. (1996). The self-fulfilling nature of positive illusions in romantic relationships: love is not blind, but prescient . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 71 , 1155–1180. 10.1037/0022-3514.71.6.1155 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Neiss M. B., Sedikides C., Stevenson J. (2002). Self-esteem: a behavioral genetics perspective . Eur. J. Pers. 16 , 351–367 10.1002/per.456 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Northoff G., Bermpohl F. (2004). Cortical midline structures and the self . Trends Cogn. Sci. 8 , 102–107. 10.1016/j.tics.2004.01.004 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Onoda K., Okamoto Y., Nakashima K., Nittono H., Yoshimura S., Yamawaki S., et al. (2010). Does low self-esteem enhance social pain? The relationship between trait self-esteem and anterior cingulate cortex activation induced by ostracism . Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 5 , 385–391. 10.1093/scan/nsq002 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ortigue S., Bianchi-Demicheli F. (2010). Overlapping neural systems mediating self-consciousness, mirror neurons, and love: a combined fMRI and 4D EEG neuroimaging approach . Paper Presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology Conference: Las Vegas, NV. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ortigue S., Bianchi-Demicheli F., de C. Hamilton A. F., Grafton S. T. (2007). The neural basis of love as a subliminal prime: an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study . J. Cogn. Neurosci. 19 , 1218–1230. 10.1162/jocn.2007.19.7.1218 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Pettigrew T. F. (1967). Social evaluation theory: convergences and applications . Nebr. Symp. Motiv. 15 , 241–311. [ Google Scholar ]
• Richeson J. A., Baird A. A., Gordon H. L., Heatherton T. F., Wyland C. L., Trawalter S., et al. (2003). An fMRI investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive function . Nat. Neurosci. 6 , 1323–1328. 10.1038/nn1156 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Richeson J. A., Shelton J. N. (2003). When prejudice does not pay: effects of interracial contact on executive function . Psychol. Sci. 14 , 287–290. 10.1111/1467-9280.03437 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rochat P. (2009). Others in Mind: Social Origins of Self-Consciousness . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rodrigues S. M., Saslow L. R., Garcia N., John O. P., Keltner D. (2009). Oxytocin receptor genetic variation relates to empathy and stress reactivity in humans . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106 , 21437–21441. 10.1073/pnas.0909579106 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Rosenthal R., Jacobson L. (1968). Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development . New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. [ Google Scholar ]
• Roy M. A., Neale M. C., Kendler K. S. (1995). The genetic epidemiology of self-esteem . Br. J. Psychiatry 166 , 813–820. 10.1192/bjp.166.6.813 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Salthouse T. A. (2004). What and when of cognitive aging . Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 14 , 0–144 10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.00293.x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Saphire-Bernstein S., Way B. M., Kim H. S., Sherman D. K., Taylor S. E. (2011). Oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is related to psychological resources . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 108 , 15118–15122. 10.1073/pnas.1113137108 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Schlenker B. R. (2003). “Self-presentation,” in Handbook of Self and Identity , eds Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 492–518. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sedikides C., Brewer M. B. (2001). Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self . Hove: Psychology Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sedikides C., Spencer S. (2007). The Self . New York, NY: Psychology Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Shrauger J. S., Rosenberg S. E. (1970). Self-esteem and the effects of success and failure feedback on performance . J. Pers. 38 , 404–417. 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1970.tb00018.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sinclair L., Kunda Z. (2000). Motivated stereotyping of women: she’s fine if she praised me but incompetent if she criticized me . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 26 , 1329–1342 10.1177/0146167200263002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Snyder M., Tanke E. D., Berscheid E. (1977). Social perception and interpersonal behavior: on the self-fulfilling nature of social stereotypes . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 35 , 656–666 10.1037/0022-3514.35.9.656 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Somerville L. H., Heatherton T. F., Kelley W. M. (2006). Anterior cingulate cortex responds differentially to expectancy violation and social rejection . Nat. Neurosci. 9 , 1007–1008. 10.1038/nn1728 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Somerville L. H., Kelley W. M., Heatherton T. F. (2010). Self-esteem modulates medial prefrontal cortical responses to evaluative social feedback . Cereb. Cortex 20 , 3005–3013. 10.1093/cercor/bhq049 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Spencer S. J., Fein S., Lomore C. D. (2001). Maintaining one’s self-image vis-à-vis others: the role of self-affirmation in the social evaluation of the self . Motiv. Emot. 25 , 41–65 10.1023/A:1010659805978 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Steele C. M. (1988). “The psychology of self-affirmation: sustaining the integrity of the self,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , Vol. 21, ed. Berkowitz L. (New York, NY: Academic Press; ), 261–302. [ Google Scholar ]
• Stinson D. A., Cameron J. J., Wood J. V., Gaucher D., Holmes J. G. (2009). Deconstructing the reign of error: interpersonal warmth explains the self-fulfilling prophecy of anticipated acceptance . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 35 , 1165–1178. 10.1177/0146167209338629 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stinson D. A., Logel C., Holmes J. G., Wood J. V., Hogle J. V., Gaucher D., et al. (2010). The regulatory function of self-esteem: testing to the acceptance and epistemic signaling systems . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 99 , 993–1013. 10.1037/a0020310 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stinson D. A., Logel C., Zanna M. P., Holmes J. G., Cameron J. J., Wood J. V., et al. (2008a). The cost of lower self-esteem: testing a self- and social-bonds model of health . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 94 , 412–428. 10.1037/0022-3514.94.3.412 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stinson D. A., Wood J. V., Doxey J. R. (2008b). In search of clarity: self-esteem and domains of confidence and confusion . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 34 , 1541–1555. 10.1177/0146167208323102 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Stone A. A., Schwartz J. E., Broderick J. E., Deaton A. (2010). A snapshot of the age distribution of psychological well-being in the United States . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107 , 9985–9990. 10.1073/pnas.1003744107 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sui J., Han S. (2007). Self-construal priming modulates neural substrates of self-awareness . Psychol. Sci. 18 , 861–866. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01992.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Swann W. B., Jr. (2012). “Self-verification theory,” in Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology , eds Van Lang P., Kruglanski A., Higgins E. T. (New York, NY: Sage; ), 23–42. [ Google Scholar ]
• Swann W. B., Schroeder D. G. (1995). The search for beauty and truth: a framework for understanding reactions to evaluations . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 21 , 1307–1318 10.1177/01461672952112008 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sylwester P. (2007). The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy . Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tajfel H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behavior . Soc. Sci. Inf. 13 , 65–93 10.1177/053901847401300204 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Taylor S. E. (2002). The Tending Instinct: Women, Men, and the Biology of Our Relationships . New York, NY: Holt. [ Google Scholar ]
• Taylor S. E., Burklund L. J., Eisenberger N. I., Lehman B. J., Hilmert C. J., Lieberman M. D. (2008). Neural bases of moderation of cortisol stress responses by psychosocial resources . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 95 , 197–211. 10.1037/0022-3514.95.1.197 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Taylor S. E., Lerner J. S., Sherman D. K., Sage R. M., McDowell N. K. (2003). Portrait of the self-enhancer: well adjusted and well liked or maladjusted and friendless? J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 84 , 165–176. 10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.165 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P. (2006). Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P. (2010). The Brain and the Meaning of Life . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P. (2012). The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P. (2014). The self as a system of multilevel interacting mechanisms . Philos. Psychol. 27 , 145–163 10.1080/09515089.2012.725715 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P., Aubie B. (2008). Emotional consciousness: a neural model of how cognitive appraisal and somatic perception interact to produce qualitative experience . Conscious. Cogn. 17 , 811–834. 10.1016/j.concog.2007.05.014 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Thagard P., Litt A. (2008). “Models of scientific explanation,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology , ed. Sun R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ), 549–564. [ Google Scholar ]
• Tice D. M., Butler J. L., Muraven M. B., Stillwell A. M. (1995). When modesty prevails: differential favorability of self-presentation to friends and strangers . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 69 , 1120–1138 10.1037/0022-3514.69.6.1120 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Tice D. M., Wallace H. M. (2003). “The reflected self: creating yourself as (you think) others see you,” in Handbook of Self and Identity , eds Leary M. R., Tangney J. P. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 91–105. [ Google Scholar ]
• Twenge J. M., Campbell W. K. (2003). “Isn’t it fun to get the respect that we’re going to deserve?” Narcissism, social rejection, and aggression . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 29 , 261–272. 10.1177/0146167202239051 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Unkelbach C., Guastella A. J., Forgas J. P. (2008). Oxytocin selectively facilitates recognition of positive sex and relationship words . Psychol. Sci. 19 , 1092–1094. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02206.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Vandekerckhove M., von Scheve C., Ismer S., Jung S., Kronast S. (2008). Regulating Emotions: Culture, Social Necessity, and Biological Inheritance . Malden, MA: Blackwell. [ Google Scholar ]
• Vohs K. D., Baumeister R. F., Ciarocco N. J. (2005). Self-regulation and self-presentation: regulatory resource depletion impairs impression management and effortful self-presentation depletes regulatory resources . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 88 , 632–657. 10.1037/0022-3514.88.4.632 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Walton G. M., Cohen G. L., Cwir D., Spencer S. J. (2012). Mere belonging: the power of social connections . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 102 , 513–532. 10.1037/a0025731 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Watson D., Suls J., Haig J. (2002). Global self-esteem in relation to structural models of personality and affectivity . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 83 , 185–197. 10.1037/0022-3514.83.1.185 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Way B. M., Taylor S. E., Eisenberger N. I. (2009). Variation in the k-opioid receptor gene (OPRM1) is associated with dispositional and neural sensitivity to social rejection . Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 106 , 15079–15084. 10.1073/pnas.0812612106 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wood J. V. (1989). Theory and research concerning social comparisons of personal attributes . Psychol. Bull. 106 , 231–248 10.1037/0033-2909.106.2.231 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wood J. V., Giordano-Beech M., Ducharme M. J. (1999). Compensating for failure through social comparison . Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 25 , 1370–1386 10.1177/0146167299259004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wood J. V., Heimpel S. A., Manwell L. A., Whittington E. J. (2009a). This mood is familiar and I don’t deserve to feel better anyway: mechanisms underlying self-esteem differences in motivation to repair sad moods . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 96 , 363–380. 10.1037/a0012881 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wood J. V., Perunovic W. Q. E., Lee J. W. (2009b). Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others . Psychol. Sci. 20 , 860–866. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Wood J. V., Taylor S. E., Lichtman R. R. (1985). Social comparison in adjustment to breast cancer . J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 49 , 1169–1183. 10.1037/0022-3514.49.5.1169 [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zayas V., Shoda Y., Mischel W., Osterhout L., Takahashi M. (2009). Neural responses to partner rejection cues . Psychol. Sci. 20 , 813–821. 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02373.x [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Zeigler-Hill V., Jordan C. H. (2011). “Two faces of self-esteem: implicit and explicit forms of self-esteem,” in Handbook of Implicit Social Cognition: Measurement, Theory, and Applications , eds Gawronski B., Payne B. K. (New York, NY: Guilford Press; ), 392–407. [ Google Scholar ]

• Bipolar Disorder
• Therapy Center
• When To See a Therapist
• Types of Therapy
• Best Online Therapy
• Best Couples Therapy
• Best Family Therapy
• Managing Stress
• Sleep and Dreaming
• Understanding Emotions
• Self-Improvement
• Healthy Relationships
• Student Resources
• Personality Types
• Guided Meditations
• Verywell Mind Insights
• 2024 Verywell Mind 25
• Mental Health in the Classroom
• Editorial Process
• Meet Our Review Board
• Crisis Support

What Is a Self-Schema?

Your beliefs about yourself can influence your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Emily is a board-certified science editor who has worked with top digital publishing brands like Voices for Biodiversity, Study.com, GoodTherapy, Vox, and Verywell.

Bloom Productions / Getty Images

Self-Schema Examples

How self-schemas work, how self-schemas form.

• Influence on Behavior
• Determine Your Self-Schema

The term schema refers to the cognitive structures we have to describe various categories of knowledge about the world. Like with many other things, we also hold schemas about ourselves. In psychology , these are known as self-schemas.

We all have ideas and beliefs about other people but we also hold the same sort of impressions about ourselves. These self-schemata impact our thoughts and behaviors.

At a Glance

Self-schemas are beliefs we hold about ourselves and how we will feel or act in certain situations. Everyone's self-schemas are different and just one portion of our self-concept. They're formed by our experiences and relationships with others.

Self-schemas are important because they influence our behaviors. The more we believe that a self-schema applies to us, the better we will perform on that dimension.

Additionally, if we develop a negative or unhealthy self-schema, it can be changed. So, if you want to change these self-beliefs, making them more positive, it is possible.

The Meaning of Self-Schema

Self-schema are categories of knowledge that reflect how we expect ourselves to think, feel, and act in particular settings or situations. Each of these beliefs includes our overall perceptions of ourselves ("outgoing," "shy," "talkative"), as well as our knowledge of past experiences in similar situations.

Self-Schema Definition

The American Psychological Association defines self-schema as a cognitive framework of beliefs and information about the self that guides and influences a person's perceptions and attention .

As an example, if you have to give a speech, your self-schema might be that you are shy in situations where you have to speak in public. Because you have an overall belief about your personality , as well as past experiences talking in public situations, you probably have a fairly good idea of how you will feel, think, and act in this situation.

When people are very high or extreme in a certain area, they are described as being self-schematic in that dimension.

For example, a person who believes they are a "people person" and not remotely timid would be considered self-schematic in that area. If a person does not hold a schema for a particular dimension, they are said to be aschematic.

Among other things, people can hold self-schemas about behaviors, personality traits , physical characteristics, and interests. Examples of behavioral self-schemas include:

• "I'm assertive."
• "I'm quiet."
• "I avoid conflict."

Examples of self-schemas involving personality traits are:

• "I'm shy."
• "I'm friendly."
• "I'm compassionate."

Physical characteristic self-schemas might include:

• "I'm pretty."
• "I'm overweight."
• "I'm tall."

Self-schemas relating to interests would be:

• "I love sports."
• "I like art."
• "I enjoy music."

There are a few key characteristics of self-schemas. Here are three to consider.

Self-Schemas Are Individualized

Each person has very different self-schemas influenced heavily by past experiences, relationships , upbringing, society, and culture. Who we are, and our self-perceptions are strongly affected by how we are raised, how we interact with others, and the impressions and feedback we receive from societal situations.

As you might have already noticed, most of these self-schemas involve bipolar dimensions, such as:

• Loud versus quiet
• Mean versus kind
• Shy versus outgoing
• Active versus passive

People often think of them as either/or traits, but most actually exist as a continuum, with each person lying somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.

Self-Schemas Form Our Self-Concept

All our various self-schemas combine and interact to form our self-concept . Our self-concepts tend to be highly complex, which is not surprising since we learn about and analyze ourselves probably more than anything else.

As we go through life and gain new knowledge and experiences, we are constantly adding to or even reconfiguring our existing self-schemas and self-concepts.

Self-Schema vs. Self-Concept

Self-schema and self-concept are related but different concepts:

• Self-concept refers to our image of ourselves or who we believe we are.
• Self-schemas are subsets of our self-concept related to various cognitive aspects.

Self-Schemas About Our Future Selves

In addition to holding self-schemas about our current selves, some experts have suggested that we also have self-schemas about our future selves. These reflect how we think we will turn out in the coming years, which might include both positive and negative ideas about our future selves.

There are a number of important factors that play a role in the formation of self-schema. Early childhood relationships, social relationships, and life experiences are a few key factors.

Early Childhood Experiences

Our initial self-schemata begins to form in early childhood based on feedback from parents and caregivers. The more involved or interested our parents are, the more positive our self-schema, while low levels of involvement by parents is associated with a negative self-schema.

Social Relationships

Psychologists suggest that our self-schemas arise from our social relationships . As you live your life, you meet new people and become part of new social groups. The feedback you receive from others plays a part in modifying your sense of self.

Life Experiences

Self-schemas are also shaped by the various roles we play throughout life. Our experiences as friends, siblings, parents, coworkers, and in other roles influence how we think and feel about ourselves and how we act in particular situations.

Can You Change Negative Self-Schema?

Fortunately, if you develop a negative or unhealthy self-schema, it can be changed. For instance, research indicates that after engaging in expressive writing, women with a history of childhood sexual abuse were able to change their sexual self-schemas.

How Self-Schemas Influence Behavior

So we know that we have self-schemas about how we think, feel, and act. But how much do these ideas really influence how we behave?

In one older study, participants who rated themselves as self-schematic for independence or dependence were faster at classifying words associated with those traits as self-descriptive. For example, people who saw themselves as "independents" were quicker to identify with independence-themed words than aschematics who, in turn, were quicker than dependents.

Researchers have found that if you believe you are self-schematic on a particular dimension, you are more likely to perform well in that area.

How to Determine Your Self-Schemas

One of the easiest ways to get a better idea of your own self-schemas is to answer the question " Who am I? " Imagine that you are providing these answers only to yourself and not to another person.

Write down 15 different things that answer this question as they occur to you without spending a lot of time thinking about how logical or important they are. Once you are done, you should have a fairly good representation of some of your central self-schemas.

So what can you do if your self-schemas are negative or unhelpful? There are a number of strategies that can help you change and overcome negative or harmful self-beliefs. A few tactics that can help include:

• Cognitive reframing : Focus on identifying and actively changing negative self-beliefs to ones that are more positive or neutral
• Positive self-talk : When you find yourself saying or thinking negative things about yourself, focus on changing that internal monologue to something more helpful
• Positive affirmations : Positive statements can help you feel more capable and less negative about yourself
• Journaling : Writing down your feelings in a journal so you can spot patterns and actively work to change those self-beliefs can be a helpful exercise
• Therapy : If negative self-schemas are holding you back or contributing to psychological distress, talking to a mental health professional can be beneficial. Many different types of therapy may help you adopt a more positive outlook on your

What This Means For You

Your self-schemas reveal how you feel about yourself, and they can have a major impact on your behavior. It can be helpful to spend some time figuring out what your self-schema are, and then looking for ways to improve negative or unhelpful self-schema.

Strategies that may help you overcome negative self-beliefs include using positive self-talk , practicing self-care, changing negative thoughts, and using positive affirmations . If you are still struggling with negative self-schema, talking to a mental health professional can be helpful.

American Psychological Association. Self-schema .

Markus H. Self-schemata and information processing about the self . J Personal Social Psychol . 1977;35(2):63-78. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.35.2.63

Prince D. What about place? Considering the role of physical environment on youth imagining of future possible selves . J Youth Studies . 2014;17(6):697-716. doi:10.1080/13676261.2013.836591

McAurthur BA, Burke TA, Connolly SL, et al. A longitudinal investigation of cognitive self-schemas across adolescent development . J Youth Adolesc . 2019;48(3):635-647. doi:10.1007/s10964-018-00981-1

DeLamater JD, Myers DJ, Collett JL. Social Psychology . 8th ed. Avalon Publishing.

Pulverman CS, Boyd RL, Stanton AM, Meston CM. Changes in the sexual self-schema of women with a history of childhood sexual abuse following expressive writing treatment . Psychol Trauma Theory Res Pract Policy . 2017;9(2):181-188. doi:10.1037/tra0000163

Ng C. Examining the self-congruent engagement hypothesis: The link between academic self-schemas, motivational goals, learning approaches and achievement within an academic year . Educ Psychol. 2014;34(6):730-762. doi:10.1080/01443410.2013.832151

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

OPINION article

Self-we-others schemata differentiation as a base for personal agency and social attitudes.

• Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

The extent to which the Self-schema is differentiated from the cognitive schemata representing other people has important meaning for diversification of social vs. individual identity ( Snyder and Fromkin, 1980 ; Brewer, 1991 ; Jarymowicz, 1993 ), socialization and individuation ( Ziller, 1964 ), and interdependence and individualism ( Waterman, 1981 ). All these concepts must be taken into account in order to gain a better understanding of the social world ( Greenwald and Pratkanis, 1984 ; Baumeister, 2005 ; Leary and Tangney, 2013 ).

Cognitive individuation is connected with a subject's individuality. Unfortunately, this concept is sometimes treated as being synonymous with an individualistic orientation, in the sense of the possession of egocentric goals. In the Chinese language, the notion of individuality is replaced by selfishness ( Nisbett, 2003 ). Yet it is evident that all human decisions and actions involve the ego to some degree and that ego-involvement is imperative for the realization of goals ( Allport, 1955 )—all goals, whether they are personal or social. The concept of individuality can be used to refer to self-awareness and a clear view of personal preferences and goals, as well as to the ability to delay gratification and to act in a socially responsible way.

The Main Assumptions

The aim of this paper is to contribute some empirical evidence to the analysis of the relationship between the Self-schema and social functioning. Our studies were based on the following assumptions ( Jarymowicz, 1987 ; Jarymowicz and Szuster, 2014 ): (1) individuality results from the individuation process, which involves differentiation between the Self-Other schemata and leads to lower or higher Self-schema distinctness; (2) Self-distinctness is a prerequisite of self-awareness and personal agency, as well as of decentration and the capacity to understand other people ( Piaget, 1965 , 1973 ); (3) Self-distinctness—based on Self vs. We schemata differentiation—allows transgression of the in-group perspective and reduction of in-group favoritism.

Self as the Subject vs. Self as the Distinct Object of Knowledge

The Self duality is considered crucial to personal agency ( Reykowski, 1979 ; Epstein, 1980 ; Greenwald and Pratkanis, 1984 ; Jarymowicz, 2008 ; Leary and Tangney, 2013 ). An individual becomes the object of self-cognition, self-esteem, and self-control, capable of recognizing the world from a non-egocentric perspective ( Markus, 1977 ; Bandura, 1982 ; Reykowski, 1989 ; Kozielecki, 1997 ; Sedikides and Skowronski, 2003 ; Baumeister, 2005 ; Gazzaniga, 2011 ). The studies discussed herein focus on the relationships between the degree of the Self-distinctness, the efficacy of self-control, and the various attitudes that are displayed toward out-group members.

We drew from research on social comparison processes in the operationalization of the Self-schema distinctness. Numerous data have implicated that estimating the degree of Self-Other similarity depends on the motivation to be similar/dissimilar to/from others ( Suls and Miller, 1977 ). Some results showed that whilst the Self-Other similarity is attractive, so too is the difference. It was found that an unconscious tendency exists to seek out diversity and uniqueness ( Fromkin, 1972 ; Codol, 1979 ; Snyder and Fromkin, 1980 ), and that the degree of similarity is often underestimated ( Codol and Jarymowicz, 1984 ). In our research, we distinguished between: (1) assessment of the Self-Other similarity by an individual; and (2) similarity between the attributes ascribed by an individual to the Self and to Others during the course of a procedure that did not involve explicit comparisons.

Measurement of Self-distinctness

The Questionnaire of Social Perception ( Jarymowicz, 1993 ) was developed to measure the Self-schema distinctness. This technique consists of three parts, which are successively handed to the participants in order to focus their attention on: (1) Others; (2) the We category; and (3) the Self. The questionnaire contains a list of 70 human traits (like creativity, honesty, rationality). The list is used three times.

1. Each participant first chooses the 10 traits to which she/he refers (“most often”) when thinking about other people.

2. In the next stage, the participant first has to indicate who the people are that she/he refers to as “we”, and is then required to select 10 traits that she/he recognizes in reference to “we.”

3. Finally, the participant selects the 10 traits referred (“most often”) to the Self.

Two indices of Self-distinctness are computed: (1) the number of unrepeated traits ascribed to the Self vs. to Others (SOD); and (2) the number of unrepeated traits ascribed to the Self vs. to the We (SWD). The latter SWD indices were used to test the hypothesis predicting that Self-We cognitive distinctness is necessary to limit the tendency to in-group favoritism.

Research on the Relationship between Self-distinctness and Personal Agency

Wolak (1993) showed that the efficacy of emotional control training is related to Self-distinctness. His hypotheses were based on reports stating that Self-identity correlates with the efficacy of self-control (e.g., Organ, 1973 ). In Wolak's laboratory studies, unexpected sounds were applied to provoke emotional tension and the participants were requested to try to relax as quickly as possible. Changes in the number of spontaneous fluctuations and skin resistance were measured throughout. The emotional control training consisted of giving the participants some feedback on how effective they were at reducing level of tension. After the accurate feedback-based training, most of the participants were better at controlling their tension. However, when false feedback was provided in the next stage of the experiment, only the participants with high SOD indices displayed the same level of self-control improvement as in the previous stage.

We assumed that the Self-schema development leads to a stage wherein self-control becomes effortless and automatic. Some implications were tested by use of the implicit affective priming paradigm ( Murphy and Zajonc, 1993 ; Ohme, 2007 ), which involves subliminal exposure to affective stimuli (faces displaying expressions of disgust or joy). Such implicit priming usually influences the subsequent evaluation of explicitly exposed neutral stimuli (unfamiliar Chinese ideograms): neutral stimuli are rated positively or negatively, depending on the valence of the implicitly primed stimulus ( Kobylińska and Karwowska, 2014 ). In some of our studies ( Jarymowicz, 2008 ), we used a modification of the affective priming paradigm to measure the implicit self-reference effect ( Błaszczak and Imbir, 2012 ). There, the participants were presented with Chinese ideograms and told that they denoted human traits. They were then asked to estimate the degree to which a given ideogram described them. As a result, the participants were more likely to ascribe positively primed ideograms to themselves than negatively primed ones. But we also found that the magnitude of this effect varied with the level of Self-distinctness. The higher the SOD index of a subject, the lower was the implicit self-reference effect, thus, the less likely she/he was to attribute neutral, unfamiliar ideograms to her or himself. In other words, the data showed that some people are resistant to affective priming and fail to relate irrelevant stimuli to themselves (even those exposed implicitly).

To explore this finding, we turned to literature on implicit information processing ( Uleman and Bargh, 1989 ; Reber, 1993 ; Underwood, 1996 ; Holyoak and Morrison, 2005 ). We hypothesized that some people have some insight into implicit information. To test this hypothesis, we used the implicit semantic priming paradigm: the subliminal exposition of words ( Dobrenko and Jarymowicz, 2011 ). The participants were told that some words were invisible, and then subsequently asked to indicate which of the set of two explicitly exposed words—a synonym or a new word—corresponded to the word presented subliminally. A series of experiments showed that some participants were capable of recognizing the meaning of subliminally presented words, wherein they were more susceptible to choose the synonyms of the subliminal stimulus than unrelated words. In further studies, we demonstrated that he level of word recognition positively correlates with the Self-distinctive schema complexity ( Jarymowicz et al., 2013 ).

Research on the Relationship between Self-distinctness and Social Attitudes

Self-distinctness and the concept of individuality are often associated with diverse manifestations of egocentrism. For instance, twentieth century intercultural psychology characterized Eastern cultures as representing a conjunction of “interdependent” Self-schema and prosocial attitudes, whereas Western cultures were held to represent a combination of “independent” Self-schema, egocentric perceptions, and more or less egoistic behavior ( Markus and Kitayama, 1991 ). Some authors try to argue that “prosocial orientation” often benefits the in-group (e.g., Triandis, 1989 ); we try to argue that attitudes toward in-group vs. out-group members depend on the Self-We-Others schemata differentiation ( Jarymowicz, 1999 ).

In a study by Krzemionka (1993) , participants were asked to declare their preferences with respect to 50 different activities and then shown the preferences of an unknown partner. In one condition, the “partner” was highly dissimilar; in the second condition, the “partner” was highly similar to the participant. Next, the participants estimated the attractiveness of this “partner”. The degree of Self-distinctness was also measured. Krzemionka showed that the estimations of partner attractiveness were related to SOD indices; more specifically, those participants with a low SOD rated similar partners as being more attractive than dissimilar partners, whereas no such differences were observed among participants with high SOD indices.

In studies taking into account the in-group vs. out-group opposition, we also found some confirmation that Self-distinctness plays a role in social perception ( Jarymowicz, 2002 , 2006 ). Some studies were based on the assumption that the similarity perceived between the Self and the Other corresponds in some way to the psychological self-other distance ( Codol, 1979 )—we found, for instance, that Polish participants underestimated their similarity to another person more frequently when the “other person” presented to them was German or Russian rather than a fellow countryman—but the effect was not significant in groups of participants with the highest relative level of Self-distinctness (of the SWD indices).

In numerous other studies, we found that effects related to in-group vs. out-group divisions correlate clearly with the Self-We differentiation. In one study ( Jarymowicz, 2006 ), the participants were asked to read the positive opinions (condition 1) or the negative opinions (condition 2) of foreigners about Poles. They were then requested to generate (“as much as possible”) the positive and negative traits of Poles and Russians. In the first condition, the participants listed a similar number of positive and negative traits for both Poles and Russians. In the second condition, however, they showed a greater positive inclination toward Poles. Once again, this effect was only observed in participants with a relatively low SWD index.

A long and systematic series of studies on conspiracy beliefs carried out by Grzesiak-Feldman (2006) brought clear and coherent results. Data showed that Self-distinctness (the SWD indices) negatively correlated with conspiracy theory beliefs concerning the diverse activities of Jews.

Analogous effects were found in reference to individual representatives of in-group vs. out-group members. In an experimental study ( Jarymowicz and Szuster, 2014 ), the participants were presented with a photograph of an attractive young woman and a brief description of her life and interests. In one condition, she was described as having participated in the Miss Polonia beauty pageant some years ago, while in the other condition, there was reference to her participation in the Miss Israel beauty pageant. In both conditions, the participants were asked several questions about the woman's skills and abilities. The main finding was that she was rated as being more competent when identified as being Polish rather than Israeli, but this effect of discrimination was only observed in those participants with a low SWD index.

To Summarize

Taken together, the results of the studies mentioned above indicate a certain degree of interdependence between the Self-schema distinctness and some aspects of personal agency (e.g., self-control and unconscious resistance to the influence of subliminal, irrelevant affective stimuli). Moreover, the results of the studies suggest that Self-distinctness (especially distinctness between the Self-We schemata) is an important determinant of the ability to perceive the Other from a non-egocentric or non-ethnocentric perspective. On the basis of the empirical data, we posit that Self-distinctness is a necessary (although not sufficient) condition of exocentric altruism and engaging for the benefit of other people—even those who are members of the out-group ( Karyłowski, 1982 ; Szuster, 1994 , 2005 ; Rutkowska and Szuster, 2011 ; Jarymowicz and Szuster, 2014 ).

Author Contributions

Contributions to the conception and design of the empirical works: MJ 70%, AS 30%. Drafting the work and revising it critically for important intellectual content: MJ 60%, AS 40%. Final approval of the version to be published: MJ 50%, AS 50%.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Allport, G. W. (1955). Becoming: Basic Consideration for a Psychology of Personality . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bandura, A. (1982). “The self and mechanisms of agency,” in Psychological Perspective on the Self , ed J. Suls (Hailsdale, NJ: Erlbaum), 3–39.

Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning and Social Life . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Błaszczak, W., and Imbir, K. (2012). Use of affective priming to measure implicit self-reference effect. Psychol. Rep. 111, 107–114. doi: 10.2466/07.21.24.PR0.111.4.107-114

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: on being the same and different. Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. 17, 475–487. doi: 10.1177/0146167291175001

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Codol, J.-P. (1979). Samblables et Différents. Recherche sur la Quête de la Similitude et de la Différentiation Sociale . Aix-en-Provence: University de Provence.

Codol, J.-P., and Jarymowicz, M. (1984). L'estimation de la ressemblance entre des personnes: quelques directions de recherche. Bull. Psychol. 366, 813–822.

Dobrenko, K., and Jarymowicz, M. (2011). Rozpoznawanie eksponowanych podprogowo słów o negatywnych bądź pozytywnych konotacjach. Psychol. Ekol. Genet. 23, 29–44.

PubMed Abstract | Google Scholar

Epstein, S. (1980). “The self-concept: a review and proposal of integrative theory of personality,” in Personality Issues and Current Research , ed E. Staub (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall), 12–51.

Fromkin, H. L. (1972). Feelings of interpersonal undistinctiveness: an unpleasant affective state. J. Exp. Res. Pers. 6, 176–182.

Gazzaniga, M. S. (2011). Who's in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain . New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Greenwald, A. G., and Pratkanis, A. R. (1984). “The Self,” in Handbook of Social Cognition,Vol. 3 , eds R. S. Wyer, and T. K. Srull (Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum), 129–178.

Grzesiak-Feldman, M. (2006). Tożsamościowe Uwarunkowania Posługiwania się Stereotypami . Warszawa: Wyd UW.

Holyoak, K. J., and Morrison, R. G. (2005). The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Jarymowicz, M. (1987). Perceiving One's Own Individuality: Estimation and Attractiveness of One's Own Distinctness from Others . Warszawa: Wyd. UW.

Jarymowicz, M. (1993). To Know Self—To Understand Others . Delft: Eburon.

Jarymowicz, M. (1999). “O godzeniu wody z ogniem: związki kolektywizmu z indywidualizmem,” in Psychologia Rozumienia Zjawisk Społecznych , eds B. Wojciszke and M. Jarymowicz (Warszawa: PWN), 121–152.

Jarymowicz, M. (2002). “Soi social, differenciation soi/nous/autres et coexistence interculturelle,” in Identités, Acculturation et Alterité , eds C. Sabatier, H. Malewska-Peyre and F. Tanon (Paris: L'Harmattan), 33–41.

Jarymowicz, M. (2006). O Przejawach Faworyzowania Swoich Względem Obcych i Rzekomej Nieuchronności Zjawiska . Warszawa: Wyd. IP PAN.

Jarymowicz, M. (2008). Psychologiczne Podstawy Podmiotowości . Warszawa: Wyd. Nauk. PWN.

Jarymowicz, M., Dobrenko, K., and Michalak, N. (2013). Złożoność standardów JA a efektywność rozpoznawania treści utajonych słów o różnych komponentach afektywnych. Psychol. Społ. 8, 448–458.

Jarymowicz, M., and Szuster, A. (2014). Rozmowy o Rozwoju Osobowym: od Koncentracji na Sobie i Swoich do Otwartości na Świat i Altruizmu . Warszawa: Wyd. UW.

Karyłowski, J. (1982). “On the two types of altruistic behavior: doing good to feel good versus to make the other feel good,” in Cooperation and Helping Behavior , eds V. Derlega and J. Grzelak (New York, NY: Academic Press), 398–413.

Kobylińska, D., and Karwowska, D. (2014). Assimilation and contrast effects in suboptimal affective priming paradigm. Front. Psychol. 5:498. doi: 10.3389/psyg.2014.00498

Kozielecki, J. (1997). Transgresja i Kultura . Warszawa: Wyd. Akad. ŻAK.

Krzemionka, D. (1993). “The cognitive Self-distinctness and attractiveness of similar and dissimilar partner,” in To know Self—to Understand Others , ed M. Jarymowicz (Delft: Eburon), 109–125.

Leary, M. R., and Tangney, J. P. (2013). Handbook of Self and Identity—2nd Edn. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Markus, H. R. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 35, 63–78. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.35.2.63

Markus, H. R., and Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychol. Rev. 98, 224–253. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

Murphy, S. T., and Zajonc, R. B. (1993). Affect, cognition, and awareness: affective priming with optimal and suboptimal stimulus exposures. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 64, 723–739. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.64.5.723

Nisbett, R. E. (2003). The Geography of Thought . New York, NY: Free Press.

Ohme, R. K. (2007). Nieuświadomiony Afekt. Najnowsze Odkrycia . Gdańsk: GWP.

Organ, D. W. (1973). Locus of control and clarity of self-concept. Percept. Motor Skills 37, 100–102. doi: 10.2466/pms.1973.37.1.100

Piaget, J. (1965). Moral Judgment in the Child . New York, NY: Free Press.

Piaget, J. (1973). To Understand is to Invent . New York, NY: Viking Press.

Reber, A. S. (1993). Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Reykowski, J. (1979). Motywacja, Postawy Prospołeczne a Osobowość . Warszawa: PWN.

Reykowski, J. (1989). “Dimensions of development of moral values,” in Social and Moral Values , eds N. Eisenberg, J. Reykowski and E. Staub (Hillsdale, NJ: Earlbaum), 23–44.

Rutkowska, D., and Szuster, A. (2011). Choosing an interaction partner: the role of representations of other people and coding systems in the preference pattern for selection criteria. Stud. Psychol. 53, 185–199.

Sedikides, C., and Skowronski, J. J. (2003). “Evolution of the self: issues and prospects,” in Handbook of Self and Identity , eds R. Leary and J. P. Tangney (New York, NY: Guilford), 594–609.

Snyder, C. R., and Fromkin, H. L. (1980). Uniqueness. The Human Pursuit of Difference . New York, NY: Plenum Press.

Suls, J. M., and Miller, R. L. (1977). Social Comparison Processes . Washington, DC: Hemipshere Publ.

Szuster, A. (1994). “O uwarunkowaniach zdolności miłowania innych: poznawcze wyodrębnienie własnej osoby a przychylność innym,” in Poza Egocentryczną Perspektywą Widzenia Siebie i Świata , ed M. Jarymowicz (Warszawa: Wyd. IP PAN), 87–104.

Szuster, A. (2005). W Poszukiwanie Źródeł i Uwarunkowań Ludzkiego Altruizmu . Warszawa: Wyd. IP PAN.

Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in different cultural contexts. Psychol. Rev. 96, 506–520. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.96.3.506

Uleman, J. S., and Bargh, J. A. (1989). Unintended Thought . New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Underwood, G. (1996). Implicit Cognition . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Waterman, A. S. (1981). Individualism and interdependence. Am. Psychol. 7, 762–773. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.36.7.762

Wolak, K. (1993). “Cognitive self-distinctness and effectiveness of emotional control training,” in To Know Self—to Understand Others , ed M. Jarymowicz (Delft: Eburon), 61–75.

Ziller, R. C. (1964). Individuation and socialization. Hum. Relat. 17, 341–360. doi: 10.1177/001872676401700403

Keywords: self-distinctness, self-control, implicit priming, resistance to implicit affect, in-group vs. out-group attitudes

Citation: Jarymowicz M and Szuster A (2016) Self-We-Others Schemata Differentiation as a Base for Personal Agency and Social Attitudes. Front. Psychol . 7:1227. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01227

Received: 17 June 2016; Accepted: 02 August 2016; Published: 18 August 2016.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2016 Jarymowicz and Szuster. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Maria Jarymowicz, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

EN - English

DE - Deutsch

ES - Español

IT - Italiano

FR - Français

PT - Português

Table of content

Full table of contents

In general, a schema is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.

More specifically, self-schemas refer to the mental representations that reflect who someone is—the beliefs, experiences, and generalizations about the self in certain settings or situations throughout life. People can hold self-schemas for different characteristics and traits, interests, and even behaviors. For instance, one person might activate their "healthy-eater" schema: They eat more vegetables and less junk food (Holub, Haney, & Roelse, 2012). Our views of our selves are constantly updated with new encounters and experiences. How many times have you asked yourself: "Who am I?" Has the answer changed?   

This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.

Terms of Use

Recommend to library

JoVE NEWSLETTERS

JoVE Journal

Methods Collections

JoVE Encyclopedia of Experiments

JoVE Business

JoVE Science Education

JoVE Lab Manual

Faculty Resource Center

Publishing Process

Editorial Board

Scope and Policies

Peer Review

Testimonials

Subscriptions

Library Advisory Board

Copyright © 2024 MyJoVE Corporation. All rights reserved

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

4.1 The Cognitive Self: The Self-Concept

Learning objectives.

• Define and describe the self-concept and its influence on information processing.
• Describe the concept of self-complexity, and explain how it influences social cognition and behavior.
• Review the measures that are used to assess the self-concept.
• Differentiate the different types of self-awareness and self-consciousness.

Some nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and perhaps dolphins, have at least a primitive sense of self (Boysen & Himes, 1999). We know this because of some interesting experiments that have been done with animals. In one study (Gallup, 1970), researchers painted a red dot on the forehead of anesthetized chimpanzees and then placed the animals in a cage with a mirror. When the chimps woke up and looked in the mirror, they touched the dot on their faces, not the dot on the faces in the mirror. This action suggests that the chimps understood that they were looking at themselves and not at other animals, and thus we can assume that they are able to realize that they exist as individuals. Most other animals, including dogs, cats, and monkeys, never realize that it is themselves they see in a mirror.

A simple test of self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. Humans and chimpanzees can pass the test; dogs never do.

Allen Skyy – Mirror – CC BY 2.0; 6SN7 – Reflecting Bullmatian – CC BY 2.0; Mor – There’s a monkey in my mirror – CC BY-NC 2.0.

Infants who have similar red dots painted on their foreheads recognize themselves in a mirror in the same way that the chimps do, and they do this by about 18 months of age (Asendorpf, Warkentin, & Baudonnière, 1996; Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996). The child’s knowledge about the self continues to develop as the child grows. By age 2, the infant becomes aware of his or her gender as a boy or a girl. At age 4, self-descriptions are likely to be based on physical features, such as one’s hair color, and by about age 6, the child is able to understand basic emotions and the concepts of traits, being able to make statements such as “I am a nice person” (Harter, 1998).

By the time they are in grade school, children have learned that they are unique individuals, and they can think about and analyze their own behavior. They also begin to show awareness of the social situation—they understand that other people are looking at and judging them the same way that they are looking at and judging others (Doherty, 2009).

Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept

Part of what is developing in children as they grow is the fundamental cognitive part of the self, known as the self-concept . The self-concept is a knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals . Throughout childhood and adolescence, the self-concept becomes more abstract and complex and is organized into a variety of different cognitive aspects , known as self-schemas . Children have self-schemas about their progress in school, their appearance, their skills at sports and other activities, and many other aspects, and these self-schemas direct and inform their processing of self-relevant information (Harter, 1999).

By the time we are adults, our sense of self has grown dramatically. In addition to possessing a wide variety of self-schemas, we can analyze our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and we can see that other people may have different thoughts than we do. We become aware of our own mortality. We plan for the future and consider the potential outcomes of our actions. At times, having a sense of self may seem unpleasant—when we are not proud of our appearance, actions, or relationships with others, or when we think about and become afraid of the possibility of our own death. On the other hand, the ability to think about the self is very useful. Being aware of our past and able to speculate about the future is adaptive—it allows us to modify our behavior on the basis of our mistakes and to plan for future activities. When we do poorly on an exam, for instance, we may study harder for the next one or even consider changing our major if we continue to have problems in the major we have chosen.

One way to learn about a person’s self-concept and the many self-schemas that it contains is by using self-report measures. One of these is a deceptively simple fill-in-the-blank measure that has been used by many scientists to get a picture of the self-concept (Rees & Nicholson, 1994). All of the 20 items in the measure are exactly the same, but the person is asked to fill in a different response for each statement. This self-report measure, known as the Twenty Statements Test, can reveal a lot about a person because it is designed to measure the most accessible—and thus the most important—parts of one’s self-concept. Try it for yourself, at least five times:

• I am (please fill in the blank) __________________________________

Although each person has a unique self-concept, we can identify some characteristics that are common across the responses given by different people on the measure. Physical characteristics are an important component of the self-concept, and they are mentioned by many people when they describe themselves. If you’ve been concerned lately that you’ve been gaining weight, you might write, “I am overweight. ” If you think you’re particularly good looking (“I am attractive ”), or if you think you’re too short (“I am too short ”), those things might have been reflected in your responses. Our physical characteristics are important to our self-concept because we realize that other people use them to judge us. People often list the physical characteristics that make them different from others in either positive or negative ways (“I am blond ,” “I am short ”), in part because they understand that these characteristics are salient and thus likely to be used by others when judging them (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978).

A second characteristic of the self-concept reflects our memberships in the social groups that we belong to and care about. Common responses in this regard include such ones as “I am an artist ,” “I am Jewish ,” and “I am a student at Augsburg College. ” As we will see later in this chapter, our group memberships form an important part of the self-concept because they provide us with our social identity —the sense of our self that involves our memberships in social groups.

The remainder of the self-concept is normally made up of personality traits —the specific and stable personality characteristics that describe an individual (“I am friendly, ” “I am shy, ” “I am persistent ”). These individual differences (the person part of the person-situation interaction) are important determinants of our behavior, and this aspect of the self-concept reflects this variation across people.

Self-Complexity Provides a Buffer Against Negative Emotions

The self-concept is a rich and complex social representation. In addition to our thoughts about who we are right now, the self-concept includes thoughts about our past self—our experiences, accomplishments, and failures—and about our future self—our hopes, plans, goals, and possibilities (Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004). The self-concept also includes thoughts about our relationships with others. You no doubt have thoughts about your family and close friends that have become part of yourself. Indeed, if you don’t see the people you really care about for a while, or if you should lose them in one way or another, you will naturally feel sad because you are in essence missing part of yourself.

Although every human being has a complex self-concept, there are nevertheless individual differences in self-complexity , the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves (Linville, 1987; Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Some selves are more complex than others, and these individual differences can be important in determining psychological outcomes. Having a complex self means that we have a lot of different ways of thinking about ourselves. For example, imagine a woman whose self-concept contains the social identities of student, girlfriend, daughter, psychology major , and tennis player and who has encountered a wide variety of life experiences. Social psychologists would say that she has high self-complexity. On the other hand, a man who perceives himself solely as a student or solely as a member of the hockey team and who has had a relatively narrow range of life experiences would be said to have low self-complexity. For those with high self-complexity, the various self-aspects of the self are separate, such that the positive and negative thoughts about a particular self-aspect do not spill over into thoughts about other aspects.

Research has found that compared with people low in self-complexity, those higher in self-complexity experience more positive outcomes. People with more complex self-concepts have been found to have lower levels of stress and illness (Kalthoff & Neimeyer, 1993), a greater tolerance for frustration (Gramzow, Sedikides, Panter, & Insko, 2000), and more positive and less negative reactions to events that they experience (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Wherry, 1992).

The benefits of self-complexity occur because the various domains of the self help to buffer us against negative events and help us to enjoy the positive events that we experience. For people low in self-complexity, negative outcomes on one aspect of the self tend to have a big impact on their self-esteem. If the only thing that Maria cares about is getting into medical school, she may be devastated if she fails to make it. On the other hand, Marty, who is also passionate about medical school but who has a more complex self-concept, may be better able to adjust to such a blow by turning to other interests. People with high self-complexity can also take advantage of the positive outcomes that occur on any of the dimensions that are important to them.

Although having high self-complexity seems useful overall, it does not seem to help everyone equally and also does not seem to help us respond to all events equally (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002). The benefits of self-complexity seem to be particularly strong on reactions to positive events. People with high self-complexity seem to react more positively to the good things that happen to them but not necessarily less negatively to the bad things. And the positive effects of self-complexity are stronger for people who have other positive aspects of the self as well. This buffering effect is stronger for people with high self-esteem, whose self-complexity involves positive rather than negative characteristics (Koch & Shepperd, 2004), and for people who feel that they have control over their outcomes (McConnell et al., 2005).

Studying the Self-Concept

Because the self-concept is a schema, it can be studied using the methods that we would use to study any other schema. As we have seen, one approach is to use self-report—for instance, by asking people to list the things that come to mind when they think about themselves. Another approach is to use neuroimaging to directly study the self in the brain. As you can see in Figure 4.1 , neuroimaging studies have shown that information about the self is stored in the prefrontal cortex, the same place that other information about people is stored (Barrios et al., 2008). This finding suggests that we store information about ourselves as people the same way we store information about others.

This figure shows the areas of the human brain that are known to be important in processing information about the self. They include primarily areas of the prefrontal cortex (areas 1, 2, 4, and 5). Data are from Lieberman (2010).

Still another approach to studying the self is to investigate how we attend to and remember things that relate to the self. Indeed, because the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, it has extraordinary influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Have you ever been at a party where there was a lot of noise and bustle, and yet you were surprised to discover that you could easily hear your own name being mentioned in the background? Because our own name is such an important part of our self-concept, and because we value it highly, it is highly accessible. We are very alert for, and react quickly to, the mention of our own name.

Other research has found that information that is related to the self-schema is better remembered than information that is unrelated to it, and that information related to the self can also be processed very quickly (Lieberman, Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004). In one classic study that demonstrated the importance of the self-schema, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) conducted an experiment to assess how college students recalled information that they had learned under different processing conditions. All the participants were presented with the same list of 40 adjectives to process, but through the use of random assignment, the participants were given one of four different sets of instructions about how to process the adjectives.

Participants assigned to the structural task condition were asked to judge whether the word was printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. Participants in the phonemic task condition were asked whether or not the word rhymed with another given word. In the semantic task condition , the participants were asked if the word was a synonym of another word. And in the self-reference task condition , participants indicated whether or not the given adjective was or was not true of themselves. After completing the specified task, each participant was asked to recall as many adjectives as he or she could remember.

Figure 4.2 The Self-Reference Effect

The chart shows the proportion of adjectives that students were able to recall under each of four learning conditions. The same words were recalled significantly better when they were processed in relation to the self than when they were processed in other ways. Data from Rogers et al. (1977).

Rogers and his colleagues hypothesized that different types of processing would have different effects on memory. As you can see in Figure 4.2 “The Self-Reference Effect” , the students in the self-reference task condition recalled significantly more adjectives than did students in any other condition. The finding that information that is processed in relationship to the self is particularly well remembered , known as the self-reference effect , is powerful evidence that the self-concept helps us organize and remember information. The next time you are studying for an exam, you might try relating the material to your own experiences—the self-reference effect suggests that doing so will help you better remember the information.

Self-Awareness

Like any other schema, the self-concept can vary in its current cognitive accessibility. Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept . When the self-concept becomes highly accessible because of our concerns about being observed and potentially judged by others, we experience the publicly induced self-awareness known as self-consciousness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Rochat, 2009).

I am sure that you can remember times when your self-awareness was increased and you became self-conscious—for instance, when you were giving a class presentation and you were perhaps painfully aware that everyone was looking at you, or when you did something in public that embarrassed you. Emotions such as anxiety and embarrassment occur in large part because the self-concept becomes highly accessible, and they serve as a signal to monitor and perhaps change our behavior.

Not all aspects of our self-concepts are equally accessible at all times, and these long-term differences in the accessibility of the different self-schemas help create individual differences, for instance, in terms of our current concerns and interests. You may know some people for whom the physical appearance component of the self-concept is highly accessible. They check their hair every time they see a mirror, worry whether their clothes are making them look good, and do a lot of shopping—for themselves, of course. Other people are more focused on their social group memberships—they tend to think about things in terms of their role as Christians or as members of the tennis team. Think back for a moment to the opener of this chapter and consider Dancing Matt Harding. What do you think are his most highly accessible self-schemas?

In addition to variation in long-term accessibility, the self and its various components may also be made temporarily more accessible through priming. We become more self-aware when we are in front of a mirror, when a TV camera is focused on us, when we are speaking in front of an audience, or when we are listening to our own tape-recorded voice (Kernis & Grannemann, 1988). When the knowledge contained in the self-schema becomes more accessible, it also becomes more likely to be used in information processing and more likely to influence our behavior.

Beaman, Klentz, Diener, and Svanum (1979) conducted a field experiment to see if self-awareness would influence children’s honesty. The researchers expected that most children viewed stealing as wrong but that they would be more likely to act on this belief when they were more self-aware. They conducted this experiment on Halloween evening in homes within the city of Seattle. When children who were trick-or-treating came to particular houses, they were greeted by one of the experimenters, shown a large bowl of candy, and were told to take only one piece each. The researchers unobtrusively watched each child to see how many pieces he or she actually took.

Behind the candy bowl in some of the houses was a large mirror. In the other houses, there was no mirror. Out of the 363 children who were observed in the study, 19% disobeyed instructions and took more than one piece of candy. However, the children who were in front of a mirror were significantly less likely to steal (14.4%) than were those who did not see a mirror (28.5%). These results suggest that the mirror activated the children’s self-awareness, which reminded them of their belief about the importance of being honest. Other research has shown that being self-aware has a powerful influence on other behaviors as well. For instance, people are more likely to stay on their diets, eat better foods, and act more morally overall when they are self-aware (Baumeister, Zell, & Tice, 2007; Heatherton, Polivy, Herman, & Baumeister, 1993). What this means is that when you are trying to stick to a diet, study harder, or engage in other difficult behaviors, you should try to focus on yourself and the importance of the goals you have set.

Social psychologists are interested in studying self-awareness because it has such an important influence on behavior. People lose their self-awareness and become more likely to violate acceptable social norms when, for example, they put on a Halloween mask or engage in other behaviors that hide their identities. The members of the militant White supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan wear white robes and hats when they meet and when they engage in their racist behavior. And when people are in large crowds, such as in a mass demonstration or a riot, they may become so much a part of the group that they lose their individual self-awareness and experience deindividuation — the loss of self-awareness and individual accountability in groups (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952; Zimbardo, 1969).

Examples of situations that may create deindividuation include wearing uniforms that hide the self and alcohol intoxication.

Craig ONeal – KKK Rally in Georgia – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; Bart Everson – Nazis – CC BY 2.0; John Penny – Snuggie Keg Stand – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Two particular types of individual differences in self-awareness have been found to be important, and they relate to self-concern and other-concern, respectively (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975; Lalwani, Shrum, & Chiu, 2009). Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings . People who are high in private self-consciousness tend to think about themselves a lot and agree with statements such as “I’m always trying to figure myself out” and “I am generally attentive to my inner feelings.” People who are high on private self-consciousness are likely to base their behavior on their own inner beliefs and values—they let their inner thoughts and feelings guide their actions—and they may be particularly likely to strive to succeed on dimensions that allow them to demonstrate their own personal accomplishments (Lalwani, Shrum & Chiu, 2009).

Public self-consciousness , in contrast, refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and to be particularly aware of the extent to which we are meeting the standards set by others . Those high in public self-consciousness agree with statements such as “I’m concerned about what other people think of me,” “Before I leave my house, I check how I look,” and “I care a lot about how I present myself to others.” These are the people who check their hair in a mirror they pass and spend a lot of time getting ready in the morning; they are more likely to let the opinions of others (rather than their own opinions) guide their behaviors and are particularly concerned with making good impressions on others.

Research has found cultural differences in public self-consciousness, such that people from East Asian collectivistic cultures have higher public self-consciousness than do people from Western individualistic cultures. Steve Heine and his colleagues (Heine, Takemoto, Moskalenko, Lasaleta, & Henrich, 2008) found that when college students from Canada (a Western culture) completed questionnaires in front of a large mirror, they subsequently became more self-critical and were less likely to cheat (much like the trick-or-treaters we discussed earlier) than were Canadian students who were not in front of a mirror. However, the presence of the mirror had no effect on college students from Japan. This person-situation interaction is consistent with the idea that people from East Asian cultures are normally already high in public self-consciousness, in comparison with people from Western cultures, and thus manipulations designed to increase public self-consciousness are less influential for them.

Overestimating How Others View Us

Although the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, and although people (particularly those high in self-consciousness) are aware of their self and how they are seen by others, this does not mean that people are always thinking about themselves. In fact, people do not generally focus on their self-concept any more than they focus on the other things and other people in their environments (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982).

On the other hand, self-awareness is more powerful for the person experiencing it than it is for others who are looking on, and the fact that self-concept is so highly accessible frequently leads people to overestimate the extent to which other people are focusing on them (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). Although you may be highly self-conscious about of something you’ve done in a particular situation, that does not mean that others are necessarily paying all that much attention to you. Research by Thomas Gilovich and his colleagues (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000) found that people who were interacting with others thought that other people were paying much more attention to them than those other people reported actually doing.

Teenagers are particularly likely to be highly self-conscious, often believing that others are constantly watching them (Goossens, Beyers, Emmen, & van Aken, 2002). Because teens think so much about themselves, they are particularly likely to believe that others must be thinking about them, too (Rycek, Stuhr, McDermott, Benker, & Swartz, 1998). It is no wonder that everything a teen’s parents do suddenly feels embarrassing to them when they are in public.

People also often mistakenly believe that their internal states show to others more than they really do. Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec (1998) asked groups of five students to work together on a “lie detection” task. One at a time, each student stood up in front of the others and answered a question that the researcher had written on a card (e.g., “I have met David Letterman”). On each round, one person’s card indicated that they were to give a false answer, whereas the other four were told to tell the truth.

Figure 4.3 The Illusion of Transparency

After each round, the students who had not been asked to lie indicated which of the students they thought had actually lied in that round, and the liar was asked to estimate the number of other students who would correctly guess who had been the liar. As you can see in Figure 4.3 “The Illusion of Transparency” , the liars overestimated the detectability of their lies: On average, they predicted that over 44% of their fellow players had known that they were the liar, but in fact only about 25% were able to accurately identify them. Gilovitch and his colleagues called this effect the “illusion of transparency.”

Key Takeaways

• The self-concept is a schema that contains knowledge about us. It is primarily made up of physical characteristics, group memberships, and traits.
• Because the self-concept is so complex, it has extraordinary influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and we can remember information that is related to it well.
• Self-complexity, the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves, helps people respond more positively to events that they experience.
• Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept. Differences in the accessibility of different self-schemas help create individual differences, for instance, in terms of our current concerns and interests.
• When people lose their self-awareness, they experience deindividuation, and this may lead them to act in violation of their personal norms.
• Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings; public self-consciousness refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and the standards set by others.
• There are cultural differences in self-consciousness, such that public self-consciousness may normally be higher in Eastern than in Western cultures.
• People frequently overestimate the extent to which others are paying attention to them and accurately understand their true intentions in public situations.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• What are the most important aspects of your self-concept, and how do they influence your behavior?
• Consider people you know in terms of their self-complexity. What effects do these differences seem to have on their feelings and behavior?
• Can you think of ways that you have been influenced by your private and public self-consciousness?
• Do you think you have ever overestimated the extent to which people are paying attention to you in public?

Asendorpf, J. B., Warkentin, V., & Baudonnière, P-M. (1996). Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation. Developmental Psychology, 32 (2), 313–321.

Barrios, V., Kwan, V. S. Y., Ganis, G., Gorman, J., Romanowski, J., & Keenan, J. P. (2008). Elucidating the neural correlates of egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement. Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 17 (2), 451–456.

Baumeister, R. F., Zell, A. L., & Tice, D. M. (2007). How emotions facilitate and impair self-regulation. In J. J. Gross & J. J. E. Gross (Eds.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 408–426). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Beaman, A. L., Klentz, B., Diener, E., & Svanum, S. (1979). Self-awareness and transgression in children: Two field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (10), 1835–1846.

Boysen, S. T., & Himes, G. T. (1999). Current issues and emerging theories in animal cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 683–705.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Figurski, T. J. (1982). Self-awareness and aversive experience in everyday life. Journal of Personality, 50 (1), 15–28.

Doherty, M. J. (2009). Theory of mind: How children understand others’ thoughts and feelings. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Duval, S., & Wicklund, R. A. (1972). A theory of objective self-awareness . New York, NY: Academic Press.

Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43 , 522–527.

Festinger, L., Pepitone, A., & Newcomb, B. (1952). Some consequences of deindividuation in a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47, 382–389.

Gallup, G. G., Jr. (1970). Chimpanzees: self-recognition. Science, 167, 86–87.

Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (1999). The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency: Egocentric assessments of how we are seen by others. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8 (6), 165–168.

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (2), 211–222.

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (2), 332–346.

Goossens, L., Beyers, W., Emmen, M., & van Aken, M. (2002). The imaginary audience and personal fable: Factor analyses and concurrent validity of the “new look” measures. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 12 (2), 193–215.

Gramzow, R. H., Sedikides, C., Panter, A. T., & Insko, C. A. (2000). Aspects of self-regulation and self-structure as predictors of perceived emotional distress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 , 188–205.

Harter, S. (1998). The development of self-representations. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, & personality development (5th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 553–618). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Harter, S. (1999). The construction of the self: A developmental perspective . New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Heatherton, T. F., Polivy, J., Herman, C. P., & Baumeister, R. F. (1993). Self-awareness, task failure, and disinhibition: How attentional focus affects eating. Journal of Personality, 61, 138–143.

Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (7), 879–887.

Kalthoff, R. A., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1993). Self-complexity and psychological distress: A test of the buffering model. International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 6 (4), 327–349.

Kernis, M. H., & Grannemann, B. D. (1988). Private self-consciousness and perceptions of self-consistency. Personality and Individual Differences, 9 (5), 897–902.

Koch, E. J., & Shepperd, J. A. (2004). Is self-complexity linked to better coping? A review of the literature. Journal of Personality, 72 (4), 727–760.

Lalwani, A. K., Shrum, L. J., & Chiu, C.-Y. (2009). Motivated response styles: The role of cultural values, regulatory focus, and self-consciousness in socially desirable responding. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 870–882.

Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Social cognitive neuroscience. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (5th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 143–193). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Lieberman, M. D., Jarcho, J. M., & Satpute, A. B. (2004). Evidence-based and intuition-based self-knowledge: An fMRI study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (4), 421–435.

Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer against stress-related illness and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (4), 663–676.

McConnell, A. R., Renaud, J. M., Dean, K. K., Green, S. P., Lamoreaux, M. J., Hall, C. E.,…Rydel, R. J. (2005). Whose self is it anyway? Self-aspect control moderates the relation between self-complexity and well-being. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41 (1), 1–18. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2004.02.004.

McGuire, W. J., McGuire, C. V., Child, P., & Fujioka, T. (1978). Salience of ethnicity in the spontaneous self-concept as a function of one’s ethnic distinctiveness in the social enviornment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 , 511–520.

Niedenthal, P. M., Setterlund, M. B., & Wherry, M. B. (1992). Possible self-complexity and affective reactions to goal-relevant evaluation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63 (1), 5–16.

Oyserman, D., Bybee, D., Terry, K., & Hart-Johnson, T. (2004). Possible selves as roadmaps. Journal of Research in Personality, 38 (2), 130–149.

Povinelli, D. J., Landau, K. R., & Perilloux, H. K. (1996). Self-recognition in young children using delayed versus live feedback: Evidence of a developmental asynchrony. Child Development, 67 (4), 1540–1554.

Rafaeli-Mor, E., & Steinberg, J. (2002). Self-complexity and well-being: A review and research synthesis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 , 31–58.

Rees, A., & Nicholson, N. (1994). The Twenty Statements Test. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds.), Qualitative methods in organizational research: A practical guide (pp. 37–54). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Roccas, S., & Brewer, M. (2002). Social identity complexity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 (2), 88–106.

Rochat, P. (2009). Others in mind: Social origins of self-consciousness. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35 (9), 677–688.

Rycek, R. F., Stuhr, S. L., McDermott, J., Benker, J., & Swartz, M. D. (1998). Adolescent egocentrism and cognitive functioning during late adolescence. Adolescence, 33 , 746–750.

Zimbardo, P. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason and order versus deindividuation impulse and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.), Nebraska Symposium of Motivation (Vol. 17). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Principles of Social Psychology Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Module 3: The Self

Module Overview

Human beings, by their very nature, are prone to focus on the self and to engage in behavior to protect it. Module 3 will cover some of the ways this occurs. We will start by focusing on the self-concept or who we are and self-schemas. We will also discuss self-perception theory, possible selves, the self-reference effect, self-discrepancies, how others affect our sense of self, and cultural differences of the self. Then we will tackle the issue of self-esteem and its two forms – global and domain specific. Self-esteem across the life span and gender and cross-cultural differences will be examined. We will discuss how self-esteem is affected, and protected, when mortality is made salient, self-efficacy and locus of control, self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-enhancement. Our third section will cover self-presentation and specific strategies we use such as self-promotion, ingratiation, false modesty, self-verification, and self-monitoring. Finally, we will discuss cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self, such as the self-serving bias, false consensus effect, false uniqueness effect, and unrealistic optimism and defensive pessimism.

Module Outline

3.1. The Self-Concept

3.2. self-esteem, 3.3. self-presentation, 3.4. cognitive biases and heuristics used to bolster the self.

Module Learning Outcomes

• Define the self-concept and clarify how we learn about the self.
• Define self-esteem and describe efforts we engage in to protect or improve it.
• Describe ways we make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others.
• Outline cognitive biases and heuristics used to defend the self.

Section Learning Objectives

• Define self-concept and clarify whether it is stable or malleable.
• Define and exemplify self-schemas.
• Describe self-perception theory and how it helps us learn about the self.
• Clarify the importance of possible selves.
• Describe the self-reference effect.
• Define self-discrepancy theory.
• Describe Cooley’s concept of the looking-glass self.
• Define reflected appraisal.
• Describe the social comparison theory and how it helps us to learn about the self.
• Clarify the importance of the two-factor-theory of emotion for the self.
• Describe cultural differences in the conception of the self.

3.1.1. The Age-Old Question – Who Are You?

Quite possibly the fundamental question of human existence is who we are. If asked who you are by another person, how would you describe yourself? Are you smart, resourceful, compassionate, petty, empathetic, self-serving, or optimistic? Are you good at sports or do you write poetry well? Should any singing you do be reserved for the shower? These descriptors are what make up our self-concept or the way we see ourselves. This view is probably clear most of the time. If you are not talented at writing, you will likely avoid writing intensive classes as a student. Some classes you cannot avoid, and so in these instances you will seek out extra help so that you are successful with the class. If you are incredibly talented at football, you may go out for the team but will not likely try out for the baseball team. But are there times when you are not so sure about who you are? The answer is likely yes. Maybe you and your spouse are considering adopting. Though you consider yourself a compassionate person, you are not sure you can open your heart up to another child the same way you would to a biological child. In this case, you have no prior experience to reference to determine who you are in this situation.

3.1.1.1. Is self-concept stable or malleable? There are two contradictory views of the self. Though our self-concept is relatively stable and people resist any information that contradicts their view of themselves (Greenwald, 1980), specific social environments can cause different selves to appear (Martindale, 1980). Markus and Kunda (1986) explored this dual nature of the self-concept in a study of 40 female students at the University of Michigan who participated to earn credit in their introductory psychology class (recall our discussion in Module 2 of convenience samples and issues with generalizability as a result). The participants were run one at a time and with three female confederates who were also undergraduate students but paid for their involvement. The researchers used minimal deception and led the participants to believe the study was on attitudes and opinions. They were first shown posters in a series of three trials. The posters had three items on them, either three colors, cartoons, or greeting cards, and the participant was asked to record for each poster the number of the item she liked best (of the three). The experimenter then explained that she had to transfer the responses to a computer coding sheet and that it would make life easier if all participants (the actual participant and the three confederates) could read their responses out loud. On each trial the participant went first, followed by the confederates. Her responses determined what the confederates would say. In the uniqueness condition, on all but 3 of the 18 trials the confederates all disagreed with the participant but agreed with one another. So if the participant preferred Color A the confederates all chose C. On the other three trials, the first confederate agreed with the participant while the other two disagreed with her and with each other. In the similarity condition, on all but 3 of the trials, the confederates agreed with the participant. If she chose Color C, then so did the three confederates. On the other three trials, none of the confederates agreed with the participant and two agreed with each other (meaning if the participant chose C, one chose A and two chose B, for instance). The participant then completed a series of dependent measures to include judgments of similarity to reference groups, self-categorization judgments, and word association. There was also a manipulation check such that participants were asked what percentage of the time they thought other participants agreed with their preference judgment in the first part of the study. Debriefing then occurred.

Results showed that for the manipulation check, subjects were aware of the extent to which participants agreed with them. The uniqueness group stated that the others agreed with them just 8% of the time while the similarity subjects estimated 77% of the time. The authors note that there was actually 17% and 83% agreement, respectively. In terms of how stable self-concept is, results showed that neither group appeared to have been influenced by the information about their similarity or uniqueness. In terms of the malleability of self-concept, the differences in the latencies between the two conditions for self-categorization judgments (i.e. their reaction times), suggests that different types of self-conceptions were mediating these judgments. This was also seen in the similarity to reference groups task such that both conditions felt more similar to in-groups than out-groups. It should be noted that the effect was not as strong for the similarity condition as their mean judgment of similarity to the in-group ( M = 4.93) was not as strong as the uniqueness condition ( M = 5.13), and their judgment of out-groups was higher ( M = 2.26) than the uniqueness condition ( M = 1.82).

Markus and Kunda (1986) conclude that both the stability and malleability of the self-concept were demonstrated in their study, though if one only looked at the results of the first part of the study (the showing of the posters with the three items to choose from) “one would tend to infer that the self-conceptions of these individuals were relatively unresponsive to the self-relevant information provided by the study” (pg. 864). Further examination of the word association, latency, and similarity tasks show that “…underlying these similar general self-descriptions were very different temporary self-conceptions” (pg. 864). When individuals were led to feel unique, they became disturbed by this and following the preference manipulation viewed their uniqueness as negative while the state of similarity to others became positive and desirable. They recruited conceptions of themselves as similar to others and made these endorsements relatively quickly (as shown through shorter latencies). Those made to feel extremely similar to others responded in the exact opposite way.

Finally, they say that the self-concept is a set of self-conceptions and from it, “the individual constructs a working self-concept that integrates the core self-conceptions with those elicited by the immediate context. In this sense, the self-concept becomes similar to that suggested by the symbolic interactionists. Thus, for Mead (1934) there was no fixed self-concept, only the current self-concept that was negotiated from the available set of self-conceptions” (Markus and Kunda, 1986, pg. 865).

3.1.2. Self-Schemas

As we interact with our world, we gather information that we need to organize in a way that we can obtain it again when needed. Basically, we store it away in memory and retrieve it when we encounter the person, object, or concept at a later time. This element of cognition is called a schema and as we can have schemas concerning external objects or ideas, we too can have them about ourselves, called a self-schema. These self-schemas make up our self-concept in much the same way that the words on this page make up the module you are reading, and this module is just one of many in the textbook. Markus (1977) defined self-schemata as, “cognitive generalizations about the self, derived from past experience, that organize and guide the processing of the self-related information contained in an individual’s social experiences (pg. 64).”

Self-schemas represent a person’s domain specific attributes or abilities and experiences as they relate to that domain. This allows for quicker encoding, more confident evaluation, accurate retrieval of domain-relevant information, and the ability to adapt to different information processing goals (Carpenter, 1988; Greenwald, 1980; Markus, 1977). Individuals with a self-schema in a domain are said to be schematic while those lacking one are aschematic for that ability (Cross & Markus, 1994). According to Markus (1977), aschematic individuals are not able to recognize their ability in a given domain and do not assign their ability any critical personal importance.

They can also help to shape social perception when the description of person is ambiguous. One study showed that when a target (Chris) is described as equally likely to be independent or dependent, participants classified as independence-schematics rated Chris as more independent and dependence-schematics rated him as more dependent or less likely to act independently compared to aschematics. The authors say that self-schemas serve a motivational role such that they help to foster the self-system’s stability, validation, and perpetuation (Green & Sedikides, 2001).

3.1.2.1. Types of self-schemas. Prieto, Cole, and Tageson (1992) compared depressed, clinic-referred children; nondepressed, clinic-referred children; and nondepressed, non-clinic referred children on three cognitive measures of positive and negative self-schemas. On a word recognition measure and an incidental word recall measure, depressed individuals had a less positive self-schema compared to the other two groups. Only non-depressed groups recalled significantly more positive words than negative ones. The results suggest that such negative self-schemas affect how new information is stored and accessed. Another study found that depressive self-schemas were a result of peer victimization such that individuals who experienced relational and verbal victimization more so than physical victimization by their peers had stronger negative and weaker positive self-cognitions and an elimination of the “normative memorial bias for recall of positive self-referential words” (Cole et al., 2014).

Self-schemas have also been identified for race-ethnicity (Oyserman, 2008; Oyserman et al., 2003), body weight (Altabe & Thompson, 1996; Markus, Hamill, & Sentis, 1987), gender (Markus, Crane, Bernstein, & Siladi, 1982), exercise (Kendzierski, 1990), religion (McIntosh, 1995), and illness (Clemmey & Nicassio, 1997), to name a few. Lodge and Hamill (1986) even propose a partisan schema related to political knowledge and interest. Those described as schematics are high in interest and knowledge and show a “consistency bias” such that they recall more policy statements consistent with a congressman’s party affiliation than those inconsistent with it. They also can classify campaign statements as Republican or Democrat. Aschematics, or those low in interest and knowledge, perform at no better than chance levels in the same task. The authors note that the restructuring of memory shown by schematics, and in particular those scoring especially high on interest and knowledge which they call sophisticates, demonstrates a serious bias in how political information is processed.

3.1.2.2. Self-perception theory. One way we gain knowledge about ourselves is through observing ourselves, called introspection or looking inward. We notice food preferences, particular music genres we like, the types of clothing we prefer to wear, and the type of person we consider to be a friend. But what we gain self-knowledge about tends to be things that are not central or critical (Bem, 1972). Why is that? The things about us that are most important make up the attitudes we express, the beliefs we hold, the traits we display, and the emotions we prefer to display and so are at our core. Self-perception helps us to learn about the more secondary aspects of the self.

3.1.2.3. Possible selves. Not only are we concerned about the person we are right now, but we focus on the person we might become, which Markus and Nurius (1986) call possible selves . These could be positive conceptions of our future self, but likewise, they could be something we are afraid of becoming and could elicit guilt and anxiety in the individual (Carver et al., 1999). According to Inglehart, Markus, and Brown (1988) our possible selves allow us to focus attention on specific, task-relevant cognitions, emotions and actions, thereby allowing us to move from our current state to the desired one (Oyserman & Markus, 1990a), especially when a possible self is seen as a self-regulator (i.e. a student who spends more time on homework, improved grades, and participated in class more because they realize they are not doing well now, but could in the future if they engage in specific types of behaviors; Oyserman et al., 2004). Across two studies, Cross and Markus (1994) showed that schematic individuals were better able to direct their attention to the problem at hand and concentrate on it while aschematic individuals were quicker to endorse negative possible selves related to logical reasoning ability. Hence, self-schemas can help foster competence by “providing a foundation for the development of possible selves related to that ability” (pg. 434). They continue, “…the possible self may link effective steps and strategies for solving reasoning problems with beliefs about one’s ability and competence in the domain. Bringing to mind a positive, desired view of oneself in the future as logical and analytical may also help the student dispel anxiety or worry during the task” (pg. 435). Research has also shown that when balance between feared and expected possible selves does not exist, the outcomes can be negative such as the initiation and maintenance of delinquent activity in adolescents (Oyserman and Markus, 1990b).

3.1.2.4. The self-reference effect. Would it surprise you to learn that humans have a tendency to more efficiently process, and recall more accurately, information about ourselves? Probably not. This is called the self-reference effect (Higgins & Bargh, 1987). Craik and Lockhart (1972) proposed the depth of processing (DOP) framework which says that how well a memory trace is retained is determined by the nature of the encoding operations such that deep, meaningful analyses result in a more durable trace than shallow, structural analyses of a stimulus. Up to 1977 it was believed that better retention could be achieved by semantic encoding though Rogers, Kuiper, and Kriker (1977) showed that self-referent encoding produced even better recall. The self-reference effect has since been replicated in numerous studies (for an overview of this research, please see Symons & Johnson, 1997).

Since the self-reference effect is a property of memory, we might expect that it is affected by the aging process. Across three studies, Gutchess, et al., (2007) showed that under some circumstances, older adults can benefit from self-referencing as much as young adults can but in general, they are more limited in their application of it. The authors speculate that “older adults may be limited in their application of self-referencing due to its demand on cognitive resources and their diminished ability to apply the strategy flexibly and broadly in other types of evaluative judgments” (pg. 834).

In terms of what area of the brain might control the self-reference effect, research using lesioning has found a role for the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Patients with focal brain damage to the mPFC were given a standard trait judgment paradigm and damage to this area was found to abolish the self-reference effect, suggesting that the structure is important for self-referential processing and the neural representation of the self (Philippi et al., 2012). The implications of this research go beyond social psychology, too. The authors write, “The ability to detect and encode information for self-relevance might contribute not only to the formation of a self-concept, but also more broadly to psychological and social functioning. Across a variety of psychopathological conditions and personality disorders, self-referential processing appears to be dysfunctional, making it a major target for psychotherapy.” To read this article yourself, please visit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3297026/ .

3.1.3. Self-Discrepancies

Self-discrepancy theory was postulated by Higgins (1987) to distinguish between the various self-states proposed by sociology, psychology, and even philosophy. Higgins says there are two cognitive dimensions which underlie the various self-state representations. The first is the domains of the self , numbering three total – the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self includes the attributes that you are believed to possess, whether by yourself or another person. The ideal self includes all attributes that someone, whether you or another person, hope or wishes for you to possess. The ought self are the attributes that someone (yourself or another person) believes you should possess (i.e. linked to a sense of duty, obligation, or responsibility). Higgins exemplifies the ideal and ought self through the example of the conflict a hero faces between their personal wishes and their sense of duty.

The second cognitive dimension is what he calls standpoints on the self , or whose perspective on the self is involved. The two basic standpoints are your own personal standpoint and the standpoint from a significant other such as a spouse, parent, sibling, or close friend. A person can have a self-state representation for any number of these significant others.

The two cognitive dimensions can then be combined to form six basic types of self-state representations: actual/own, actual/other, ideal/own, ideal/other, ought/own, and ought/other. Our self-concept is derived from the first two, while the last four are self-directive standards or acquired guides for being, or as he calls them, self-guides . Self-discrepancy theory therefore proposes that people differ as to which self-guide they are motivated to meet, and that people do not necessarily possess all four (we might have only ought or ideal self-guides). We are motivated to “reach a condition where our self-concept matches our personally relevant self-guides” (pg. 321).

If this does not happen, we can experience sadness, disappointment, fear, dissatisfaction, apprehension, or feel threatened. For instance, if a discrepancy exists between the actual/own and ideal/own states, meaning the person feels their personal hopes or wishes have not been fulfilled, they will be vulnerable to dejected-related emotions such as disappointment, frustration, and dissatisfaction. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ideal/other, meaning they have failed to obtain a significant other’s hopes or wishes for them, they may feel shame, embarrassment, or feel downcast. If the discrepancy is between actual/own and ought/other, meaning the current state of our attributes from our standpoint does not match the state the person believes some significant other considers to be our duty or obligation to obtain, then we might experience agitation-related emotions and feel fear or threatened. Finally, an actual/own and ought/own discrepancy occurs when the current state of our attributes, from our standpoint, do not match the state we believe is our duty or obligation to obtain and so we feel self-contempt, guilt, and uneasiness (Higgins, 1987).

In sum, self-discrepancy theory helps us to understand discrepancies between our view of our self and who we would ideally like to be or believe other people think we should be.

3.1.4. How Others Affect Our Sense of Self

3.1.4.1. The looking-glass self. Sociologist Charles Cooley (1902) stated that people based their sense of self on how they think others see them. This social interaction serves as a sort of mirror in which people use the judgments of others to measure their own worth, behavior, and values. He calls this the looking-glass self , and it occurs in three steps. First, we imagine how we appear to others when in a social situation. Second, we imagine what others think of our appearance. Third, we form opinions and feelings about this perceived judgment and then respond to it. Let’s say for instance you are assigned to a small group in your social psychology class and are asked to discuss the topic of self-discrepancy theory. You have not interacted with these individuals thus far this semester, and so you want to demonstrate to these fellow students that you are knowledgeable of the concept. As you discuss the material, you take note of how your fellow classmates respond to your thoughts and applications of the concept of self-discrepancy theory. What is their body language? Do they maintain eye contact with you? Do they seem to be distracted or are they focused? What words do they use in response to your comments? If your classmates generally have positive feedback such as commenting constructively on your thoughts or listening intently, you will feel confident that they see you as competent and knowledgeable. If, on the other hand, they look away often, are playing a game on their phone, or have negative comments, you will likely feel that they do not see you as knowledgeable. To make matters more complicated, in the future your professor has you work with a different group of classmates for a different activity. The new task provides a different context for the interaction and the new set of students changes the nature of those involved. So, how you use the information obtained from this new group of individuals will likely be different than the first group. And of course, not all feedback carries the same weight. Maybe you know one of your group members is an A student and doing very well in the class. If they provide positive feedback this will mean more to you than a student praising your analysis who you know is struggling.

3.1.4.2. Reflected appraisals. Building off Cooley’s work, Felson (1985) said that we come to see ourselves as those important to us see us, called a reflected appraisal. In an interesting study of adolescents from the Netherlands, Verkuyten (1988) found that the general self-esteem of ethnic minorities was relatively high, despite the fact that they have low status, experience discrimination and prejudice, and have little power to influence policymakers. So why was their self-esteem higher than expected? As support for the reflected appraisal process, they derived their self-esteem from fellow family members who regarded them highly.

3.1.4.3. Social comparison theory. Oftentimes, we are uncertain of our abilities and so look to others for a clue. A college baseball player may compare his batting average against those of his teammates to see how well he is doing. Festinger (1954) called this the social comparison theory . We make such comparisons as a way to bring about self-improvement or to motivate us to be better. If the players’ batting average is not the lowest, but close, he may ask for additional batting practice or tips from the batting coach. We also compare ourselves to others to enhance our positive self-image. If the player learns that his batting average is better than most of his teammates, he will feel good about his hitting ability. Of course, he might also develop a superior attitude or become biased or judgmental.

How might social media affect the social comparisons we make? Social networking sites such as Facebook give the impression that others are doing better than they are which can be detrimental to how we view ourselves. In a study of 231 adults aged 18-25, Facebook use was found to lead to greater levels of negative social comparison which resulted in seeing oneself as less socially competent and less physically attractive. This effect was weaker among happier individuals (de Vries & Kuhne, 2015).  A similar study of Instagram “likes” found that exposing female undergraduates to thin-ideal images led to greater levels of body and facial dissatisfaction than average images and that greater investment in Instagram likes led to higher levels of appearance comparison and facial dissatisfaction (Tiggerman et al., 2018).

The benefit of social comparison is that it can lead to efforts to self-improve. How so? We could make a specific type of social comparison called an upward social comparison in which we compare our traits and abilities against someone who is more skilled than we are. This can lead us to engage in motivated behavior to improve, but it could also leave us feeling incompetent, shameful, or jealous (Collins, 1996).

3.1.4.4. Arousal as information about us. Stimuli are forever present in our sensory world and we have perceptions of them. These perceptions lead us to respond. For example, if you are walking down a street and hear footsteps behind you, you might perceive this as a threat if it is late at night and you thought you were alone on the street. This could lead you to walk quicker to your car or house or turnaround to confront the person behind you. What if you heard footsteps but is the middle of the day, on campus, and in between classes? You would likely perceive this as just another student going to class and have no reaction. Schachter (1964) proposed his two-factor theory of emotion which states that how we perceive our own emotions depends on two factors: 1) how much physiological arousal we experience such as rapid breathing, sweating, and/or a pounding heart, and 2) the cognitive interpretation or label we apply such as angry, scared, or happy. Others help us with the second factor such that we will examine their reactions to a given situation to help us interpret the arousal we are experiencing. Say for instance we are at a movie and out of nowhere the killer jumps out and attacks the protagonist. When this happens, we jump in our seat and scream, and notice that other moviegoers have the same reaction. We thus realize we experienced a high level of arousal and label the emotion as scared. Soon after we likely laugh at ourselves since we knew all along the event was not real but a mere fiction on the screen.

3.1.5. The Self and Culture

The self does not exist on an island but in the context of the society and culture in which it lives. As such, there is a great deal of variability in terms of what the self-concept is from culture to culture. First, culture includes all the beliefs, customs, institutions, experience, values, attitudes, art, religion, etc. of a group of people. Each culture establishes norms , or rules, for how its members should behave. For instance, Western cultures view the self as independent or individualistic , meaning that individuals reject conformity, focus on individual traits and goals, and seek personal achievement while Asian cultures are interdependent or collectivistic and identify the self in a social context, believe in blending in, focus on group goals, promote solidarity, and are against egotism.  According to Markus and Kitayma (1991) the independent construal of self is bounded, unitary, and stable; focuses on being unique, realizing internal attributes, and promoting ones’ goals; and sees the role of others as self-appraisal and linked to social comparison and reflected appraisal. In terms of the interdependent self, they say the structure is flexible; the task is to belong and fit in, occupy one’s place and promote other’s goals; and our relationships with others in specific contexts define the self. The independent is internal and private, focused on one’s abilities, thoughts, and feelings while the interdependent is external and public, and focused on statuses, roles, and relationships (Markus & Kitayma, 1991).

Research shows that East Asians, namely those from Korea, have more flexibility in their self-concept compared to Americans (Choi & Choi, 2002) and that Asian Americans, compared to European Americans, show variability across relationship contexts but stability within them (English & Serena, 2007). In another study, when trait self-perceptions across different relationships were inconsistent, relationship quality and authenticity was lower for European Americans but not East Asian Americans. When there was inconsistency within the same relationship, both ethnic groups showed negative outcomes (English & Chen, 2011).

• Describe how self-esteem is a need.
• Identify and define types of self-esteem.
• Clarify what happens to self-esteem across the life span.
• Clarify if there are gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem.
• Define Terror Management Theory and clarify its relevance to self-esteem.
• Describe self-efficacy and locus of control and how they relate to the self.
• Define self-regulation.
• Define self-awareness and describe issues related to it.
• Differentiate public and private self-consciousness.
• Define self-enhancement and describe strategies used in it.

3.2.1. Self-Esteem Defined and Described

3.2.1.1. Self-esteem as a need. Psychologist Abraham Maslow described a hierarchy of needs as one way to understand motivation and specifically the push of motivated behavior (contrasted with the pull that comes from outside us). According to Maslow, there are five types of needs arranged in a hierarchy, or more so in a pyramid formation. Lower level needs must be fulfilled before higher level ones can be. At the bottom are the physiological needs which are what we need to survive. They include food, water, sex, temperature, oxygen, etc. At the next level are needs centered on our safety and security , or living in a safe environment, being safe from Mother Nature, and having enough money to pay the bills. With this level satisfied, we can next focus on feeling socially connected to others and being in mature relationships, which he called the love and belonginess needs . Fourth are our self-esteem needs or being independent, gaining mastery, how we feel about ourselves, and being responsible. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are our self-actualization needs , which Carl Rogers and other humanistic psychologists discussed. This level focuses on realizing our full potential, feeling fulfilled and satisfied, and seeking personal growth. We also pursue interests out of intrinsic interest and not extrinsic demands. For our purposes, Maslow’s fourth level will be focused on and self-esteem can be defined as how we see ourselves, including both positive and negative evaluative components.

3.2.1.2. Types of self-esteem. Is self-esteem a unitary concept though? Rosenberg (1979) proposed a global self-esteem and subsequent research has supported domain specific self-esteem such as for academic matters (Rosenberg et al., 1995). So, which causes which? Does global self-esteem lead to specific or vice versa? The authors propose that global could be the result of specific self-esteem since it is “based on the judgments of various parts of the self, the parts (specifics) might be seen as responsible for the whole (global)” (pg. 148). In terms of the specific arising from global, they say, “assessments of particular facets of the self may well be based on one’s overall feelings of self-worth” (pg. 148). They conclude that global and specific self-esteem are in fact neither equivalent nor interchangeable, global appears to be heavily affective in nature and associated with psychological well-being while specific is more judgmental and evaluative arising from a cognitive component; specific facets of the self vary in their level of abstraction and some types such as academic self-esteem affect global self-esteem more than other types; the degree to which we value our behavior affects how much specific self-esteem affects global; and finally, in the case of school performance it is affected by self-esteem but in terms of the specific type and not global (Rosenberg et al., 1995).

What are some of the specific types of self-esteem.? According to Gentile et al. (2009) they might include:

• Physical appearance – what we look like
• Athletics – how good we are in sports
• Academics – our general performance in school
• Social Acceptance – our friendships, peer relationships, and social approval
• Family – Our family can serve as a source support and help affirm our beliefs about our own self-worth
• Behavioral conduct – includes our perception of how socially unacceptable our behavior is
• Affect – Feeling happy, satisfied, and free from anxiety which lead to better emotional well-being
• Personal self – Our evaluation of our personality independent from the physical body or others
• Self-satisfaction – Our measure of happiness with oneself as a person
• Moral-ethical self-concept – Our perception of moral-ethical attributes and how satisfied we are with our religion or lack of one

3.2.1.3. Self-esteem across the life span. Our next question centers on whether self-esteem can change throughout our life. Trzesniewski et al., (2003) tested this very question across two studies and found that, “stability is relatively low during early childhood, increases through adolescence and young adulthood, and then declines during midlife and old age” (pg. 215). This effect held across gender, nationality, and ethnicity. How can we account for these trends? First, self-esteem was least stable during childhood, though the authors question whether self-esteem measures are valid for young children as they may not fully understand the meaning of questions on such scales or cannot form abstract concepts of themselves, such as being good or bad. Second, self-esteem is lower in early adolescence and increases after this likely due to the turmoil puberty brings about in terms of rapid maturational changes. By late adolescence and early adulthood, the individual has the resources and autonomy necessary to deal with these changes. Finally, self-esteem stability decreases from midlife to old age likely because in midlife there are few environmental changes but as we transition into late adulthood, there are a great deal of life changes and shifting social circumstances such as children moving out, retirement, health problems and the death of loved ones. In regard to late adulthood, they add, “Another possibility is that as individuals age they may begin to review their lifelong accomplishments and experiences, leading in some cases to more critical self-appraisals and in other cases to greater acceptance of their faults and limitations” (pg. 216).

Interestingly, data from 187 newlywed couples shows that the birth of the first child does affect self-esteem over the first five years of marriage. Changes mostly affect the mother and are negative in nature with a sudden decline in self-esteem the first year after the child’s birth and a gradual decline continuing over the next four years. The study utilized a control group of parents who had no child during the same period and for which there was no change in self-esteem. This suggests that the change in self-esteem of the parents with a child was likely due to the birth of their first child (Bleidorn et al., 2016).

3.2.1.4. Gender and cross-cultural differences in self-esteem. Gentile et al. (2009) conducted a meta-analysis of 115 studies and assessed the 10 different domains of self-esteem mentioned at the end of the previous section. They found that gender differences vary greatly across the different domains of self-esteem. In some cases, there was no difference at all (i.e. academic, social acceptance, family, and affect), while other domains showed a moderate amount of variation (i.e. males higher on physical appearance, athletics, personal, and self-satisfaction; females higher on behavioral conduct and moral-ethical).

But are there cross-cultural differences in gender and self-esteem? Bleidorn et al. (2016) tackled the issue in an Internet sample of 985,937 individuals from 48 nations and found that self-esteem increased from late adolescence to middle adulthood, there were significant gender gaps, and that males consistently report higher self-esteem than females. These findings are important as they show that the trends, which are consistent with the literature but previous studies only examined Western samples, are in fact cross-culturally valid and suggest universal mechanisms at least in part. These mechanisms might include biological sources including genetics or hormones or universal sociocultural factors such as socially learned gender roles and stereotypes.

Despite these cross-cultural similarities, there was a difference across nations in terms of the magnitude of gender-specific trajectories, suggesting that universal explanations may not be at work but culture-specific influences such as a nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita, mean age at marriage, and HDI (Human Development Index; measures of living a long life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living) are responsible. Their data suggests that wealthy, developed, egalitarian, and individualistic nations had relatively large gender differences in self-esteem, though they decrease throughout early and middle adulthood. In contrast, collectivistic, poorer, developing nations marked by greater gender inequality and an earlier age at marriage show smaller gender gaps, though these increase during early and middle adulthood.

Bleidorn et. al. (2016) conclude that universal influences on self-esteem do not tell the whole story, and that “systematic cultural differences in the magnitude and shape of gender and age differences in self-esteem provide evidence for contextual influences on the self-esteem development in men and women” (pg. 408).

3.2.2. Terror Management Theory (TMT)

3.2.2.1. What is TMT? Ernest Becker (1962, 1973, & 1975) stated that it is the human capacity for intelligence, to be able to make decisions, think creatively, and infer cause and effect, that leads us to an awareness that we will someday die. This awareness manifests itself as terror and any cultural worldviews that are created need to provide ways to deal with this terror, create concepts and structures to understand our world, answer cosmological questions, and give us a sense of meaning in the world.

Based on this notion, Terror Management Theory (TMT; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, and Solomon, 1986) posits that worldviews serve as a buffer against the anxiety we experience from knowing we will die someday. This cultural anxiety buffer has two main parts. First, we must have faith in our worldviews and be willing to defend them. Second, we derive self-esteem from living up to these worldviews and behaving in culturally approved ways. So, culture supports a belief in a just world and meeting the standards of value of the culture provides us with immortality in one of two ways. Literal immortality is arrived at via religious concepts such as the soul and the afterlife. Symbolic immortality is provided by linking our identity to something higher such as the nation or corporation and by leaving something behind such as children or cultural valued products. It has also been linked to the appeal of fame (Greenberg, Kosloff, Solomon, Cohen, and Landau, 2010).

Finally, based on whether death thoughts are in focal attention or are unconscious, we employ either proximal or distal defenses. Proximal defenses involve the suppression of death-related thoughts, a denial of one’s vulnerability, or participating in behavior that will reduce the threat of demise (i.e. exercise) and occur when thought of death is in focal attention. On the other hand, distal defenses are called upon when death thoughts are unconscious and involve strivings for self-esteem and faith in one’s worldview and assuage these unconscious mortality concerns through the symbolic protection a sense of meaning offers.

3.2.2.2. The typical mortality salience study. In a typical mortality salience (MS) study, participants are told they are to take part in an investigation of the relationship between personality traits and interpersonal judgments. They complete a few standardized personality assessments which are actually filler items to sustain the cover story. Embedded in the personality assessments is a projective personality test which consists of two open ended questions which vary based on which condition the participant is in. Participants in the MS condition are asked to write about what they think will happen to them when they die and the emotions that the thought of their own death arouses in them. Individuals in the control condition are asked to write about concerns such as eating a meal, watching television, experiencing dental pain, or taking an exam. Next, they complete a self-report measure of affect, typically the PANAS (Positive-Affect, Negative-Affect Scale), to determine the effect of MS manipulation on their mood. Finally, they are asked to make judgments about individuals who either directly or indirectly threaten or bolster their cultural worldviews.

3.2.2.3. Worldview defense. General findings on TMT have shown that when mortality is made salient, we generally display unfavorable attitudes toward those who threaten our worldview and celebrate those who uphold our view. This effect has been demonstrated in relation to anxious individuals even when part of one’s in-group (Martens, Greenberg, Schimel, Kosloff, and Weise, 2010) such that mortality reminders led participants to react more negatively toward an anxious police liaison from their community (Study 1) or to a fellow university student who was anxious (Study 2). Mortality salience has also been found to elevate preference for political candidates who are charismatic and espouse the same values associated with the participant’s political worldview, whether conservative or liberal (Kosloff, Greenberg, Weise, and Solomon, 2010).

Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, and Lyon (1989) examined reactions of participants to those who violated or upheld cultural worldviews across a series of six experiments. In general, they hypothesized that when people are reminded of their own mortality, they are motivated to maintain their cultural anxiety buffer and are punitive toward those who violate it and benevolent to those who uphold it. Experiments 1 and 3 provided support for the hypothesis that subjects induced to think about their own mortality increased their desire to punish the moral transgressor (i.e. to recommend higher bonds for an accused prostitute) while rewarding the hero (Experiment 3). Experiment 2 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 and extended them by showing that increasing MS does not lead subjects to derogate just any target as it had no effect on evaluations of the experimenter. Also, MS increased punishment of the transgressor only among subjects who believed the target’s behavior was truly immoral.

Experiments 4 – 6 tested alternative explanations for the findings. First, self-awareness could lead individuals to behave in a manner consistent with their attitudes and standards.  The results of Study 4 showed that unlike MS, self-awareness does not encourage harsher bond recommendations and in fact, heightened self-awareness reduces how harshly a prostitute is treated among individuals with positive attitudes toward prostitution. In Study 5, physiological arousal was monitored and MS was found not to arise from mere heightened arousal. Finally, Experiment 6 showed that particular features of the open-ended death questionnaire did not lead to the findings of Studies 1-5, but rather to requiring subjects to think about their own deaths.

McGregor, Lieberman, Greenberg, Solomon, Arndt, Simon, and Pyszcznski (1998) tested the hypothesis that MS increases aggression against those who threaten one’s worldview by measuring the amount of hot sauce allocated to the author of a derogatory essay. In the study, politically conservative and liberal participants were asked to think about their own death (MS) or their next important exam (control). They were then asked to read an essay that was derogatory toward either conservatives or liberals. Finally, participants allocated a quantity of very spicy hot sauce to the author of the essay, knowing that the author did not like spicy foods and would have to consume the entire sample of hot sauce. As expected, MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce to the author of the worldview-threatening essay than did control participants.

In a second study, participants thought about their own mortality or dental pain and were given an opportunity to aggress against someone who threatened their worldview. Half of the MS participants allocated the hot sauce before evaluating the target while the other half evaluated the target before allocating the hot sauce. Results of Study 2 showed that MS participants allocated significantly more hot sauce when they were not able to verbally derogate the targets prior to the administration of hot sauce. However, when MS participants were able to first express their attitudes toward the target, the amount of hot sauce allocated was not significantly greater than for the controls. This finding suggests that people will choose the first mode of worldview defense provided to them.

3.2.2.4. Self-esteem. According to the anxiety buffer hypothesis, if a psychological structure provides protection against anxiety, then strengthening that structure should make an individual less prone to displays of anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats while weakening that structure should make a person more prone to exhibit anxiety or anxiety related behavior in response to threats. In support of this, Greenberg et al. (1992) showed that by increasing self-esteem, self-reported anxiety in response to death images and physiological arousal in response to the threat of pain could be reduced. Furthermore, the authors found no evidence that this effect was mediated by positive affect. Additional support for the function of self-esteem in reducing anxiety was provided by Harmon-Jones, Simon, Greenberg, Pyszcynski, Solomon, and McGregor (1997) who showed that individuals with high self-esteem, whether induced experimentally (Experiment 1) or dispositionally (Experiment 2), did not respond to MS with increased worldview defense and that this occurred due to the suppression of death constructs (Experiment 3).

3.2.3. Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control

Self-Efficacy (Bandura, 1986) is our sense of competence and feeling like we can deal with life’s problems. It includes our beliefs about our ability to complete a task and affects how we think, feel, and motivate ourselves. When our self-efficacy is high, we feel like we can cope with life events and overcome obstacles. Difficult tasks are seen as challenges and we set challenging goals. In contrast, if it is low, we feel hopeless, helpless, and that we cannot handle what life throws at us. We avoid difficult tasks and throw in the towel quickly when things get tough. These individuals are easily depressed and stressed.

Our sense of competence is affected by the degree to which we blame internal or external forces for our success and failures. Using Julian Rotter’s (1973) concept of locus of control, we have an internal locus of control if we believe we are in control of our own destiny, but if we believe outside forces determine our life, we have an external locus of control.

So how do self-efficacy and locus of control intersect with one another. A study of students from a mid-sized public university in the northeastern area of the United States showed that students with an external locus of control and who are low in academic self-efficacy should be identified as they enter college and interventions directed at them to help them perform better in their classes (Drago, Rheinheimer, & Detweiler, 2018). A study of 147 women with type 1 diabetes examined the relationship between self-efficacy, locus of control, and what their expectations were of preconception counseling (Grady & Geller, 2016). Using the Diabetes-Specific Locus of Control (DLC) measure which assesses beliefs about internal, chance, and powerful others loci of control in terms of how diabetes is managed (the measure has 5 subscales: internal-autonomy, internal-blame, chance, powerful other – health professionals, and powerful other – nonmedical), a measure to assess preconception planning, and sociodemographic data,  the researchers tested the hypothesis that expectations of preconception counseling would be associated with beliefs about disease control and self-efficacy. The results showed that self-efficacy for planning a healthy pregnancy predicted outcome expectations of preconception counseling. The authors write, “…women’s self-efficacy was positively associated with their perceived usefulness of preconception counseling and birth control use, whereas self-blame about disease management negatively correlated with these views” (pg. 41). The authors suggest that efforts should be taken to improve self-efficacy and empower women with diabetes to confidently control their disease” (Grady & Geller, 2016).

3.2.4. Self-Regulation

We cannot always act or say what we feel. At times, we have to practice what social psychologists call self-regulation or controlling and directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions so that we can achieve a societal or personal goal. The good news is that much of our self-regulation occurs outside of conscious awareness but if we are trying to engage in meaningful behavioral change, we might have to focus much of our energy into self-control. One study linked successful self-regulation to executive functions to include updating, inhibiting, and shifting, which results in the ability to take goal-direction action such as losing weight (Dohle, Diel, & Hofmann, 2018).

Do concerted efforts at self-regulation reduce the amount of energy available for such activities in subsequent tasks? The question implies that self-regulation is a limited resource. Baumeister, Bratslasky, Muraven, and Tice (1998) tested this over four experiments and described this temporary reduction in the self’s ability to engage in volitional action caused by engaging in a volitional act previously ego depletion . The researchers first attempted to show that exerting self-control in terms of resisting temptation (Experiment 1) or a preliminary act of choice and responsibility (Experiment 2) would reduce the person’s ability to self-regulate on a subsequent, frustrating and difficult task. Results showed that people asked to resist eating chocolates and to make themselves eat radishes instead gave up much faster when next asked to complete a difficult puzzle than those who could indulge and eat the chocolate. Likewise, people who freely and deliberately consented to make a counterattitudinal or proattitudindal speech gave up quickly when asked to do the puzzle while those who expected to make the counterattitudinal speech under low-choice conditions showed no reduction in self-control. They state that it was the act of responsible choice, and not the behavior itself, that depleted the self and reduced persistence on the subsequent task. Experiments 3 and 4 further confirmed the finding that an initial act of volition leads to ego depletion in subsequent tasks. The good news is that this resource is replenished with time and specific factors could hasten or delay this replenishment (Baumeister et al., 1998).

3.2.5. Self-Awareness

Duval and Wicklund (1972) proposed that our self-regulation can either be directed inward and toward the self or directed outward and toward the environment. We are usually focused outward, but there are times when our attention is turned inward. For instance, if you walk by a mirror you might stop to see how you look in your new jeans. If we see a video of ourselves, are asked to talk about ourselves in an interview, or are required to give a presentation in our social psychology class, we experience an increased level of self-awareness and compare ourselves against a high standard which leads to reduced self-esteem since we realize we do not meet the standard. We then engage in motivated behavior to meet the standard, reassess whether we have, and then continue making adjustments until we finally meet the standard or give up and turn away from the self (Carver & Scheier, 1981). As you might expect, the process is aversive and so we want to resolve it (Flory et al., 2000). If we do not, we could experience depression (Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987), engage in binge eating (Heatherton & Baumeister), and engage in counternormative behavior such as cheating (Diener & Wallbom, 1976) to name a few of the negative effects. Two recent studies found that when male participants were exposed to an intervention designed to focus their attention onto inhibitory, self-awareness cues, they engaged in significantly less alcohol-related physical aggression behaviors toward a female confederate compared to controls (Gallagher & Parrott, 2016) but for men with an internal and not an external locus of control (Purvis, Gallagher, & Parrott, 2016).

It is possible that some individuals are more self-focused than others, a distinction referred to as public vs. private self-consciousness (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). Public self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on themselves as a social object and is concerned by how they appear to others. In contrast, private self-consciousness refers to an individual who focuses on the internal self, is introspective, and attends to one’s thoughts, feelings, and motives. Scheier, Buss, and Buss (1978) found that for those high in private self-consciousness, the correlation between aggressive behavior and self-report of aggressiveness was significantly higher than for those low in private self-consciousness or high or low public self-consciousness. Public self-consciousness has also been found to relate to social aspects of identity while private self-consciousness was related to personal aspects (Cheek & Briggs, 1982).

3.2.6. Self-Enhancement

Self-enhancement is a fundamental component of human nature and involves our tendency to see ourselves in a positive light. This often occurs after our self-esteem has been negatively affected in some way (Beauregard & Dunning, 1998).

According to Sedikides & Gregg (2008), self-enhancement can be done in one of several ways. First, we might self-advance or self-protect either by augmenting positivity or reducing the negativity of the self-concept. Second, self-enhancement can occur either publicly or privately whereby in the case of the former we engage in favorable self-presentation and the latter is an internal affair. Third, we tend to self-enhance in domains that matter most to us. Finally, self-enhancement is either candid or tactical, meaning “one can both seize an opportunity for overt and immediate self-advancement, or one can forgo it in favor of other activities liable to facilitate delayed self-enhancement” (pg. 104).

People can also engage in positive illusions (Taylor & Brown, 1988) in which they hold opinions of themselves that are exaggerated or falsely positive regarding abilities and skills. These positive illusions include inflating their perceptions of themselves (i.e. self-aggrandizement), believing they have more control over events than they do (i.e. exaggerated perceptions of control), and being overly optimistic about their future (i.e. unrealistic optimism). Positive illusions have been shown to lead to successful adjustment to stressful events (Taylor & Armor, 1996); increased satisfaction in close relationships when an individual idealized their partner and is in turn idealized by them (Barelds & Dijkstra, 2011; Murray, Holmes, & Griffin, 1996); and better outcomes for physical health later in life in terms of more satisfaction with leisure time, higher self-esteem, better perceived health, and less boredom proneness when retirees hold an exaggerated youthful bias (Gana, Alaphillippe, & Bailly, 2002). Positive illusions have been reported in parenting as well in which parents have a tendency to rate their own children as possessing more positive and less negative attributes than other children (Wenger & Fowers, 2008).

Have you ever worried about doing well on a test and so create an excuse to cover poor performance such as saying you were sick when you took it? If so, you engaged in behavioral self-handicapping (Jones & Berglas, 1978). We self-handicap when we are uncertain about our abilities and anticipate a threat to our self-esteem. Instead of saying we failed the exam because our ability was low or we did not study, we instead blame it on being sick or not sleeping well the night before. Self-handicapping can take two forms – behavioral and claimed. Behavioral self-handicapping occurs when we actively acquire an impediment such as drug or alcohol abuse (Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985) or do not have enough time to practice (Baumeister, Hamilton, & Tice, 1985). Claimed self-handicapping occurs when a person only reports obstacles to their success such as suffering from test anxiety (Smith, Snyder, and Handelsman, 1982) or being in a bad mood (Baumgarder, Lake, and Arkin, 1985). Between the two, behavioral handicaps are more convincingly tied to performance and so more credible, while claimed handicaps serve as an excuse for failure but do not necessarily decrease the person’s chance of success (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Finally, Stewart & Walker (2014) found that self-handicapping was predicted by perfectionism and an external locus of control in a study of 79 university students (they also found that perfectionism predicted low self-efficacy).

We might even engage in the social comparison process to feel better about ourselves. How so? Instead of comparing our performance to others to see where we rate, we will look for someone we know performs worse than we do or is worse off than we are, and then make a downward social comparison (Wills, 1981). This makes us feel better about ourselves because no matter how bad off we are at the time, that person is in a far worse predicament. Maybe we know we are in a batting slump over the past 10 games and have experienced a reduction in our self-esteem as a result. We might compare ourselves against another teammate who has underperformed all year and realize that our situation is temporary and not seemingly permanent like theirs.

People have a tendency to evaluate themselves much higher than they evaluate others. For instance, they are smarter, better looking, more capable, and more honest than other people. This is called the “better than average” ( BTA) effect. Across five studies, Brown (2012) showed that the BTA is stronger for important attributes than ones that do not matter and when participants experienced a threat to their feelings of self-worth. It has also been shown that the effect holds for easy tasks which produce underconfidence, but not for difficult ones which lead to overconfidence and making a worse-than-average bias (Larrick, Burson, & Soll, 2007). Finally, Kanten and Teigen (2008) asked 385 students to rate themselves or an acquaintance relative to their peers on several personality traits. The results showed that participants saw themselves as superior to most others at all points in time. The authors describe a better than average improvement effect such that participants said they were more superior now compared to the past and expected to be even more superior in the future.

Finally, Cialdini et al. (1976) said that people have a tendency to publicly announce their associations with successful others in a process they called “ bask in reflected glory ” (BIRG). In a series of three field experiments involving 300 university students across seven universities in the United States, Cialdini et al. (1976) found that participants strived to bask in the glory of successful others even though they were not the cause of their  success, such as wearing school apparel and saying ‘we’ after their team was victorious but not when they lost (in the case of a loss, participants often said ‘they lost’ instead of ‘we lost’).  In another study, two days before the 1999 general election in Flanders researchers counted and recorded houses displaying at least one poster or one removable lawn sign supporting a political party (a total of 462 addresses for posters and 177 addresses for lawn signs). The day after the elections, the houses were checked to see if the poster or lawn sign (s) was/were still present. The results showed that the better the election result, the more houses that still displayed the sign/poster. Winners flaunted their association with the winning party, supporting BIRG while supporters of the losing party tried to conceal their association (Boen et al., 2002).

• Define self-presentation.
• Define self-promotion and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define ingratiation and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define false modesty and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define self-verification and describe how it is used in self-presentation.
• Define self-monitoring and describe how it is used in self-presentation.

3.3.1. Self-Presentation Defined

Think about the last date you went on, especially a first date. What did you do beforehand? You likely showered and groomed yourself, maybe even rehearsed what you would say in the mirror. You also likely took great care to pick your clothes out to make a good first impression. Any strategies we use to make ourselves appear in a more positive light to others is called self-presentation. We intentionally try to control or shape their impressions of us (Schlenker, 2012). First impressions are especially important. Oftentimes, if we make a bad first impression it can be virtually impossible to overcome even if subsequent interactions are much more positive.

3.3.2. Specific Strategies Used in Self-Presentation

So that we can successfully shape the view others have of us to be positive, we need to engage in effortful behavior. How so? One strategy is to use self-promotion or engaging in behaviors or saying positive things about oneself. We often engage in this type of behavior on a first date or in an interview. Research has also shown that individuals higher in narcissism and lower in self-esteem engage in greater levels of online activity on social networking sites such as Facebook and use more self-promotional content to include About Me, Main Photo, View Photos, and status updates. The study also found gender differences insofar as males engaged in more self-promotion in the About Me and Notes sections while females displayed more self-promotional main photos (Mehdizadeh, 2010).

Another strategy is called ingratiation or complimenting, flattering, or engaging in other acts that lead a person to do things for you or like you. This is a typical strategy used by salespeople to have you engage in one clear behavior – buy a car or other product. Politicians are known to use the strategy also so that you come to like them while they are campaigning and then subsequently vote for them on election day. Cialdini (2007) writes in his book Influence: The Power of Persuasion , “Apparently we have such an automatically positive reaction to compliments that we can fall victim to someone who uses them in an obvious attempt to win our favor” (pg. 176).

Maybe you have been on a team at work before and had an idea that completely revolutionized the way your company completed a service for its clients. Did you gloat about your performance? Not likely. You were more likely to downplay your performance and talk about the contributions of your fellow teammates instead. The end result is that you will be seen as likeable and competent by others but for what is called false modesty , you must have been successful in your performance and others must know about it already (i.e. a fan was watching the big game and saw the wide receiver catch the game winning touchdown).

Another strategy is to choose situations or interpret behavior in ways that confirm already held beliefs or to avoid situations and criticism that might contradict these beliefs. Essentially, we want to confirm our existing self-concept but from the eyes of others. This behavior can best be described as self-verification .

Finally, we engage in self-monitoring or observing our own behavior so that we can make adjustments to produce the impression we desire in others and to meet the demands of the situation (Snyder, 1987). For instance, a literature review of self-monitoring through paper diaries, the internet, personal digital assistants, and digital scales in relation to weight loss, found that more frequent self-monitoring of diet, physical activity, or weight led to more successful outcomes for weight management (Burke, Wang, & Sevick, 2011).

• Define the self-serving bias.
• Describe how social desirability is a form of the self-serving bias.
• Contrast the false consensus and false uniqueness effects.
• Outline the benefits, and perils, of optimism and pessimism.

Our final section covers cognitive biases and heuristics used to increase our sense of self, though we have discussed others already throughout this module.

3.4.1. The Self-Serving Bias

First, the self-serving bias is our tendency to see ourselves in a favorable light. We take credit for our successes but blame failures on outside forces. This bias is often displayed by students who are quicker to explain a bad grade on a test as the instructor creating a test that was too difficult or testing on information not in the study guide. When the student does well, though, it is due to their skill and time spent studying, and not necessarily to the test being extra easy.

We even have a tendency to see ourselves as less likely to exhibit a self-serving bias than others (Friedrich, 1996; Myers, 1990). Friedrich (1996) documented this effect across two studies. First, 47 upper level undergraduates enrolled in either a statistics or industrial/organizational psychology course completed an anonymous survey at the beginning of class having them read a paragraph about the results of a SAT survey and then respond to a paragraph describing the self-serving bias. At the end they were asked, “How often do you think (you; the average person) make this kind of mistake when judging or evaluating (yourself; him- or herself)?” and indicated their answer on a 9-point scale (1 meaning almost never and 9 indicating nearly all the time). The results showed that students generally saw themselves as significantly less likely to distort their self-perceptions. In the second study, 38 introductory psychology students were lectured on research related to the self-serving bias during the last third of a regularly scheduled class. At the beginning of the next class they were given a questionnaire asking them to what degree they thought that they or the average person (depending on the condition they were in) would make the mistake. The same 9-point scale was used. Results of the second study were consistent with the first such that students believed others are more likely to commit the self-serving bias than they are.

Another way we see the self-serving bias play out in research is through the social desirability effect or when participants only provide information that appears to be what is expected by society or is desirable. If asked questions about sexual activity, some may report lower levels of activity than is true or not mention acts of sexual impropriety. Though our society has become sexually charged, there are still limits to what is acceptable. We will talk more about self-serving behavior when we discuss attribution theory in Module 4.

3.4.1.1. Explaining self-serving bias. So, what are potential causes of the self-serving bias? In a 2008 article, Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny cite a few different classes of explanations. First, the previously discussed self-enhancement and self-presentation are offered as motivation-driven reasons (please see the previous sections for a discussion).

Second, they offer cognitive-driven explanations. The outcomes might be inconsistent with expectations such that our expectations are grounded in experience and we utilize cognitive mechanisms that might mute, dampen, or even erase previous negative experiences but not positive ones. Our outcomes may also not be consistent with our self-schema meaning that our views of our skills and abilities are often overly positive and that we view ourselves as the kind of person who produces positive outcomes, not negative ones. Positive outcomes are consistent with our self-schema while negative outcomes lead to two possible conclusions: the negative outcome had an internal cause and our positive self-schema is not correct, or the negative outcome had an external cause and our positive self-schema remains intact. A third possibility is that outcomes are inconsistent with actions . Positive expectations usually lead to goal-directed behavior. The authors offer the example of a boy who prepares to ask a girl out on a date by rehearsing what he will say, dressing nice, and acting charming. If she accepts his offer, he will see it as due to his efforts but if she rejects him, he will likely regroup and try again a few times. If the answer continues to be ‘no’ then he will believe the cause is not with him but something external.

A fourth cognitive explanation is called biased hypothesis-testing . When failure occurs in place of expected success, we are likely to ask ‘why did this happen?’ Like scientist’s, people form hypotheses to answer the question and then collect data to test it. But they are often not good scientists and engage in confirmation bias and see only information that confirms rather than disconfirms their hypothesis. People also find case-positive information more diagnostic than case-negative. Finally, people engage in different standards of proof in which they form a proposition or hypothesis and proceed to evaluate evidence. Unlike biased hypothesis-testing though, they consider all information and do not omit disconfirming evidence. How much information is needed to accept or reject their hypothesis also varies insofar as they require more information to accept an undesired hypothesis and less for a desired hypothesis.  For instance, the specific hypothesis tested (i.e. ‘Am I smart?’ or ‘Am I stupid?’) determines what information is sought out in biased hypothesis testing while in different standards of proof the exact hypothesis determines how much information is required to draw a conclusion (more proof for the question centered on whether they are stupid and less for if they are smart).

Shepperd, Malone, and Sweeny (2008) conclude that the self-serving bias can only be understood using both motivational and cognitive driven explanations.

3.4.2. Overestimating Our Opinions and Skills

People often overestimate to what degree their opinion is shared by others. This tendency is called the false consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). It may occur because people are biased in viewing their own positions as what everyone else subscribes to as well, or because they overgeneralize from case information with their opinion serving as one salient type of case information (Alicke & Largo, 1995). The false consensus effect has been demonstrated in regard to smoking behavior (thinking that half or more than half of adults or peers smoked led to the most smoking involvement; Botvin et al., 1992); drug use (Wolfson, 2000); engaging in health protective or defeating behaviors (Suls, Wan, & Sanders, 1988); a willingness to escalate a disturbance (Russell & Arms, 1995); presidential preferences such that supporters of a candidate predicted a higher percentage of support for the candidate than other candidates (Brown, 1982); determining the extent to which other voters would vote like you (Koestner et al., 1995); and illicit drug use by elite athletes (Dunn, Thomas, Swift, & Burns, 2011).

Likewise, we tend to underestimate to what degree others share our abilities and skills. This tendency is called the false uniqueness effect . We might see our math ability as rare, our future to be brighter, or our opinion of a social matter to be more desirable. One study found that participants believed their first name to be unique, whether it was rare or common. The effect held for both male and female names and the researchers also found that when we consider making a name change, rare names are often considered (Kulig, 2013).

3.4.3. Optimism…to the Extreme

Of course, seeing the jar as half full and not half empty has obvious benefits for mental health. This is the essence of the difference between being optimistic and pessimistic.  Scheier and Carver (1985) offered a theory of dispositional optimism which defines it as, “a stable individual difference that reflects the general perception that future positive outcomes will be common and future negative outcomes will be rare” (Gallagher, Lopez, & Pressman, 2012). Research has shown that being optimistic results in higher levels of subjective well-being for college students (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009) and adults (Isaacowitz, 2005), leads to more adaptive coping mechanisms (Carver et al., 2009; Nes & Segerstrom, 2006), can bring about greater success on the job (Seligman & Schulman, 1986), results in goal attainment (Segerstrom & Nes, 2006), and brings about better physical health (Giltay et al., 2004).

Is optimism universal? Gallagher, Lopez, and Pressman (2012) conducted a study using representative samples from 142 countries numbering over 150,000 participants and found that individuals of all ages, races, education levels, and socioeconomic backgrounds and most countries are optimistic and that this optimism leads to better subjective well-being and health. Optimism is not merely a benefit of living in an industrialized nation either.

But is there such a thing as being too optimistic to the point of being unrealistic? The answer is yes and Weinstein (1980) identified a tendency people have to think they are invulnerable and that others will be the victims of misfortune but not themselves. He called this error in judgment, which results in a bias towards favorable outcomes, unrealistic optimism . For instance, college students in one study were unrealistically optimistic about the likelihood they would develop alcohol related problems in the future such as having a hangover, missing classes, or having an argument with a friend over their drinking. The negative consequences of unrealistic optimism were found to be both proximal and distal (Dillard, Midboe, & Klein, 2009). Another study found that patient’s participating in early-phase oncology trials display the unrealistic optimism bias in relation to their expectation of the therapeutic benefit of the trial and that this tendency can undermine the informed consent of participants (Jansen et al., 2011).

Everything is not always roses and so expressing some pessimism can actually help us to be realistic. Defensive pessimism can help us manage our anxiety and pursue our goals by setting low expectations and mentally exploring possible outcomes of goal-relevant tasks (Norem, 2008; Norem & Cantor, 1986). Hazlett, Molden, and Sackett (2011) found that participants who were focused on growth and advancement preferred optimistic forecasts and perform better when they express an optimistic outlook while those who were concerned with safety and security preferred pessimistic forecasts and perform better when they express a pessimistic outlook.

Module Recap

That’s it. We spent an entire module talking about our – self and should feel no guilt over it. Kidding. To be serious though, we all try and answer the question of who we are and philosophers have been tackling issues related to what it means to be human and matters of human existence since the dawn of time. Our discussion focused on the self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and biases and heuristics we make/use to protect our sense of self. We hope you enjoyed the wide array of issues we covered and with this topic out of the way, we can now continue our discussion in Part II of how we think about ourselves and others by focusing on ‘others.’ After this, we will round out Part II by discussing the attitudes we have about ourselves, others, and things in our world.

2nd edition

Share This Book

• Increase Font Size

2.2: Self-Schemas

Chapter 1: research methods, chapter 2: the social self, chapter 3: social judgement and decision-making, chapter 4: understanding and influencing others, chapter 5: attitudes and persuasion, chapter 6: close relationships, chapter 7: stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, chapter 8: helping and hurting, chapter 9: group dynamics.

The JoVE video player is compatible with HTML5 and Adobe Flash. Older browsers that do not support HTML5 and the H.264 video codec will still use a Flash-based video player. We recommend downloading the newest version of Flash here, but we support all versions 10 and above.

The concept of a social self can be traced back to William James over a century ago when he coined “social me”—referring to aspects of self-knowledge and the impact of interactions with others across social contexts.

During the process of understanding one’s self, an individual may look inward, through introspection, to focus their attention. While gathering self-knowledge, they may “see” a version of their life’s story and may then realize that their self-narrative is constructed and remodeled based on different social experiences.

If self-knowledge is, in large part, a product of construal, its reliability can be called into question. For instance, the person might be motived to hide or change aspects of themselves, such as they honestly dislike reading, but their partner who likes to read keeps buying them more books.

Inaccuracies of self-knowledge can also occur because someone can’t access mental processes that provide insight into the self—that is, her many thoughts and feelings are nonconscious, arising outside of awareness. As a result, they may create alternative accounts that appear plausible, like she thinks she’s more athletic than studious.

While an individual can learn skills and note experiences of their own inner states to assess their internal traits, close acquaintances are reportedly better at judging the other person’s external traits by observing overt behavioral states.

Whether accurate or not, all of this self-knowledge must somehow be stored in memory, presumably in cognitive structures called self-schemas —mental representations that someone draws from when answering the question, “Who am I?”.

Now, in this circumstance, she activates her “healthy” schema, which influences her decisions on what health-conscious groceries to buy and what wholesome restaurants she can frequent.

Similar to other schemas, including those for recurring events and objects, possessing multiple relevant self-schemas can help everyone navigate and interpret information in a complex world.

In general, a schema is a mental construct consisting of a cluster or collection of related concepts (Bartlett, 1932). There are many different types of schemata, and they all have one thing in common: schemata are a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently. When a schema is activated, the brain makes immediate assumptions about the person or object being observed.

More specifically, self-schemas refer to the mental representations that reflect who someone is—the beliefs, experiences, and generalizations about the self in certain settings or situations throughout life. People can hold self-schemas for different characteristics and traits, interests, and even behaviors. For instance, one person might activate their "healthy-eater" schema: They eat more vegetables and less junk food (Holub, Haney, & Roelse, 2012). Our views of our selves are constantly updated with new encounters and experiences. How many times have you asked yourself: "Who am I?" Has the answer changed?   

This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.

Holub, S.C., Haney, A.M., & Roelse, H. (2012). Deconstructing the concept of the healthy eater self-schematic: Relations to dietary intake, weight, and eating cognitions. Eating Behaviors, 13 (2), 106-111.

Get cutting-edge science videos from J o VE sent straight to your inbox every month.

mktb-description

We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website.

By continuing to use our website or clicking “Continue”, you are agreeing to accept our cookies.

Schema Theory In Psychology

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

• A schema is a knowledge structure that allows organisms to interpret and understand the world around them. Schemata is a method of organizing information that allows the brain to work more efficiently.
• Piaget’s theory of cognitive development put the concept at the forefront of cognitive science. Contemporary conceptions of schema evolved in the 1970s and 1980s.
• The widespread use of computers in the last decades of the 20th century also affected theories of how people store and use information in the brain.
• There are four main types of schemas. These are centered around objects, the self, roles, and events.
• Schemas can be changed and reconstructed throughout a person’s life. The two processes for doing so are assimilation and accommodation.
• Schemas have been pivotal in influencing theories of learning as well as in teacher instruction methods.

Historical Background

Schema theory is a branch of cognitive science concerned with how the brain structures knowledge. Schema (plural: schemas or schemata) is an organized unit of knowledge for a subject or event based on past experience.

Individuals access schema to guide current understanding and action (Pankin, 2013). For example, a student’s self-schema of being intelligent may have formed due to past experiences of teachers praising the student’s work and influencing the student to have studious habits.

Information that does not fit into the schema may be comprehended incorrectly or even not at all.

For example, if a waiter at a restaurant asked a customer if he would like to hum with his omelet, the patron may have a difficult time interpreting what he was asking and why, as humming is not typically something that patrons in restaurants do with omelets (Widmayer, 2001).

The concept of a schema can be traced to Plato and Aristotle (Marshall, 1995); nonetheless, scholars consider Kant (1929) to be the first to talk about schemas as organizing structures that people use to mediate how they see and interpret the world (Johnson, 1987).

F.C. Bartlett, in his book Remembering (1932), was the first to write extensively about schemas in the context of procedural memory. Procedural memory is a part of long-term memory responsible for organisms knowing how to control their bodies in certain ways in order to accomplish certain tasks, also known as motor skills.

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget , best known for his work on child development, was the first to create a cognitive development theory that included schemas.

Piaget (1976) saw schemas as mental structures altered by new information. In Piaget’s theory, new information can be added or assimilated into current schemas — ideas people have about how the world functions.

However, new information that cannot be integrated into an organism’s current schemas can create cognitive dissonance. When this happens, the schemas must change to accommodate new information.

Characteristics of Schemas

The theorists of the 1970s and 1980s conceptualized schemas as structures for representing broad concepts in memory (Ortony, 1977; McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek, 2005).

This definition highlights several important features of schemas, as noted by Rumelhart (1984):

• Schemas have variables,
• Schemas can be embedded, one within another,
• Schemas represent knowledge at all levels of abstraction,
• Schemas represent knowledge rather than definitions,
• Schemas are active processes,
• Schemas are recognition devices whose processing is aimed at evaluating how well new information fits into itself.

Piaget developed the notion of schemata, mental “structures,” which act as frameworks through which the individual classifies and interprets the world. It is these schemas that allow us, for instance, to distinguish between horses and cows by looking for key characteristics.

A schema can be discrete and specific or sequential and elaborate. For example, a schema may be as specific as recognizing a dog or as elaborate as categorizing different types of dogs.

For example, when a parent reads to a child about dogs, the child constructs a schema about dogs.

On a more sophisticated level, the schema allows us to interpret geographical features, understand complex mathematical formulae, and understand acceptable behavior associated with particular roles and contexts.

Piaget argues that, as we grow and mature, our schemata become increasingly more complex and intricate, allowing us access to more sophisticated understandings and interpretations of the world.

A baby, for instance, has only its innate schema through which to interpret and interact with its environment, such as grasping and sucking. As that baby grows, however, new schemas develop and become more complex.

For instance, it will learn to distinguish objects and people and manipulate its surroundings.

As it develops further, the child will develop the schemata necessary to deal with more abstract and symbolic concepts, such as spoken (and later, written) language, together with mathematical and logical reasoning.

Schema and Culture

People develop schemas for their own and other cultures. They may also develop schemas for cultural understanding. Cultural information and experiences are stored and schemas and support cultural identity.

Once a schema is formed, it focuses people’s attention on the aspects of the culture they are experiencing and by assimilating, accommodating, or rejecting aspects that don’t conform.

For example, someone growing up in England may develop a schema around Christmas involving crackers, caroling, turkey, mince pies, and Saint Nicholas.

This schema may affirm their cultural identity if they say, spend Christmas in Sicily, where a native schema of Christmas would likely involve eating several types of fish.

A schema used for cultural understanding is more than a stereotype about the members of a culture.

While stereotypes tend to be rigid, schemas are dynamic and subject to revision, and while stereotypes tend to simplify and ignore group differences, a schema can be complex (Renstch, Mot, and Abbe, 2009).

There are several types of schemata.

Event schema

Event schemas often called cognitive scripts, describe behavioral and event sequences and daily activities. These provide a basis for anticipating the future, setting objectives, and making plans.

For example, the behavior sequence where people are supposed to become hungry in the evening may lead someone to make evening reservations at a restaurant.

Event schemata are automatic and can be difficult to change, such as texting while driving.

Event schemata can vary widely among different cultures and countries. For example, while it is quite common for people to greet one another with a handshake in the United States, in Tibet, you greet someone by sticking your tongue out at them, and in Belize, you bump fists.

Self-schema

Self-schema is a term used to describe the knowledge that people accumulate about themselves by interacting with the natural world and with other human beings.

In turn, this influences peoples’ behavior towards others and their motivations.

Because information about the self continually comes into a person’s mind as a result of experience and social interaction, the self-schema constantly evolves over the lifespan (Lemme, 2006).

Object schema

Object schema helps to interpret inanimate objects. They inform people’s understanding of what objects are, how they should function, and what someone can expect from them.

For example, someone may have an object schema around how to use a pen.

Role schema

Role schemas invoke knowledge about how people are supposed to behave based on their roles in particular social situations (Callero, 1994).

For example, at a polite dinner party, someone with the role of the guest may be expected not to put their elbows on the table and to not talk over others.

How Schemas Change

Piaget argued that people experience a biological urge to maintain equilibrium, a state of balance between internal schema and the external environment – in other words, the ability to fully understand what’s going on around us using our existing cognitive models.

Through the processes of accommodation and assimilation, schemas evolve and become more sophisticated.

• In assimilation , new information becomes incorporated into pre-existing schemas. The information itself does not change the schema, as the schema already accounts for the new information. Assimilation promotes the “status quo” of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1976).

For organisms to learn and develop, they must be able to adapt their schemas to new information and construct new schemas for unfamiliar concepts.

Piaget argues that, on occasions, new environmental information is encountered that doesn’t match neatly with existing schemata, and we must consequently adjust and refine these schemas using the accommodation.

• In accommodation , existing schemas may be altered or new ones formed as a person learns new information or has new experiences. This disrupts the structure of pre-existing schemas and may lead to the creation of a new schema altogether.

Generally, psychologists believe that schemas are easier to change during childhood than later in life. They may also persist despite encounters with evidence that contradicts an individual’s beliefs.

Consequently, as people grow and learn more about their world, their schemata become more specialized and refined until they are able to perform complex abstract cognitions.

It is important to note, however, that – according to Piaget – the refinement of schemata does not occur without restrictions; at different ages, we are capable of different cognitive processes – and the extent of our schemata is consequently limited by biological boundaries.

Consequently, the reason that 6-year-old rocket scientists are thin on the ground is that the differences between the mental abilities of children and adults are qualitative as well as quantitative.

In other words, development is not just governed by the amount of information absorbed by the individual but also by the types of cognitive operation that can be performed on that information.

These operations are, in turn, determined by the age of the child and their resultant physiological development. Piaget consequently argues that as children age, they move through a series of stages, each of which brings with them the ability to perform increasingly more sophisticated cognitive operations.

How Schemas Affect Learning

Several instructional strategies can follow from schema theory. One of the most relevant implications of schema theory to teaching is the role that prior knowledge plays in students’ processing of information.

For learners to process information effectively, something needs to activate their existing schemas related to the new content. For instance, it would be unlikely that a student would be able to fully interpret the implications of Jacobinism without an existing schema around the existence of the French Revolution (Widmayer, 2001).

This idea that schema activation is important to learning is reflected in popular theories of learning, such as the third stage of Gagne’s nine conditions of learning , “Stimulating Recall of Prior Knowledge.”

Learners under schema theory acquire knowledge in a similar way to Piaget’s model of cognitive developments. There are three main reactions that a learner can have to new information (Widmayer, 2001):

• Accreditation : In accreditation, learners assimilate a new input into their existing schema without making any changes to the overall schema.
• For example, a learner learning that grass blades and tree leaves undergo photosynthesis may not need to change their schema to process this information if their photosynthesis schema is that “all plants undergo photosynthesis.”
• Many teachers even use “metacognitive” strategies designed to activate the learner’s schema before reading, such as reading a heading and the title, looking at visuals in the text, and making predictions about the text based on the title and pictures (Widmayer, 2001).
• Another way of pre-activating schema encourages the use of analogies and comparisons to draw attention to the learner’s existing schema and help them make connections between the existing schema and the new information (Armbruster, 1996; Driscoll, 1997).
• Tuning : Tuning is when learners realize that their existing schema is inadequate for the new knowledge and thus modify their existing schema accordingly.
• For example, someone may learn that a particular proposition is nonsensical in a particular sentence structure and thus need to modify their schema around when it is and is not appropriate to use that proposition.
• Scholars have noted that the transfer of knowledge outside of the context in which it was originally acquired is difficult and may require that learners be exposed to similar knowledge in numerous different contexts to eventually be able to construct less situationally constricted schema (Price & Driscroll, 1997).
• Restructuring : Finally, restructuring is the process of creating a new schema that addresses the inconsistencies between the old schema and the newly acquired information.
• For example, a learner who learns that corn is technically a fruit may need to overhaul their entire schema of fruit to address the inconsistencies between how they had previously defined fruit and this new information.

Unlike Piaget, schema theorists do not see each schema as representative of discrete stages of development, and the processes of accreditation, tuning, and restructuring happen over multiple domains in a continuous time frame (Widmayer, 2001).

According to schema theory, Knowledge is not necessarily stored hierarchically. Rather, knowledge is driven by the meanings attached to that knowledge by the learner and represented propositionally and in a way that is actively constructed by the learner.

In addition to schema, psychologists believe that learners also have mental models — dynamic models for problem-solving based on a learner’s existing schema and perceptions of task demand and task performance.

Rather than starting from nothing, people have imprecise, partial, and idiosyncratic understandings to tasks that evolve with experience (Driscoll, 1994).

Critical Evaluation

While schema theory gives psychologists a framework for understanding how humans process knowledge, some scholars have argued that it is ill-constrained and provides few assumptions about how this processing actually works.

This lack of constraint, it has been argued, allows the theory enough flexibility for people to explain virtually any set of empirical data using the theory.

The flexibility of schema theory also gives it limited predictive value and, thus, a limited ability to be tested as a scientific theory (Thorndyke and Yekovich, 1979).

Thorndyke and Yekovich (1979) elaborate on the shortcomings of a schema as a predictive theory. In the same vein as the criticism about the flexibility of schema theory, Thorndyke and Yekovich note that it is difficult to find data inconsistent with schema theory and that it has largely been used for descriptive purposes to account for existing data.

Lastly, Thorndyke and Yekovich (1979) argue that the second area of theoretical weakness in Schema theories lies in its specification of detailed processes for manipulating and creating schemas.

One competing theory to the schema theory of learning is Ausubel’s Meaningful Receptive Learning Theory (1966). In short, Ausubel’s Meaningful Reception Learning Theory states that learners can learn best when the new material being taught can be anchored into existing cognitive information in the learners.

In contrast to Ausbel’s theory, the learner in schema theory actively builds schemas and revises them in light of new information. As a result, each individual’s schema is unique and dependent on that individual’s experiences and cognitive processes.

Ausubel proposed a hierarchical organization of knowledge where the learner more or less attaches new knowledge to an existing hierarchy. In this representation, structure, as well as meaning, drives memory.

Applications

Schemas are a major determinant of how people think, feel, behave, and interact socially. People generally accept their schemas as truths about the world outside of awareness, despite how they influence the processing of experiences.

Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey E. Young (1990), is an integrative therapy approach and theoretical framework used to treat patients, most often with personality disorders. Schema therapy evolved from cognitive behavioral therapy.

Those with personality disorders often fail to respond to traditional cognitive behavioral theory (Beck et al., 1990). Rather than targeting acute psychiatric symptoms, schema therapy targets the underlying characteristics of personality disorders.

The schema therapy model has three main constructs: “schemas,” or core psychological themes; “coping styles,” or characteristic behavioral responses to schemas; and “modes,” which are the schemas and coping styles operating at a given moment (Martin and Young, 2009).

According to the schema therapy framework, the earliest and most central schemas tend to originate in one’s childhood. These schemas begin as representations of the child’s environment based on reality and develop from the interactions between a child’s innate temperament and specific unmet, core childhood needs (Martin and Young, 2009).

Schema therapy seeks to alter these long-standing schemas by helping people to:

• identify and heal their own schemas,
• identify and address coping styles that get in the way of emotional needs,
• change patterns of feeling and behaviors that result from schemas,
• learn how to get core emotional needs met in a healthy and adaptive way,
• and learn how to cope healthily with frustration and distress when certain needs cannot be met.

Alba, J. W., & Hasher, L. (1983). Is memory schematic? . Psychological Bulletin, 93 (2), 203.

Armbruster, B. B. (1986). Schema theory and the design of content-area textbooks . Educational Psychologist, 21 (4), 253-267

Ausubel, D. P. (1966). Meaningful reception learning and the acquisition of concepts. In Analyses of concept learning (pp. 157-175). Academic Press.

Bartlett, F. C., & Bartlett, F. C. (1995). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology . Cambridge University Press.

Beck, A. T., Freeman, A., & Associates. (1990). Cognitive therapy of personality disorders . New York: Guilford Press.

Brewer, W. F., & Treyens, J. C. (1981). Role of schemata in memory for places. Cognitive Psychology, 13 (2), 207-230.

Driscoll, M. P. (1994). Psychology of learning for instruction . Allyn & Bacon.

Gagne, R. M., & Glaser, R. (1987). Foundations in learning research. Instructional technology: foundations , 49-83.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1989). Language, context, and text: Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective .

Johnson, M. (1987). The body in mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination. Reason .

Kant, I. (1929). Critique of Pure Reason (1781-1787), Trans. Kemp Smith.

Kaplan, R. B. (1966). Cultural thought patterns in intercultural education. Language Learning, 16 (1), 1-20.

Lemme, B. H. (2006) Development in Adulthood . Boston, MA. Pearson Education, Inc

Marshall, S. P. (1995). Schemas in problem solving . Cambridge University Press.

Martin, R., & Young, J. (2009). Schema therapy. Handbook of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies , 317.

McVee, M. B., Dunsmore, K., & Gavelek, J. R. (2005). Schema theory revisited. Review of Educational Research, 75 (4), 531-566.

Ortony, A., & Anderson, R. C. (1977). Definite descriptions and semantic memory. Cognitive Science, 1 (1), 74-83.

Pankin, J. (2013). Schema theory and concept formation. Presentation at MIT , Fall.

Piaget, J. (1976). Piaget’s theory. In Piaget and his school (pp. 11-23). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Price, E. A., & Driscoll, M. P. (1997). An inquiry into the spontaneous transfer of problem-solving skill. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 22 (4), 472-494.

Rentsch, J. R., Mot, I., & Abbe, A. (2009). Identifying the core content and structure of a schema for cultural understanding. ARMY RESEARCH INST FOR THE BEHAVIORAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCES ARLINGTON VA.

Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In Representation and understanding (pp. 211-236). Morgan Kaufmann.

Rumelhart, D. E. (1984). Schemata and the cognitive system .

Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (2013). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures . Psychology Press.

Schank, R. C. (1982). Reading and understanding: Teaching from the perspective of artificial intelligence . L. Erlbaum Associates Inc.

Schwartz, N. H., Ellsworth, L. S., Graham, L., & Knight, B. (1998). Accessing prior knowledge to remember text: A comparison of advance organizers and maps. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 23 (1), 65-89.

Thorndyke, P. W., & Yekovich, F. R. (1979). A critique of schemata as a theory of human story memory (No. P-6307). Santa Monica, CA. Rand.

Widmayer, S. A. (2004). Schema theory: An introduction . Retrieved December 26, 2004.

Young, J. E. (1990). Cognitive therapy for personality disorders . Professional Resources Press. Sarasota, FL

Further Reading

• Baldwin, M. W. (1992). Relational schemas and the processing of social information. Psychological bulletin, 112(3), 461.
• Padesky, C. A. (1994). Schema change processes in cognitive therapy. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 1(5), 267-278.

Related Articles

Child Psychology

Vygotsky vs. Piaget: A Paradigm Shift

Interactional Synchrony

Internal Working Models of Attachment

Cognitive Psychology

Automatic Processing in Psychology: Definition & Examples

Controlled Processing in Psychology: Definition & Examples

Learning Theory of Attachment

3. The Self

The cognitive self: the self-concept, learning objectives.

• Define and describe the self-concept, its influence on information processing, and its diversity across social groups.
• Describe the concepts of self-complexity and self-concept clarity, and explain how they influence social cognition and behavior.
• Differentiate the various types of self-awareness and self-consciousness.
• Describe self-awareness, self-discrepancy, and self-affirmation theories, and their interrelationships.
• Explore how we sometimes overestimate the accuracy with which other people view us.

Some nonhuman animals, including chimpanzees, orangutans, and perhaps dolphins, have at least a primitive sense of self (Boysen & Himes, 1999). We know this because of some interesting experiments that have been done with animals. In one study (Gallup, 1970), researchers painted a red dot on the forehead of anesthetized chimpanzees and then placed the animals in a cage with a mirror. When the chimps woke up and looked in the mirror, they touched the dot on their faces, not the dot on the faces in the mirror. This action suggests that the chimps understood that they were looking at themselves and not at other animals, and thus we can assume that they are able to realize that they exist as individuals. Most other animals, including dogs, cats, and monkeys, never realize that it is themselves they see in a mirror.

Figure 3.2 A simple test of self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. Humans and chimpanzees can pass the test; dogs never do. Getting ready by Flavia used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Mirror mirror by rromer  used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Quite Reflection by Valerie used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Toddler in mirror by Samantha Steele used under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Infants who have similar red dots painted on their foreheads recognize themselves in a mirror in the same way that chimps do, and they do this by about 18 months of age (Asendorpf, Warkentin, & Baudonnière, 1996; Povinelli, Landau, & Perilloux, 1996). The child’s knowledge about the self continues to develop as the child grows. By two years of age, the infant becomes aware of his or her gender as a boy or a girl. At age four, the child’s self-descriptions are likely to be based on physical features, such as hair color, and by about age six, the child is able to understand basic emotions and the concepts of traits, being able to make statements such as “I am a nice person” (Harter, 1998).

By the time children are in grade school, they have learned that they are unique individuals, and they can think about and analyze their own behavior. They also begin to show awareness of the social situation—they understand that other people are looking at and judging them the same way that they are looking at and judging others (Doherty, 2009).

Development and Characteristics of the Self-Concept

Part of what is developing in children as they grow is the fundamental cognitive part of the self, known as the self-concept . The self-concept is a knowledge representation that contains knowledge about us, including our beliefs about our personality traits, physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and roles, as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals . Throughout childhood and adolescence, the self-concept becomes more abstract and complex and is organized into a variety of different cognitive aspects of the self , known as self-schemas.  Children have self-schemas about their progress in school, their appearance, their skills at sports and other activities, and many other aspects. In turn, these self-schemas direct and inform their processing of self-relevant information (Harter, 1999), much as we saw schemas in general affecting our social cognition.

These self-schemas can be studied using the methods that we would use to study any other schema. One approach is to use neuroimaging to directly study the self in the brain. As you can see in  Figure 3.3 , neuroimaging studies have shown that information about the self is stored in the prefrontal cortex, the same place that other information about people is stored (Barrios et al., 2008).

Figure 3.3 This figure shows the areas of the human brain that are known to be important in processing information about the self. They include primarily areas of the prefrontal cortex (areas 1, 2, 4, and 5). Data are from Lieberman (2010)

Another approach to studying the self is to investigate how we attend to and remember things that relate to the self. Indeed, because the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, it has an extraordinary degree of influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Have you ever been at a party where there was a lot of noise and bustle, and yet you were surprised to discover that you could easily hear your own name being mentioned in the background? Because our own name is such an important part of our self-concept, and because we value it highly, it is highly accessible. We are very alert for, and react quickly to, the mention of our own name.

Other research has found that information related to the self-schema is better remembered than information that is unrelated to it, and that information related to the self can also be processed very quickly (Lieberman, Jarcho, & Satpute, 2004). In one classic study that demonstrated the importance of the self-schema, Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker (1977) conducted an experiment to assess how college students recalled information that they had learned under different processing conditions. All the participants were presented with the same list of 40 adjectives to process, but through the use of random assignment, the participants were given one of four different sets of instructions about how to process the adjectives.

Participants assigned to the  structural task condition  were asked to judge whether the word was printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. Participants in the  phonemic task condition  were asked whether the word rhymed with another given word. In the  semantic task condition , the participants were asked if the word was a synonym of another word. And in the  self-reference task condition , participants indicated whether the given adjective was or was not true of themselves. After completing the specified task, each participant was asked to recall as many adjectives as he or she could remember. Rogers and his colleagues hypothesized that different types of processing would have different effects on memory. As you can see in  Figure 3.4, “The Self-Reference Effect,” the students in the self-reference task condition recalled significantly more adjectives than did students in any other condition.

Figure 3.7 The Illusion of Transparency

The chart shows the proportion of adjectives that students were able to recall under each of four learning conditions. The same words were recalled significantly better when they were processed in relation to the self than when they were processed in other ways. Data from Rogers et al. (1977).

The finding that  information that is processed in relationship to the self is particularly well remembered , known as the self-reference effect , is powerful evidence that the self-concept helps us organize and remember information. The next time you are studying, you might try relating the material to your own experiences—the self-reference effect suggests that doing so will help you better remember the information.

The specific content of our self-concept powerfully affects the way that we process information relating to ourselves. But how can we measure that specific content? One way is by using self-report tests. One of these is a deceptively simple fill-in-the-blank measure that has been widely used by many scientists to get a picture of the self-concept (Rees & Nicholson, 1994). All of the 20 items in the measure are exactly the same, but the person is asked to fill in a different response for each statement. This self-report measure, known as the Twenty Statements Test (TST), can reveal a lot about a person because it is designed to measure the most accessible—and thus the most important—parts of a person’s self-concept. Try it for yourself, at least five times:

• I am (please fill in the blank) __________________________________

Although each person has a unique self-concept, we can identify some characteristics that are common across the responses given by different people on the measure. Physical characteristics are an important component of the self-concept, and they are mentioned by many people when they describe themselves. If you’ve been concerned lately that you’ve been gaining weight, you might write, “I am overweight. ” If you think you’re particularly good looking (“I am attractive ”), or if you think you’re too short (“I am too short ”), those things might have been reflected in your responses. Our physical characteristics are important to our self-concept because we realize that other people use them to judge us. People often list the physical characteristics that make them different from others in either positive or negative ways (“I am blond ,” “I am short ”), in part because they understand that these characteristics are salient and thus likely to be used by others when judging them (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978).

A second aspect of the self-concept relating to personal characteristics is made up of  personality traits — the specific and stable personality characteristics that describe an individual (“I am  friendly, ” “I am  shy, ” “I am  persistent ”). These individual differences are important determinants of behavior, and this aspect of the self-concept varies among people.

The remainder of the self-concept reflects its more external, social components; for example, memberships in the social groups that we belong to and care about. Common responses for this component may include “I am an artist ,” “I am Jewish ,” and “I am a mother, sister, daughter. ” As we will see later in this chapter, group memberships form an important part of the self-concept because they provide us with our social identity — the sense of our self that involves our memberships in social groups .

Although we all define ourselves in relation to these three broad categories of characteristics—physical, personality, and social – some interesting cultural differences in the relative importance of these categories have been shown in people’s responses to the TST. For example, Ip and Bond (1995) found that the responses from Asian participants included significantly more references to themselves as occupants of social roles (e.g., “I am Joyce’s friend”) or social groups (e.g., “I am a member of the Cheng family”) than those of American participants. Similarly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) reported that Asian participants were more than twice as likely to include references to other people in their self-concept than did their Western counterparts. This greater emphasis on either external and social aspects of the self-concept reflects the relative importance that collectivistic and individualistic cultures place on an interdependence versus independence (Nisbett, 2003).

Interestingly, bicultural individuals who report acculturation to both collectivist and individualist cultures show shifts in their self-concept depending on which culture they are primed to think about when completing the TST. For example, Ross, Xun, & Wilson (2002) found that students born in China but living in Canada reported more interdependent aspects of themselves on the TST when asked to write their responses in Chinese, as opposed to English. These culturally different responses to the TST are also related to a broader distinction in self-concept, with people from individualistic cultures often describing themselves using internal characteristics that emphasize their uniqueness, compared with those from collectivistic backgrounds who tend to stress shared social group memberships and roles. In turn, this distinction can lead to important differences in social behavior.

One simple yet powerful demonstration of cultural differences in self-concept affecting social behavior is shown in a study that was conducted by Kim and Markus (1999). In this study, participants were contacted in the waiting area of the San Francisco airport and asked to fill out a short questionnaire for the researcher. The participants were selected according to their cultural background: about one-half of them indicated they were European Americans whose parents were born in the United States, and the other half indicated they were Asian Americans whose parents were born in China and who spoke Chinese at home. After completing the questionnaires (which were not used in the data analysis except to determine the cultural backgrounds), participants were asked if they would like to take a pen with them as a token of appreciation. The experimenter extended his or her hand, which contained five pens. The pens offered to the participants were either three or four of one color and one or two of another color (the ink in the pens was always black). As shown in  Figure 3.5, “Cultural Differences in Desire for Uniqueness,” and consistent with the hypothesized preference for uniqueness in Western, but not Eastern, cultures, the European Americans preferred to take a pen with the more unusual color, whereas the Asian American participants preferred one with the more common color.

Figure 3.5 Cultural Differences in Desire for Uniqueness

In this study, participants from European American and East Asian cultures were asked to choose a pen as a token of appreciation for completing a questionnaire. There were either four pens of one color and one of another color, or three pens of one color and two of another. European Americans were significantly more likely to choose the more uncommon pen color in both cases. Data are from Kim and Markus (1999, Experiment 3).

Cultural differences in self-concept have even been found in people’s self-descriptions on social networking sites. DeAndrea, Shaw, and Levine (2010) examined individuals’ free-text self-descriptions in the About Me section in their Facebook profiles. Consistent with the researchers’ hypotheses, and with previous research using the TST, African American participants had the most the most independently (internally) described self-concepts, and Asian Americans had the most interdependent (external) self-descriptions, with European Americans in the middle.

As well as indications of cultural diversity in the content of the self-concept, there is also evidence of parallel gender diversity between males and females from various cultures, with females, on average, giving more external and social responses to the TST than males (Kashima et al., 1995). Interestingly, these gender differences have been found to be more apparent in individualistic nations than in collectivistic nations (Watkins et al., 1998).

Self-Complexity and Self-Concept Clarity

As we have seen, the self-concept is a rich and complex social representation of who we are, encompassing both our internal characteristics and our social roles. In addition to our thoughts about who we are right now, the self-concept also includes thoughts about our past self—our experiences, accomplishments, and failures—and about our future self—our hopes, plans, goals, and possibilities (Oyserman, Bybee, Terry, & Hart-Johnson, 2004). The multidimensional nature of our self-concept means that we need to consider not just each component in isolation, but also their interactions with each other and their overall structure. Two particularly important structural aspects of our self-concept are complexity and clarity.

Although every human being has a complex self-concept, there are nevertheless individual differences in self-complexity , the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves (Linville, 1987; Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Some selves are more complex than others, and these individual differences can be important in determining psychological outcomes. Having a complex self means that we have a lot of different ways of thinking about ourselves. For example, imagine a woman whose self-concept contains the social identities of student, girlfriend, daughter, psychology student , and tennis player and who has encountered a wide variety of life experiences. Social psychologists would say that she has high self-complexity. On the other hand, a man who perceives himself primarily as either a student or as a member of the soccer team and who has had a relatively narrow range of life experiences would be said to have low self-complexity. For those with high self-complexity, the various aspects of the self are separate, as the positive and negative thoughts about a particular self-aspect do not spill over into thoughts about other aspects.

Research has found that compared with people low in self-complexity, those higher in self-complexity tend to experience more positive outcomes, including  higher levels of self-esteem (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002), lower levels of stress and illness (Kalthoff & Neimeyer, 1993), and a greater tolerance for frustration (Gramzow, Sedikides, Panter, & Insko, 2000).

The benefits of self-complexity occur because the various domains of the self help to buffer us against negative events and enjoy the positive events that we experience. For people low in self-complexity, negative outcomes in relation to one aspect of the self tend to have a big impact on their self-esteem. For example, if the only thing that Maria cares about is getting into medical school, she may be devastated if she fails to make it. On the other hand, Marty, who is also passionate about medical school but who has a more complex self-concept, may be better able to adjust to such a blow by turning to other interests.

Although having high self-complexity seems useful overall, it does not seem to help everyone equally in their response to all events (Rafaeli-Mor & Steinberg, 2002). People with high self-complexity seem to react more positively to the good things that happen to them but not necessarily less negatively to the bad things. And the positive effects of self-complexity are stronger for people who have other positive aspects of the self as well. This buffering effect is stronger for people with high self-esteem, whose self-complexity involves positive rather than negative characteristics (Koch & Shepperd, 2004), and for people who feel that they have control over their outcomes (McConnell et al., 2005).

Just as we may differ in the complexity of our self-concept, so we may also differ in its clarity.  Self-concept clarity  is the extent to which one’s self-concept is clearly and consistently defined (Campbell, 1990). Theoretically, the concepts of complexity and clarity are independent of each other—a person could have either a more or less complex self-concept that is either well defined and consistent, or ill defined and inconsistent. However, in reality, they each have similar relationships to many indices of well-being.

For example, as has been found with self-complexity, higher self-concept clarity is positively related to self-esteem (Campbell et al., 1996). Why might this be? Perhaps people with higher self-esteem tend to have a more well-defined and stable view of their positive qualities, whereas those with lower self-esteem show more inconsistency and instability in their self-concept, which is then more vulnerable to being negatively affected by challenging situations. Consistent with this assertion, self-concept clarity appears to mediate the relationship between stress and well-being (Ritchie et al., 2011).

Also, having a clear and stable view of ourselves can help us in our relationships. Lewandowski, Nardine, and Raines (2010) found a positive correlation between clarity and relationship satisfaction, as well as a significant increase in reported satisfaction following an experimental manipulation of participants’ self-concept clarity. Greater clarity may promote relationship satisfaction in a number of ways. As Lewandowski and colleagues (2010) argue, when we have a clear self-concept, we may be better able to consistently communicate who we are and what we want to our partner, which will promote greater understanding and satisfaction. Also, perhaps when we feel clearer about who we are, then we feel less of a threat to our self-concept and autonomy when we find ourselves having to make compromises in our close relationships.

Thinking back to the cultural differences we discussed earlier in this section in the context of people’s self-concepts, it could be that self-concept clarity is generally higher in individuals from individualistic cultures, as their self-concept is based more on internal characteristics that are held to be stable across situations, than on external social facets of the self that may be more changeable. This is indeed what the research suggests. Not only do members of more collectivistic cultures tend to have lower self-concept clarity, that clarity is also less strongly related to their self-esteem compared with those from more individualistic cultures (Campbell et al., 1996). As we shall see when our attention turns to perceiving others in Chapter 5, our cultural background not only affects the clarity and consistency of how we see ourselves, but also how consistently we view other people and their behavior.

Self-Awareness

Like any other schema, the self-concept can vary in its current cognitive accessibility. Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept . When our self-concept becomes highly accessible because of our concerns about being observed and potentially judged by others, we experience the publicly induced self-awareness known as self-consciousness (Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Rochat, 2009).

Perhaps you can remember times when your self-awareness was increased and you became self-conscious—for instance, when you were giving a presentation and you were perhaps painfully aware that everyone was looking at you, or when you did something in public that embarrassed you. Emotions such as anxiety and embarrassment occur in large part because the self-concept becomes highly accessible, and they serve as a signal to monitor and perhaps change our behavior.

Not all aspects of our self-concept are equally accessible at all times, and these long-term differences in the accessibility of the different self-schemas help create individual differences in terms of, for instance, our current concerns and interests. You may know some people for whom the physical appearance component of the self-concept is highly accessible. They check their hair every time they see a mirror, worry whether their clothes are making them look good, and do a lot of shopping—for themselves, of course. Other people are more focused on their social group memberships—they tend to think about things in terms of their role as Muslims or Christians, for example, or as members of the local tennis or soccer team.

In addition to variation in long-term accessibility, the self and its various components may also be made temporarily more accessible through priming. We become more self-aware when we are in front of a mirror, when a TV camera is focused on us, when we are speaking in front of an audience, or when we are listening to our own tape-recorded voice (Kernis & Grannemann, 1988). When the knowledge contained in the self-schema becomes more accessible, it also becomes more likely to be used in information processing and to influence our behavior.

Beaman, Klentz, Diener, and Svanum (1979) conducted a field experiment to see if self-awareness would influence children’s honesty. The researchers expected that most children viewed stealing as wrong but that they would be more likely to act on this belief when they were more self-aware. They conducted this experiment on Halloween in homes within the city of Seattle, Washington. At particular houses, children who were trick-or-treating were greeted by one of the experimenters, shown a large bowl of candy, and were told to take only one piece each. The researchers unobtrusively watched each child to see how many pieces he or she actually took. In some of the houses there was a large mirror behind the candy bowl; in other houses, there was no mirror. Out of the 363 children who were observed in the study, 19% disobeyed instructions and took more than one piece of candy. However, the children who were in front of a mirror were significantly less likely to steal (14.4%) than were those who did not see a mirror (28.5%).

These results suggest that the mirror activated the children’s self-awareness, which reminded them of their belief about the importance of being honest. Other research has shown that being self-aware has a powerful influence on other behaviors as well. For instance, people are more likely to stay on a diet, eat better food, and act more morally overall when they are self-aware (Baumeister, Zell, & Tice, 2007; Heatherton, Polivy, Herman, & Baumeister, 1993). What this means is that when you are trying to stick to a diet, study harder, or engage in other difficult behaviors, you should try to focus on yourself and the importance of the goals you have set.

Social psychologists are interested in studying self-awareness because it has such an important influence on behavior. People become more likely to violate acceptable, mainstream social norms when, for example, they put on a Halloween mask or engage in other behaviors that hide their identities. For example, the members of the militant White supremacist organization the Ku Klux Klan wear white robes and hats when they meet and when they engage in their racist behavior. And when people are in large crowds, such as in a mass demonstration or a riot, they may become so much a part of the group that they experience deindividuation — the loss of individual self-awareness and individual accountability in groups (Festinger, Pepitone, & Newcomb, 1952; Zimbardo, 1969) and become more attuned to themselves as group members and to the specific social norms of the particular situation (Reicher & Stott, 2011).

Figure 3.6 Examples of situations that may create deindividuation include wearing uniforms that hide the self and alcohol intoxication. 08KKKfamilyPortrait by Image Editor used under CC BY 2.0 license.   Catholic clergy and Nazi official  is in the  public domain . Eric Church by Larry Darling used under CC BY-NC 2.0 License.

Social Psychology in the Public Interest

Deindividuation and Rioting

Rioting occurs when civilians engage in violent public disturbances. The targets of these disturbances can be people in authority, other civilians, or property. The triggers for riots are varied, including everything from the aftermath of sporting events, to the killing of a civilian by law enforcement officers, to commodity shortages, to political oppression. Both civilians and law enforcement personnel are frequently seriously injured or killed during riots, and the damage to public property can be considerable.

Social psychologists, like many other academics, have long been interested in the forces that shape rioting behavior. One of the earliest and most influential perspectives on rioting was offered by French sociologist, Gustav Le Bon (1841–1931). In his book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon (1895) described the transformation of the individual in the crowd. According to Le Bon, the forces of anonymity, suggestibility, and contagion combine to change a collection of individuals into a “psychological crowd.” Under this view, the individuals then become submerged in the crowd, lose self-control, and engage in antisocial behaviors.

Some of the early social psychological accounts of rioting focused in particular on the concept of deindividuation as a way of trying to account for the forces that Le Bon described. Festinger et al. (1952), for instance, argued that members of large groups do not pay attention to other people as individuals and do not feel that their own behavior is being scrutinized. Under this view, being unidentified and thereby unaccountable has the psychological consequence of reducing inner restraints and increasing behavior that is usually repressed, such as that often seen in riots.

Extending these ideas, Zimbardo (1969) argued that deindividuation involved feelings of reduced self-observation, which then bring about antinormative and disinhibited behavior. In support of this position, he found that participants engaged in more antisocial behavior when their identity was made anonymous by wearing Ku Klux Klan uniforms. However, in the context of rioting, these perspectives, which focus on behaviors that are antinormative (e.g., aggressive behavior is typically antinormative), neglect the possibility that they might actually be normative in the particular situation. For example, during some riots, antisocial behavior can be viewed as a normative response to injustice or oppression. Consistent with this assertion, Johnson and Downing (1979) found that when participants were able to mask their identities by wearing nurses uniforms, their deindividuated state actually led them to show more prosocial behavior than when their identities were visible to others. In other words, if the group situation is associated with more prosocial norms, deindividuation can actually increase these behaviors, and therefore does not inevitably lead to antisocial conduct.

Building on these findings, researchers have developed more contemporary accounts of deindividuation and rioting. One particularly important approach has been the social identity model of deindividuation effects (or SIDE model), developed by Reicher, Spears, and Postmes (1995). This perspective argues that being in a deindividuated state can actually reinforce group salience and conformity to specific group norms in the current situation. According to this model, deindividuation does not, then, lead to a loss of identity per se . Instead, people take on a more collective identity. Seen in this way, rioting behavior is more about the conscious adoption of behaviors reflecting collective identity than the abdication of personal identity and responsibility outlined in the earlier perspectives on deindividuation.

In support of the SIDE model, although crowd behavior during riots might seem mindless, antinormative, and disinhibited to the outside observer, to those taking part it is often perceived as rational, normative, and subject to well-defined limits (Reicher, 1987). For instance, when law enforcement officers are the target of rioters, then any targeting of other civilians by rioters is often condemned and policed by the group members themselves (Reicher & Stott, 2011). Indeed, as Fogelson (1971) concluded in his analysis of rioting in the United States in the 1960s, restraint and selectivity, as opposed to mindless and indiscriminate violence, were among the most crucial features of the riots.

Seeing rioting in this way, as a rational, normative response, Reicher and Stott (2011) describe it as being caused by a number of interlocking factors, including a sense of illegitimacy or grievance, a lack of alternatives to confrontation, the formation of a shared identity, and a sense of confidence in collective power. Viewing deindividuation as a force that causes people to increase their sense of collective identity and then to express that identity in meaningful ways leads to some important recommendations for controlling rioting more effectively, including that:

• Labeling rioters as “mindless,” “thugs,” and so on will not address the underlying causes of riots.
• Indiscriminate or disproportionate use of force by police will often lead to an escalation of rioting behavior.
• Law enforcement personnel should allow legitimate and legal protest behaviors to occur during riots, and only illegal and inappropriate behaviors should be targeted.
• Police officers should communicate their intentions to crowds before using force.

Two aspects of individual differences in self-awareness have been found to be important, and they relate to self-concern and other-concern, respectively (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975; Lalwani, Shrum, & Chiu, 2009).   Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings . People who are high in private self-consciousness tend to think about themselves a lot and agree with statements such as “I’m always trying to figure myself out” and “I am generally attentive to my inner feelings.” People who are high on private self-consciousness are likely to base their behavior on their own inner beliefs and values—they let their inner thoughts and feelings guide their actions—and they may be particularly likely to strive to succeed on dimensions that allow them to demonstrate their own personal accomplishments (Lalwani et al., 2009).

Public self-consciousness , in contrast, refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and to be particularly aware of the extent to which we are meeting the standards set by others . Those high in public self-consciousness agree with statements such as “I’m concerned about what other people think of me,” “Before I leave my house, I check how I look,” and “I care a lot about how I present myself to others.” These are the people who check their hair in a mirror they pass and spend a lot of time getting ready in the morning; they are more likely to let the opinions of others (rather than their own opinions) guide their behaviors and are particularly concerned with making good impressions on others.

Research has found cultural differences in public self-consciousness, with people from East Asian, collectivistic cultures having higher public self-consciousness than people from Western, individualistic cultures. Steve Heine and colleagues (2008) found that when college students from Canada (a Western culture) completed questionnaires in front of a large mirror, they subsequently became more self-critical and were less likely to cheat (much like the trick-or-treaters discussed earlier) than were Canadian students who were not in front of a mirror. However, the presence of the mirror had no effect on college students from Japan. This person-situation interaction is consistent with the idea that people from East Asian cultures are normally already high in public self-consciousness compared with people from Western cultures, and thus manipulations designed to increase public self-consciousness influence them less.

So we see that there are clearly individual and cultural differences in the degree to and manner in which we tend to be aware of ourselves. In general, though, we all experience heightened moments of self-awareness from time to time. According to self-awareness theory  (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), when we focus our attention on ourselves, we tend to compare our current behavior against our internal standards . Sometimes when we make these comparisons, we realize that we are not currently measuring up. In these cases,  self-discrepancy theory  states that when we   perceive a discrepancy between our actual and ideal selves, this is distressing to us  (Higgins, Klein, & Strauman, 1987). In contrast, on the occasions when self-awareness leads us to comparisons where we feel that we  are  being congruent with our standards, then self-awareness can produce positive affect (Greenberg & Musham, 1981). Tying these ideas from the two theories together, Philips and Silvia (2005) found that people felt significantly more distressed when exposed to self-discrepancies while sitting in front of a mirror. In contrast, those not sitting in front of a mirror, and presumably experiencing lower self-awareness, were not significantly emotionally affected by perceived self-discrepancies. Simply put, the more self-aware we are in a given situation, the more pain we feel when we are not living up to our ideals.

In part, the stress arising from perceived self-discrepancy relates to a sense of  cognitive dissonance , which is the discomfort that occurs when we respond in ways that we see as inconsistent . In these cases, we may realign our current state to be closer to our ideals, or shift our ideals to be closer to our current state, both of which will help reduce our sense of dissonance. Another potential response to feelings of self-discrepancy is to try to reduce the state of self-awareness that gave rise to these feelings by focusing on other things. For example, Moskalenko and Heine (2002) found that people who are given false negative feedback about their performance on an intelligence test, which presumably lead them to feel discrepant from their internal performance standards about such tasks, subsequently focused significantly more on a video playing in a room than those given positive feedback.

There are certain situations, however, where these common dissonance-reduction strategies may not be realistic options to pursue. For example, if someone who has generally negative attitudes toward drug use nevertheless becomes addicted to a particular substance, it will often not be easy to quit the habit, to reframe the evidence regarding the drug’s negative effects, or to reduce self-awareness. In such cases,  self-affirmation theory  suggests that people will try to reduce the threat to their self-concept posed by feelings of self-discrepancy by focusing on and affirming their worth in another domain, unrelated to the issue at hand . For instance, the person who has become addicted to an illegal substance may choose to focus on healthy eating and exercise regimes instead as a way of reducing the dissonance created by the drug use.

Although self-affirmation can often help people feel more comfortable by reducing their sense of dissonance, it can also have have some negative effects. For example, Munro and Stansbury (2009) tested people’s social cognitive responses to hypotheses that were either threatening or non-threatening to their self-concepts, following exposure to either a self-affirming or non-affirming activity. The key findings were that those who had engaged in the self-affirmation condition and were then exposed to a threatening hypothesis showed greater tendencies than those in the non-affirming group to seek out evidence confirming their own views, and to detect illusory correlations in support of these positions. One possible interpretation of these results is that self-affirmation elevates people’s mood and they then become more likely to engage in heuristic processing, as discussed in Chapter 2.

Still another option to pursue when we feel that our current self is not matching up to our ideal self is to seek out opportunities to get closer to our ideal selves. One method of doing this can be in online environments. Massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming, for instance, offers people the chance to interact with others in a virtual world, using graphical alter egos, or avatars, to represent themselves. The role of the self-concept in influencing people’s choice of avatars is only just beginning to be researched, but some evidence suggests that gamers design avatars that are closer to their ideal than their actual selves. For example, a study of avatars used in one popular MMO role-play game indicated that players rated their avatars as having more favorable attributes than their own self-ratings, particularly if they had lower self-esteem (Bessiere, Seay, & Keisler, 2007). They also rated their avatars as more similar to their ideal selves than they themselves were. The authors of this study concluded that these online environments allow players to explore their ideal selves, freed from the constraints of the physical world.

There are also emerging findings exploring the role of self-awareness and self-affirmation in relation to behaviors on social networking sites. Gonzales and Hancock (2011) conducted an experiment showing that individuals became more self-aware after viewing and updating their Facebook profiles, and in turn reported higher self-esteem than participants assigned to an offline, control condition. The increased self-awareness that can come from Facebook activity may not always have beneficial effects, however. Chiou and Lee (2013) conducted two experiments indicating that when individuals put personal photos and wall postings onto their Facebook accounts, they show increased self-awareness, but subsequently decreased ability to take other people’s perspectives. Perhaps sometimes we can have too much self-awareness and focus to the detriment of our abilities to understand others. Toma and Hancock (2013) investigated the role of self-affirmation in Facebook usage and found that users viewed their profiles in self-affirming ways, which enhanced their self-worth. They were also more likely to look at their Facebook profiles after receiving threats to their self-concept, doing so in an attempt to use self-affirmation to restore their self-esteem. It seems, then, that the dynamics of self-awareness and affirmation are quite similar in our online and offline behaviors.

Having reviewed some important theories and findings in relation to self-discrepancy and affirmation, we should now turn our attention to diversity. Once again, as with many other aspects of the self-concept, we find that there are important cultural differences. For instance, Heine and Lehman (1997) tested participants from a more individualistic nation (Canada) and a more collectivistic one (Japan) in a situation where they took a personality test and then received bogus positive or negative feedback. They were then asked to rate the desirability of 10 music CDs. Subsequently, they were offered the choice of taking home either their fifth- or sixth-ranked CD, and then required to re-rate the 10 CDs. The critical finding was that the Canadians overall rated their chosen CD higher and their unchosen one lower the second time around, mirroring classic findings on dissonance reduction, whereas the Japanese participants did not. Crucially, though, the Canadian participants who had been given positive feedback about their personalities (in other words, had been given self-affirming evidence in an unrelated domain) did not feel the need to pursue this dissonance reduction strategy. In contrast, the Japanese did not significantly adjust their ratings in response to either positive or negative feedback from the personality test.

Once more, these findings make sense if we consider that the pressure to avoid self-discrepant feelings will tend to be higher in individualistic cultures, where people are expected to be more cross-situationally consistent in their behaviors. Those from collectivistic cultures, however, are more accustomed to shifting their behaviors to fit the needs of the ingroup and the situation, and so are less troubled by such seeming inconsistencies.

Overestimating How Closely and Accurately Others View Us

Although the self-concept is the most important of all our schemas, and although people (particularly those high in self-consciousness) are aware of their self and how they are seen by others, this does not mean that people are always thinking about themselves. In fact, people do not generally focus on their self-concept any more than they focus on the other things and other people in their environments (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982).

On the other hand, self-awareness is more powerful for the person experiencing it than it is for others who are looking on, and the fact that self-concept is so highly accessible frequently leads people to overestimate the extent to which other people are focusing on them (Gilovich & Savitsky, 1999). Although you may be highly self-conscious about something you’ve done in a particular situation, that does not mean that others are necessarily paying all that much attention to you. Research by Thomas Gilovich and colleagues (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000) found that people who were interacting with others thought that other people were paying much more attention to them than those other people reported actually doing. This may be welcome news, for example, when we find ourselves wincing over an embarrassing comment we made during a group conversation. It may well be that no one else paid nearly as much attention to it as we did!

There is also some diversity in relation to age. Teenagers are particularly likely to be highly self-conscious, often believing that others are watching them (Goossens, Beyers, Emmen, & van Aken, 2002). Because teens think so much about themselves, they are particularly likely to believe that others must be thinking about them, too (Rycek, Stuhr, McDermott, Benker, & Swartz, 1998). Viewed in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that teens can become embarrassed so easily by their parents’ behaviour in public, or by their own physical appearance, for example.

People also often mistakenly believe that their internal states show to others more than they really do. Gilovich, Savitsky, and Medvec (1998) asked groups of five students to work together on a “lie detection” task. One at a time, each student stood up in front of the others and answered a question that the researcher had written on a card (e.g., “I have met David Letterman”). On each round, one person’s card indicated that they were to give a false answer, whereas the other four were told to tell the truth.

After each round, the students who had not been asked to lie indicated which of the students they thought had actually lied in that round, and the liar was asked to estimate the number of other students who would correctly guess who had been the liar. As you can see in  Figure 3.7, “The Illusion of Transparency,” the liars overestimated the detectability of their lies: on average, they predicted that over 44% of their fellow players had known that they were the liar, but in fact only about 25% were able to accurately identify them. Gilovich and colleagues called this effect the “illusion of transparency.” This illusion brings home an important final learning point about our self-concepts: although we may feel that our view of ourselves is obvious to others, it may not always be!

Key Takeaways

• The self-concept is a schema that contains knowledge about us. It is primarily made up of physical characteristics, group memberships, and traits.
• Because the self-concept is so complex, it has extraordinary influence on our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and we can remember information that is related to it well.
• Self-complexity, the extent to which individuals have many different and relatively independent ways of thinking about themselves, helps people respond more positively to events that they experience.
• Self-concept clarity, the extent to which individuals have self-concepts that are clearly defined and stable over time, can also help people to respond more positively to challenging situations.
• Self-awareness refers to the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept. Differences in the accessibility of different self-schemas help create individual differences: for instance, in terms of our current concerns and interests.
• People who are experiencing high self-awareness may notice self-discrepancies between their actual and ideal selves. This can, in turn, lead them to engage in self-affirmation as a way of resolving these discrepancies.
• When people lose their self-awareness, they experience deindividuation.
• Private self-consciousness refers to the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings; public self-consciousness refers to the tendency to focus on our outer public image and the standards set by others.
• There are cultural differences in self-consciousness: public self-consciousness may be higher in Eastern than in Western cultures.
• People frequently overestimate the extent to which others are paying attention to them and accurately understand their true intentions in public situations.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• What are the most important aspects of your self-concept, and how do they influence your self-esteem and social behavior?
• Consider people you know who vary in terms of their self-complexity and self-concept clarity. What effects do these differences seem to have on their self-esteem and behavior?
• Describe a situation where you experienced a feeling of self-discrepancy between your actual and ideal selves. How well does self-affirmation theory help to explain how you responded to these feelings of discrepancy?
• Try to identify some situations where you have been influenced by your private and public self-consciousness. What did this lead you to do? What have you learned about yourself from these experiences?
• Describe some situations where you overestimated the extent to which people were paying attention to you in public. Why do you think that you did this and what were the consequences?

Asendorpf, J. B., Warkentin, V., & Baudonnière, P-M. (1996). Self-awareness and other-awareness. II: Mirror self-recognition, social contingency awareness, and synchronic imitation.  Developmental Psychology, 32 (2), 313–321.

Barrios, V., Kwan, V. S. Y., Ganis, G., Gorman, J., Romanowski, J., & Keenan, J. P. (2008). Elucidating the neural correlates of egoistic and moralistic self-enhancement.  Consciousness and Cognition: An International Journal, 17 (2), 451–456.

Baumeister, R. F., Zell, A. L., & Tice, D. M. (2007). How emotions facilitate and impair self-regulation. In J. J. Gross & J. J. E. Gross (Eds.),  Handbook of emotion regulation  (pp. 408–426). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Beaman, A. L., Klentz, B., Diener, E., & Svanum, S. (1979). Self-awareness and transgression in children: Two field studies.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (10), 1835–1846.

Bessiere, K.,  Seay, A. F., & Kiesler, S. (2007). The ideal elf: Identity exploration in World of Warcraft.  Cyberpsychology and Behavior: The Impact of the Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Reality on Behavior and Society, 10(4),  530-535.

Boysen, S. T., & Himes, G. T. (1999). Current issues and emerging theories in animal cognition.  Annual Review of Psychology, 50,  683–705.

Campbell, J. D. (1990). Self-esteem and clarity of the self-concept.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59,  538-549.

Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavalle, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70,  141-156.

Chiou, W., & Lee, C. (2013). Enactment of one-to-many communication may induce self-focused attention that leads to diminished perspective taking: The case of Facebook.  Judgment And Decision Making ,  8 (3), 372-380.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Figurski, T. J. (1982). Self-awareness and aversive experience in everyday life.  Journal of Personality, 50 (1), 15–28.

DeAndrea, D. C., Shaw, A. S., & Levine, T. R. (2010). Online language: The role of culture in self-expression and self-construal on Facebook.  Journal Of Language And Social Psychology ,  29 (4), 425-442. doi:10.1177/0261927X10377989

Doherty, M. J. (2009).  Theory of mind: How children understand others’ thoughts and feelings.  New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Duval, S., & Wicklund, R. A. (1972).  A theory of objective self-awareness . New York, NY: Academic Press.

Fenigstein, A., Scheier, M. F., & Buss, A. H. (1975). Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory.  Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 43 , 522–527.

Festinger, L., Pepitone, A., & Newcomb, B. (1952). Some consequences of deindividuation in a group.  Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 47,  382–389.

Fogelson, R. M. (1971). Violence as protest: A study of riots and ghettos. New York: Anchor.

Gallup, G. G., Jr. (1970). Chimpanzees: self-recognition.  Science, 167,  86–87.

Gilovich, T., & Savitsky, K. (1999). The spotlight effect and the illusion of transparency: Egocentric assessments of how we are seen by others.  Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8 (6), 165–168.

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78 (2), 211–222.

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). The illusion of transparency: Biased assessments of others’ ability to read one’s emotional states.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (2), 332–346.

Gonzales, A. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2011). Mirror, mirror on my Facebook wall: Effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, And Social Networking ,  14 (1-2), 79-83. doi:10.1089/cyber.2009.0411

Goossens, L., Beyers, W., Emmen, M., & van Aken, M. (2002). The imaginary audience and personal fable: Factor analyses and concurrent validity of the “new look” measures.  Journal of Research on Adolescence, 12 (2), 193–215.

Gramzow, R. H., Sedikides, C., Panter, A. T., & Insko, C. A. (2000). Aspects of self-regulation and self-structure as predictors of perceived emotional distress.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26 , 188–205.

Greenberg, J., & Musham, C. (1981). Avoiding and seeking self-focused attention.  Journal of Research in Personality, 15 ,  191-200.

Harter, S. (1998). The development of self-representations. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.),  Handbook of child psychology: Social, emotional, & personality development  (5th ed., Vol. 3, pp. 553–618). New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Harter, S. (1999).  The construction of the self: A developmental perspective . New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Heatherton, T. F., Polivy, J., Herman, C. P., & Baumeister, R. F. (1993). Self-awareness, task failure, and disinhibition: How attentional focus affects eating.  Journal of Personality, 61,  138–143.

Heine, S. J., and Lehman, D. R. (1997). Culture, dissonance, and self-affirmation.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23,  389-400.

Heine, S. J., Takemoto, T., Moskalenko, S., Lasaleta, J., & Henrich, J. (2008). Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34 (7), 879–887.

Higgins, E. T., Klein, R., & Strauman, T. (1987). Self-discrepancies: Distinguishing among self-states, self-state conflicts, and emotional vulnerabilities. In K. M. Yardley & T. M. Honess (Eds.),  Self and identity: Psychosocial perspectives.  (pp. 173-186). New York: Wiley.

Ip, G. W. M., & Bond, M. H. (1995). Culture, values, and the spontaneous self-concept.  Asian Journal of Psychology,  1, 29-35.

Johnson, R. D. & Downing, L. L. (1979). Deindividuation and valence of cues: Effects of prosocial and antisocial behavior. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 37, 1532-1538 10.1037//0022-3514 .37.9.1532.

Kalthoff, R. A., & Neimeyer, R. A. (1993). Self-complexity and psychological distress: A test of the buffering model.  International Journal of Personal Construct Psychology, 6 (4), 327–349.

Kashima, Y., Yamaguchi, S., Kim, U., Choi, S., Gelfank, M., & Yuki, M. (1995). Culture, gender, and self: A perspective from individualism-collectivism research.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69,  925-937.

Kernis, M. H., & Grannemann, B. D. (1988). Private self-consciousness and perceptions of self-consistency.  Personality and Individual Differences, 9 (5), 897–902.

Kim, H., & Markus, H. (1999). Deviance or uniqueness, harmony or conformity? A cultural analysis.  Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology ,  77 (4), 785-800. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.4.785

Koch, E. J., & Shepperd, J. A. (2004). Is self-complexity linked to better coping? A review of the literature.  Journal of Personality, 72 (4), 727–760.

Lalwani, A. K., Shrum, L. J., & Chiu, C-Y. (2009). Motivated response styles: The role of cultural values, regulatory focus, and self-consciousness in socially desirable responding.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96,  870–882.

Le Bon, G. (1895). The crowd: A study of the popular mind.  Project Gutenberg.  

Lewandowski, G. R., Nardon, N., Raines, A. J. (2010). The role of self-concept clarity in relationship quality.  Self and Identity, 9(4),  416-433.

Lieberman, M. D. (2010). Social cognitive neuroscience. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert, & G. Lindzey (Eds.),  Handbook of social psychology  (5th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 143–193). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Lieberman, M. D., Jarcho, J. M., & Satpute, A. B. (2004). Evidence-based and intuition-based self-knowledge: An fMRI study.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (4), 421–435.

Linville, P. W. (1987). Self-complexity as a cognitive buffer against stress-related illness and depression.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52 (4), 663–676.

Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.  Psychological Review ,  98 (2), 224-253. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.98.2.224

McConnell, A. R., Renaud, J. M., Dean, K. K., Green, S. P., Lamoreaux, M. J., Hall, C. E.,…Rydel, R. J. (2005). Whose self is it anyway? Self-aspect control moderates the relation between self-complexity and well-being.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41 (1), 1–18. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2004.02.004

McGuire, W. J., McGuire, C. V., Child, P., & Fujioka, T. (1978). Salience of ethnicity in the spontaneous self-concept as a function of one’s ethnic distinctiveness in the social enviornment.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 , 511–520.

Moskalenko, S., & Heine, S. J. (2002). Watching your troubles away: Television viewing as a stimulus for subjective self-awareness.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 29,  76-85.

Munro, G. D., & Stansbury, J. A. (2009). The dark side of self-affirmation: Confirmation bias and illusory correlation in response to threatening information.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35(9),  1143-1153.

Nisbett, R. E. (2003).  The geography of thought.  New York, NY: Free Press.

Oyserman, D., Bybee, D., Terry, K., & Hart-Johnson, T. (2004). Possible selves as roadmaps.  Journal of Research in Personality, 38 (2), 130–149.

Phillips, A. G., & Silvia, P. J. (2005). Self-Awareness and the Emotional Consequences of Self-Discrepancies.  Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin ,  31 (5), 703-713. doi:10.1177/0146167204271559

Povinelli, D. J., Landau, K. R., & Perilloux, H. K. (1996). Self-recognition in young children using delayed versus live feedback: Evidence of a developmental asynchrony.  Child Development, 67 (4), 1540–1554.

Rafaeli-Mor, E., & Steinberg, J. (2002). Self-complexity and well-being: A review and research synthesis.  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 , 31–58.

Reicher, S. D. (1987). Crowd behaviour as social action. In J. C. Turner, M. A. Hogg, P. J. Oakes, S. D. Reicher, & M. S. Wetherell (Eds.), Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory (pp. 171–202). Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell

Reicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena. In W. Strobe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology (pp.161-198). Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Reicher, S., & Stott, C. (2011).  Mad mobs and Englishmen? Myths and realities of the 2011 riots.  London: Constable and Robinson.

Rees, A., & Nicholson, N. (1994). The Twenty Statements Test. In C. Cassell & G. Symon (Eds.),  Qualitative methods in organizational research: A practical guide  (pp. 37–54).

Ritchie, T. D., Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J., & Gidron, Y. (2011). Self-concept clarity mediates the relation between stress and subjective well-being.  Self and Identity, 10(4),  493-508.

Roccas, S., & Brewer, M. (2002). Social identity complexity.  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 6 (2), 88–106.

Rochat, P. (2009).  Others in mind: Social origins of self-consciousness.  New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Rogers, T. B., Kuiper, N. A., & Kirker, W. S. (1977). Self-reference and the encoding of personal information.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35 (9), 677–688.

Ross, M., Xun, W. Q., & Wilson, A. E. (2002). Language and the bicultural self.  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28,  1040-1050.

Rycek, R. F., Stuhr, S. L., McDermott, J., Benker, J., & Swartz, M. D. (1998). Adolescent egocentrism and cognitive functioning during late adolescence.  Adolescence, 33 , 746–750.

Toma, C. L., & Hancock, J. T. (2013). Self-affirmation underlies Facebook use.  Personality And Social Psychology Bulletin ,  39 (3), 321-331. doi:10.1177/0146167212474694

Watkins, D., Akande, A. , Fleming, J., Ismail, M., Lefner, K., Regmi, M., Watson, S., Yu, J., Adair, J., Cheng, C., Gerong, A., McInerney, D., Mpofu, E., Sinch-Sengupta, S., & Wondimu, H. (1998). Cultural dimensions, gender, and the nature of self-concept: A fourteen-country study.  International Journal of Psychology, 33,  17-31.

Zimbardo, P. (1969). The human choice: Individuation, reason and order versus deindividuation impulse and chaos. In W. J. Arnold & D. Levine (Eds.),  Nebraska Symposium of Motivation  (Vol. 17). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

• Principles of Social Psychology - 1st International Edition. Authored by : Rajiv Jhangiani, Hammond Tarry, and Charles Stangor. Provided by : BC Campus OpenEd. Located at : https://open.bccampus.ca/find-open-textbooks/?uuid=66c0cf64-c485-442c-8183-de75151f13f5&contributor=&keyword=&subject= . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike

Piaget’s Schema & Learning Theory: 3 Fascinating Experiments

Piagetian approaches to learning as a process of actively constructing knowledge have been particularly effective in education, where they challenged traditional methods of teaching that overlooked the importance of the child’s role as a learner.

In this article, you’ll gain a complete understanding of basic Piagetian theory and the strong body of experimental evidence supporting its application.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free . These science-based exercises explore fundamental aspects of positive psychology, including strengths, values, and self-compassion, and will give you the tools to enhance the wellbeing of your clients, students, or employees.

This Article Contains:

Piaget’s learning theory & constructivism, what are schemas in piaget’s theory 4 examples, assimilation, accommodation, & equilibrium, piaget’s theory vs vygotsky’s, 3 fascinating experiments exploring piaget’s theories, implications in education, 3 best books on the topic, positivepsychology.com’s relevant resources, a take-home message.

Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive development remains among the most complete and influential theories describing how the human mind shapes and develops through the process of learning.

At the University of Geneva in the 1960s, Piaget employed elegant experimental techniques and keen observational insight to analyze the moving pieces of cognitive development in children (Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

A biologist by training, Piaget took a pragmatic and mechanistic approach to understanding how the advanced architecture of human cognition develops, looking past the intuitive conception of the mind as something apparently complex and unapproachable to see simple and ordered principles of organization lying underneath (Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

At the core of Piaget’s theory are stages of development (Malik & Marwaha, 2021; Scott & Cogburn, 2021), a series of overall states of increasing cognitive sophistication defined principally by how the developing human ‘knows’ (i.e., understands) the world.

Learning is both the cognitive activity that occurs during these stages and the process of moving between stages. In each stage, children use a different set of cognitive tools to investigate and interpret the world and construct knowledge based on that interpretation. This, in turn, unlocks more sophisticated cognitive tools for more sophisticated learning, and so on.

The ultimate goal of this process of learning is to construct the most complete and accurate internal model of the world available at the time (Gandhi & Mukherji, 2021; Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

Sensorimotor period

The first stage occurs between birth to two years of age. In this stage, children understand their world only as far as simple physical interactions allow. For example, the world may be represented as things that can be touched and things that can be thrown .

The development of motor skills during this period allows the physical representation of the sensorimotor period to become more elaborate and finely tuned, with many potential ways of representing the world relating to different actions.

Preoperational period

In the preoperational period, occurring between two and seven years of age, children begin to understand the world using basic symbols and physical actions.

This marks the development of a more complex form of cognition but does not constitute the more advanced mental operations that emerge later in childhood (hence ‘pre-operational’).

Symbols include words, gestures, and simple imagery, and become increasingly governed by logic throughout the period.

Concrete operational period

Between 7 and 11 years of age, children begin to perform mental operations: internalized actions that are abstract and reversible. Children gain the ability to run simulations on their mental model of the world, which can be manipulated freely.

These mental operations follow a strict logical framework, and the content of these operations typically only represent concrete (i.e., ‘real’) objects.

Formal operational period

Between 11 and 15 years of age, children develop their ability to perform mental operations and expand the scope of the content of these operations to include abstract (e.g., mathematical or social concepts) and concrete objects.

Furthermore, they gain the ability to perform mental operations on mental operations themselves, such as evaluating the likelihood of something represented by a mental operation and comparing one mental operation with another.

Constructivism

A recurring theme throughout Piaget’s theory is the notion that learning is a process of construction, where the thing being constructed is the child’s internal model of the world or ‘reality’ more generally. This foundational theoretical assumption is called ‘constructivism’ (Gandhi & Mukherji, 2021).

Constructivism frames learning not as a process of absorbing knowledge that’s already out there in the world, but rather as a process of making knowledge from scratch.

This is done by using whatever cognitive tools learners have at their disposal to interpret incoming information and translate it into knowledge. Before it is interpreted, this incoming information lacks any objective content of knowledge; knowledge is something that is made after the fact.

This is contrary to the more traditional notion of learning as an individual receiving knowledge from a more knowledgeable source, such as a teacher in a classroom.

From the constructivist perspective, teachers are not a source of knowledge, but rather a source of information. Whether that information becomes knowledge or meaningless noise depends on the experience of the learner.

This framework comprises distinct structures of knowledge called schemas, which are organized and generalizable sets of knowledge about certain concepts. They typically contain a set of instructions or logical statements about a concept, as well as knowledge that can be applied to any instance of that concept.

Generalizability highlights the key function of schemas: an up-to-date set of instructions and ideas about as much of the world as possible, which can be used to predict and navigate the world in the future. Considering this, learning could more precisely be described as the process of keeping schemas up to date and developing new schemas where necessary (Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

While schemas are a constant feature of each stage of cognitive development, they change in content and sophistication, just as the stages do.

In the sensorimotor stage, a schema might be chewing, which encodes a set of instructions relating to how to chew and the motivations for chewing (e.g., chewing feels satisfying and stimulates hunger).

Within the schema for chewing are relevant categories of information, such as sets of objects that can and can’t be chewed. Likewise, objects that can be chewed might contain further categories: those that taste good, those that are particularly soft, and so on. All of the pertinent information for chewing is contained in the schema.

A preoperational stage schema might involve instructions for basic forms of communication. For example, a preoperational schema might involve all the information pertinent to waving, including what waving represents in a basic sense, when to wave, and the basic physical actions involved.

In the concrete operational period, schemas contain more detailed representations of the properties of objects. For example, a concrete operational schema for flowers might contain the typical features uniting all flowers, such as shapes, colors, locations, and also features that depend on mental operations, such as when it is appropriate to pick a flower and what to expect when a flower is given to a friend.

Finally, a formal operational schema might describe any number of abstract concepts. An example might be a schema containing abstract instructions for moral behavior that are described not only in basic physical or egocentric terms, but also involving religious ideals, non-egocentric ideas (e.g., empathy), and more abstract consequences and motivations for behaving morally.

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Exercises (PDF)

Enhance wellbeing with these free, science-based exercises that draw on the latest insights from positive psychology.

Download 3 Free Positive Psychology Tools Pack (PDF)

By filling out your name and email address below.

Another constant feature described in Piaget’s theory are the actual processes by which schemas are updated with newly constructed knowledge (Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

Overall, these processes are known as adaptation, which is another way to describe using the most sophisticated cognitive tools available to keep schemas up to date. Adaptation involves two complementary sub-processes: assimilation and accommodation (Scott & Cogburn, 2021).

Assimilation is the process of integrating new knowledge into existing schemas by editing the new knowledge to ensure an acceptable fit.

In other words, assimilation involves updating schemas without changing the structure of those schemas. This is a common process; to an extent, all our cognition is constrained by basic universal rules and principles that create a fundamental unchanging cognitive structure, and it is useful to use these rules to ‘warp’ knowledge in order to fit.

Some schemas are resistant to change due to personal significance or simply because it may be easier to edit new knowledge rather than overhaul the existing mental organization.

Accommodation, in contrast, is the process of adjusting the cognitive organization of schemas in response to new knowledge. This occurs when the existing structure cannot account for the new information, rendering assimilation impossible.

As a simple example, a child may have a schema for birds that includes everything with wings and a schema for mammals that includes everything without wings. When they are presented with a bat, they are faced with a fundamental contradiction of this organization and have to reshuffle their cognitive structures to accommodate and make sense of this shared feature.

These two sub-processes occur in a cycle, as accommodation creates and reshapes the cognitive structure of schemas, which helps assimilate new knowledge, until accommodation is again necessary, and so on.

The goal of this cycle is to maintain as much equilibrium as possible, where there is no conflict between new knowledge and existing knowledge. This state of equilibrium can never be perfect, but learning is the act of trying to make it increasingly stable.

Piaget’s schema – Sprouts

Piaget’s work is commonly compared with that of Lev Vygotsky, another influential learning theorist conducting research at a similar time.

Their theoretical approaches are both primarily concerned with how knowledge is constructed and reject the traditional notion of knowledge as something that is transferred from one individual to another.

However, while Piaget emphasized that knowledge is constructed by the individual and shaped by existing cognitive structures (schemas) that organize the experiences of that individual, Vygotsky saw knowledge construction occurring elsewhere.

Vygotsky’s theory asserts that knowledge is constructed in the individual’s immediate social environment and shaped and interpreted by the individual’s use of language.

In Vygotsky’s theory, language takes the place of Piaget’s cognitive tools and actions. According to Vygotsky, individuals know the world through language, and the extent to which they know the world is mediated by the extent to which they can use language (Stewin & Martin, 1974; Lourenço, 2012).

Importantly, when considering the inherently social aspect of language, it follows that other individuals in someone’s immediate social context would be equally influential in how the individual knows the world.

As a result, in the place of internal stages of development, Vygotsky described external zones of development: social contexts within which individuals can use language to construct knowledge and develop, expanding the scope to include a broader social context for development, and so on.

Piaget and Vygotsky’s approaches are not wholly mutually exclusive, as a Piagetian theorist must acknowledge the influence of context in constructing knowledge, just as Vygotskyian theorists must acknowledge the influence of individual experience in constructing knowledge.

Likewise, this works in reverse, meaning that cognitive development becomes evident through observing how an individual apparently perceives the world.

A foundational experiment underlying Piaget’s theory examines differences in the ability to understand conservation of quantity. Children younger than seven were shown a row of squares and a row of circles of equal quantity. They were correctly able to identify that there were the same number of squares as circles.

However, when the experimenter moved the squares further apart, making a row of greater length, the children now answered that there were more squares than circles.

Because they lack the ability for reversible mental operations developed in the concrete operational stage, changing the appearance of the squares to make the space they occupied larger was sufficient justification for the children to conclude there were more (Kubli, 1979, 1983).

Other experiments have similarly shown how comprehending conservation changes as a function of developmental changes in how the world is represented. For example, another experiment showed children a pair of rods of identical length, placed side by side to demonstrate their equivalence. One of the rods was then displaced so that its position was nearer and therefore appeared longer.

Children younger than six were able to correctly identify the rods as equivalent length when they were side by side, but when displaced, they concluded one rod had become larger. Some slightly older children suggested the rods may become equivalent length again if the displaced rod was returned to its original position, demonstrating their development of reversibility.

Finally, the oldest children concluded that length was an invariant property that was conserved regardless of how the rod was displaced, showing a confident grasp of both reversibility and conservation (Kubli, 1979, 1983).

Another experiment clearly illustrates the development and refinement of schemas that accompany the transition between stages in Piaget’s theory. Children were presented with a picture featuring a bunch of flowers consisting of five asters and two tulips. They were then asked whether there were more asters in the picture or more flowers.

In children younger than roughly eight years of age, the typical answer is that there are more asters, demonstrating that these children have not yet developed the ability to comprehensively categorize the world into schemas of related objects and concepts, and therefore do not recognize that flowers should be a category inclusive of asters (Politzer, 2016).

Here are a few considerations of specific importance (Kubli, 1979).

The development of the ability to comprehend invariance and reversibility defines much of the content of Piaget’s stages . The development of these concepts reflects children’s understanding of rules that extend throughout the world and provide a fundamental basis for reality, and the development of the mental operations necessary to reason based on these rules.

As a result, teachers should adopt an approach that closely follows their students’ search for invariant rules and experimentation with reversibility. Teachers should not adopt a heavy-handed approach where they walk their students through these rules, nor should they become too detached from their students’ development and assume certain types of knowledge that their students may not have discovered yet.

Instead, the process of teaching should be a journey characterized by the discovery and construction of new forms of knowledge.

In an applied education context, teachers should also be careful not to focus too strongly on the theoretical assumptions of constructivism. While constructivism emphasizes the role of the learner as an individual, learning often occurs in a social context alongside a class.

Consequently, although learners are engaged in the construction of their own knowledge, they will inevitably try to model their knowledge on others and form theories about the world that are acceptable and relatable to others. Teachers should, therefore, remain aware that their assumptions and attitudes as educators remain highly influential in a constructivist framework.

To get an in-depth understanding of Piaget’s Schema & Learning Theory, we suggest investing in the following books:

1. The Psychology of the Child – Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder

The Psychology of the Child provides the most accessible means of studying Piaget’s original work underlying his influential theory.

While contemporary writers may do a better job of putting Piagetian theory in context, when it comes to understanding and engaging with the theory itself, there is no substitute to reading about it in the words of the seminal psychologist himself.

Find the book on Amazon .

2. Children’s Thinking – Robert Siegler

Children’s Thinking provides a solid academic reference for a variety of theoretical approaches to cognitive development, including Piagetian theory.

It’s rarely useful to take a single-track approach to psychology, and your understanding and application of Piagetian theory will be improved greatly by learning about other theories of childhood cognition and development, which through their differences or similarities help to delineate Piaget’s ideas.

3. Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives and Practice – Catherine Fosnot

This book by Catherine Fosnot is a comprehensive and practical text analyzing the fundamental assumptions and applications of constructivist epistemology.

Studying the epistemological assumptions underlying psychological theory can seem like a chore, but it is absolutely vital in order to engage with your knowledge and develop a confident and flexible approach to applying Piagetian theory.

Fortunately, Fosnot’s insightful description and commentary are anything but a chore to read.

On our site, we have many relevant resources that will give a more solid theoretical background and also provide practical ways to apply theory. Here are a few recommended reads:

• Developmental Psychology 101: Theories, Stages, & Research provides a great alternative to the suggested reading above if you want a more digestible overview of the predominant theories of cognitive development and valuable insight into the broader theoretical context alongside Piaget’s ideas.
• Applying Positive Psychology in Schools & Education is a comprehensive guide to applying your knowledge of psychological theory in education. If you are learning about Piagetian theory as an educator, this article will provide essential further reading for developing the ideas you’ve learned here.
• Top 37 Educational Psychology Books, Interventions, & Apps is an excellent resource if you want to go beyond the recommended books listed above. Educational psychology is a truly vast topic, with many fascinating ideas to explore in a variety of media, and this article will help you begin your deeper exploration of the topic.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others enhance their wellbeing, check out this signature collection of 17 validated positive psychology tools for practitioners. Use them to help others flourish and thrive.

17 Top-Rated Positive Psychology Exercises for Practitioners

Expand your arsenal and impact with these 17 Positive Psychology Exercises [PDF] , scientifically designed to promote human flourishing, meaning, and wellbeing.

Created by Experts. 100% Science-based.

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development provides a comprehensive and useful theoretical framework for thinking deeply about how information is translated to knowledge in the developing mind.

This has important implications for education, as having a clear theoretical framework for understanding how children learn helps make teaching a more structured and efficient activity for both teachers and students alike.

More generally, Piaget’s ideas also highlight the importance of considering the different ways individuals can have knowledge of the world, depending on their stage of development and methods of learning.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Positive Psychology Exercises for free .

• Fosnot, C. T. (2005). Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Gandhi, M. H., & Mukherji, P. (2021). Learning theories . StatPearls. Retrieved November 5, 2021, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK562189/
• Kubli, F. (1979). Piaget’s cognitive psychology and its consequences for the teaching of science.  European Journal of Science Education , 1 (1), 5–20.
• Kubli, F. (1983). Piaget’s clinical experiments: A critical analysis and study of their implications for science teaching. European Journal of Science Education , 5 (2), 123–139.
• Lourenço, O. (2012). Piaget and Vygotsky: Many resemblances, and a crucial difference. New Ideas in Psychology , 30 (3), 281–295.
• Malik, F., & Marwaha, R. (2021). Cognitive development . StatPearls. Retrieved November 5, 2021, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537095/
• Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The psychology of the child.  Basic Books.
• Politzer, G. (2016). The class inclusion question: A case study in applying pragmatics to the experimental study of cognition. SpringerPlus , 5 (1), 1133.
• Scott, H. K., & Cogburn, M. (2021). Piaget . StatPearls. Retrieved November 5, 2021, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK448206/
• Siegler, R. S. (1997). Children’s thinking (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall.
• Stewin, L. L., & Martin, J. (1974). The developmental stages of L. S. Vygotsky and J. Piaget: A comparison. Alberta Journal of Educational Research , 20 (4), 348–362.

Share this article:

Article feedback

What our readers think.

Hello! Thanks for the great article. However, I have an observation. I’m a teacher in a government primary school. I wish there had more information about how I can use this theory in my lesson plan or in education.

Glad you enjoyed the article! I will make sure our writing team will receive your feedback 🙂 Kind regards, Julia | Community Manager

Let us know your thoughts Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Related articles

How to Fuel Positive Change by Leveraging Episodic Memory

Some researchers believe that our memory didn’t evolve for us to only remember but to imagine all that might be (Young, 2019). Episodic memory is [...]

Theory of Mind: How We Learn to Understand Each Other

As psychologists, coaches, therapists, and humans, we spend a great deal of our time focused on what we and our clients are feeling and thinking. [...]

The Science of Sleep: 7 Secrets for Better Wellbeing

Sleep is at once highly familiar—we all do it—and deeply mysterious; among those studying the science of sleep, there is no consensus on why it [...]

Read other articles by their category

• Body & Brain (53)
• Coaching & Application (58)
• Compassion (26)
• Counseling (51)
• Emotional Intelligence (23)
• Gratitude (18)
• Grief & Bereavement (21)
• Happiness & SWB (40)
• Meaning & Values (26)
• Meditation (20)
• Mindfulness (44)
• Motivation & Goals (46)
• Optimism & Mindset (34)
• Positive CBT (30)
• Positive Communication (22)
• Positive Education (48)
• Positive Emotions (32)
• Positive Leadership (19)
• Positive Parenting (16)
• Positive Psychology (34)
• Positive Workplace (37)
• Productivity (18)
• Relationships (45)
• Resilience & Coping (39)
• Self Awareness (21)
• Self Esteem (38)
• Strengths & Virtues (32)
• Stress & Burnout Prevention (34)
• Theory & Books (46)
• Therapy Exercises (37)
• Types of Therapy (64)

3 Positive Psychology Tools (PDF)

• Submit Content
• Business And Management
• Social Anthropology
• World Religions
• Biology 2016
• Design Technology
• Environmental Systems And Societies
• Sports Exercise And Health Science
• Mathematics Studies
• Mathematics SL
• Mathematics HL
• Computer Science
• Visual Arts
• Theory Of Knowledge
• Extended Essay
• Creativity Activity Service
• Video guides
• External links

The biological level of analysis

• General learning outcomes
• GLO1 : Outline principles that define...
• GLO2 : Explain how principles that de...
• GLO3 : Discuss how and why particular...
• GLO4 : Discuss ethical considerations...
• Physiology and Behaviour
• PB1 : Explain one study related to l...
• PB2 : Using one or more examples, ex...
• PB3 : Using one or more examples, ex...
• PB4 : Discuss two effects of the env...
• PB5 : Examine one interaction betwee...
• PB6 : Discuss the use of brain imagi...
• Genetics and Behaviour
• GB1 : With reference to relevant to ...
• GB2 : Examine one evolutionary expla...
• GB3 : Discuss ethical considerations...

The cognitive level of analysis

• Cognitive Processes
• CP1 : Evaluate schema theory with re...
• CP2 : Evaluate two models or theorie...
• CP3 : Explain how biological factors...
• CP4 : Discuss how social or cultural...
• CP5 : With reference to relevant res...
• CP6 : Discuss the use of technology ...
• Cognition and Emotion
• CE1 : To what extent do cognitive an...
• CE2 : Evaluate one theory of how emo...

The sociocultural level of analysis

• Sociocultural cognition
• SC1 : Describe the role of situation...
• SC2 : Discuss two errors in attribut...
• SC3 : Evaluate social identity theor...
• SC4 : Explain the formation of stere...
• Social Norms
• SN1 : Explain social learning theory...
• SN2 : Discuss the use of compliance ...
• SN3 : Evaluate research on conformit...

Evaluate schema theory with reference to research studies.

Introduction.

• Define schema 
• Schemas are cognitive structures that organise knowledge stored in our memory.
• They are mental representations of categories (from our knowledge, beliefs and expectations) about particular aspects of the world such as people, objects, events, and situations. 
• Expand on schema 
• Knowledge that is stored in our memory is organized as a set of schemas (or knowledge structures), which represent the general knowledge about the world, people, events, objects, actions and situations that has been acquired from past experiences.
• Types of schemas: 
• Scripts provide information about the sequence of events that occur in particular contexts (e.g. going to a restaurant, visiting the dentist, attending class).s 
• Self-schemas organise information we have about ourselves (information stored in our memory about our strengths and weaknesses and how we feel about them). 
• Social schemas (e.g. stereotypes) – represent information about groups of people (e.g. Americans, Egyptians, women, accountants, etc.). 
• Define schema theory 
• Cognitive theory of processing and organizing information.
• Schema theory states that “as active processors of information, humans integrate new information with existing, stored information.” 
• Expand on schema theory Effects 
• Existing knowledge stored in our memory (what we already know) and organized in the form of schemas will affect information processing and behaviour in specific settings. 
• E.g. Information we already know affects the way we interpret new information and events and how we store it in our memory.
• It is not possible to see how knowledge is processed and stored in the brain, but the concept of schema theory helps psychologists understand and discuss what cannot be seen.
• Schema theory can describe how specific knowledge is organised and stored in memory so that it can be retrieved.
• State what you are doing in the essay
• Schema theory will be evaluated, making an appraisal by weighing up strengths and limitations with some reference to studies on the effect of schema on memory.
• Schema theory provides the theoretical basis for the studies reported below.

Supporting Studies

• Bartlett – “War of the Ghosts” (1932) 
• Anderson & Pichert (1978) 
• Brewer & Treyens – “picnic basket” (1981) 
• French & Richards (1933) 

*Choose three studies from the above studies in the evaluation of schema theory   Supporting Study 1: Bartlett (1932) – “War of the Ghost” Introduce Study/Signpost: 

• A significant researcher into schemas, Bartlett (1932) introduced the idea of schemas in his study entitled “The War of the Ghost.” 
• Bartlett aimed to determine how social and cultural factors influence schemas and hence can lead to memory distortions. 
• Participants used were of an English background. 
• Were asked to read “The War of the Ghosts” – a Native American folk tale. 
• Tested their memory of the story using serial reproduction and repeated reproduction, where they were asked to recall it six or seven times over various retention intervals. 
• Serial reproduction: the first participant reading the story reproduces it on paper, which is then read by a second participant who reproduces the first participant’s reproduction, and so on until it is reproduced by six or seven different participants.
• Repeated reproduction: the same participant reproduces the story six or seven times from their own previous reproductions. Their reproductions occur between time intervals from 15 minutes to as long as several years. 

Results: 

• Both methods lead to similar results. 
• As the number of reproductions increased, the story became shorter and there were more changes to the story. 
• For example, ‘hunting seals’ changed into ‘fishing’ and ‘canoes’ became ‘boats’. 
• These changes show the alteration of culturally unfamiliar things into what the English participants were culturally familiar with, 
• This makes the story more understandable according to the participants’ experiences and cultural background (schemas). 
• He found that recalled stories were distorted and altered in various ways making it more conventional and acceptable to their own cultural perspective (rationalization). 

Conclusion: 

• Memory is very inaccurate 
• It is always subject to reconstruction based on pre-existing schemas 
• Bartlett’s study helped to explain through the understanding of schemas when people remember stories, they typically omit (”leave out”) some details, and introduce rationalisations and distortions, because they reconstruct the story so as to make more sense in terms of their knowledge, the culture in which they were brought up in and experiences in the form of schemas. 

Evaluation:

• Limitations: 
• Bartlett did not explicitly ask participants to be as accurate as possible in their reproduction 
• Experiment was not very controlled 
• instructions were not standardised (specific) 
• disregard for environmental setting of experiment 
• Bartlett's study shows how schema theory is useful for understand how people categorise information, interpret stories, and make inferences. 
• It also contributes to understanding of cognitive distortions in memory. 

Supporting Study 2: Anderson and Pichert (1978) Introduce Study/Signpost: 

• Further support for the influence of schemas of memory on cognition memory at encoding point was reported by Anderson and Pichert (1978). 
• To investigate if schema processing influences encoding and retrieval. 
• Half the participants were given the schema of a burglar and the other half was given the schema of a potential house-buyer. 
• Participants then heard a story which was based on 72 points, previously rated by a group of people based on their importance to a potential house-buyer (leaky roof, damp basement) or a burglar (10speed bike, colour TV). 
• Participants performed a distraction task for 12 minutes, before recall was tested. 
• After another 5 minute delay, half of the participants were given the switched schema. Participants with burglar schema were given house-buyer schema and vice versa. 
• The other half of the participants kept the same schema. 
• All participants’ recalls were tested again. 
• Shorter Method: 
• Participants read a story from the perspective of either a burglar or potential home buyer. After they had recalled as much as they could of the story from the perspective they had been given, they were shifted to the alternative perspective (schema) and were asked to recall the story again. 
• Participants who changed schema recalled 7% more points on the second recall test than the first. 
• There was also a 10% increase in the recall of points directly linked to the new schema. 
• The group who kept the same schema did not recall as many ideas in the second testing. 
• Research also showed that people encoded different information which was irrelevant to their prevailing schema (those who had buyer schema at encoding were able to recall burglar information when the schema was changed, and vice versa). 
• This shows that our schemas of “knowledge,” etc. are not always correct, because of external influences. 
• Summary: On the second recall, participants recalled more information that was important only to the second perspective or schema than they had done on the first recall. 

Conclusion:

• Schema processing has an influence at the encoding and retrieval stage, as new schema influenced recall at the retrieval stage. 
• Strengths 
• Controlled laboratory experiment allowed researchers to determine a cause-effect relationship on how schemas affect different memory processes. 
• Limitations 
• Lacks ecological validity 
• Laboratory setting 
• Unrealistic task, which does not reflect something that the general population would do 
• This study provides evidence to support schema theory affecting the cognitive process of memory. 
• Strength of schema theorythere is research evidence to support it. 

Supporting Study 3: Brewer and Treyens (1981) “picnic basket” Introduce Study/Signpost: 

• Another study demonstrating schema theory is by Brewer and Treyens (1981).   
• To see whether a stereotypical schema of an office would affect memory (recall) of an office. 
• Participants were taken into a university student office and left for 35 seconds before being taken to another room. 
• They were asked to write down as much as they could remember from the office. 

Results:  

• Participants recalled things of a “typical office” according to their schema. 
• They did not recall the wine and picnic basket that were in the office. 

Conclusions:  

• Participants' schema of an office influenced their memory of it. 
• They did not recall the wine and picnic basket because it is not part of their “typical office” schema. 

Evaluation: 

• Strengths: 
• Strict control over variables --> to determine cause & effect relationship
• Limitation: 
• Laboratory setting artificial environment 
• Task does not reflect daily activity 
• This study provides evidence to support how our schemas can affect our cognition/cognitive processes, in particular memory. 
• Our schemas influence what we recall in our memory. 
• Strength of schema theory – there is many types of research evidence to support it. 

Supporting Study 4: French and Richards (1933)

Introduce Study/Signpost:

• A further study demonstrating schematic influence is by French and Richards (1933). 
• To investigate the schemata influence on memory retrieval. 
• In the study there were three conditions: 
• Condition 1: Participants were shown a clock with roman numerals and asked to draw from memory.
• Condition 2: The same procedure, except the participants were told beforehand that they would be required to draw the clock from memory. 
• Condition 3: The clock was left in full view of the participants and just had to draw it. 
• The clock used represented the number four with IIII, not the conventional IV. 
• In the first two conditions, the participants reverted to the conventional IV notation, whereas in the third condition, the IIII notation, because of the direct copy. 
• They found that subjects asked to draw from memory a clock that had Roman numerals on its face typically represented the number four on the clock face as “IV” rather than the correct “IIII,” whereas those merely asked to copy it typically drew “IIII.” 
• French and Richards explained this result in terms of schematic knowledge of roman numerals affecting memory retrieval. 
• The findings supported the idea that subjects in the copy condition were more likely than subjects in other conditions to draw the clock without invoking schematic knowledge of Roman numerals. 
• Strict control over variables to determine cause & effect relationship
• Define strengths of schema theory: 
• Supported by lots of research to suggest schemas affect memory processes knowledge, both in a positive and negative sense.
• Through supporting studies, schema theory was demonstrated in its usefulness for understanding how memory is categorized, how inferences are made, how stories are interpreted, memory distortions and social cognition. 
• Define weaknesses of schema theory: 
• Not many studies/research evidence that evaluate and find limitations of schema theory 
• Lacks explanation
• It is not clear exactly
• how schemas are initially acquired 
• how they influence cognitive processes 
• how people choose between relevant schemas when categorising people 
• Cohen (1993) argued that: 
• The concept of a schema is too vague to be useful. 
• Schema theory does not show how schemas are required. It is not clear which develops first, the schema to interpret the experiences or vice versa. 
• Schema theory explains how new information is categorised according to existing knowledge.
• But it does not account for completely new information that cannot link with existing knowledge.
• Therefore, it does not explain how new information is organised in early life
• E.g. language acquisition 
• Thus schemas affect our cognitive processes and are used to organize our knowledge, assist recall, guide our behaviour, predict likely happenings and help make sense of current experiences helps us understand how we organize our knowledge. 
• In conclusion, strengths of schema theory: 
• Provides an explanation for how knowledge is stored in the mind something that is unobservable and remains unknown in psychology
• There is much research that supports schema theory 
• But its limitations are that, 
• It is unclear exactly how schemas are acquired and how people choose between schemas 
• It does not account for new information without a link to existing schemas 
• Overall, with the amount of evidence, schema theory should be considered an important theory that provides insight into information processing and behaviour. 
• It has contributed largely to our understanding of mental processes. 
• But the theory requires further research and refinements to overcome its limitations and uncover its unclear aspects

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Machine learning
• Social justice
• Black holes
• Classes and programs

Departments

• Aeronautics and Astronautics
• Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Architecture
• Political Science
• Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

• Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
• Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
• Lincoln Laboratory
• School of Architecture + Planning
• School of Engineering
• School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
• Sloan School of Management
• School of Science
• MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

Understanding the visual knowledge of language models

Press contact :.

Previous image Next image

You’ve likely heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but can a large language model (LLM) get the picture if it’s never seen images before? As it turns out, language models that are trained purely on text have a solid understanding of the visual world. They can write image-rendering code to generate complex scenes with intriguing objects and compositions — and even when that knowledge is not used properly, LLMs can refine their images. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) observed this when prompting language models to self-correct their code for different images, where the systems improved on their simple clipart drawings with each query.

The visual knowledge of these language models is gained from how concepts like shapes and colors are described across the internet, whether in language or code. When given a direction like “draw a parrot in the jungle,” users jog the LLM to consider what it’s read in descriptions before. To assess how much visual knowledge LLMs have, the CSAIL team constructed a “vision checkup” for LLMs: using their “Visual Aptitude Dataset,” they tested the models’ abilities to draw, recognize, and self-correct these concepts. Collecting each final draft of these illustrations, the researchers trained a computer vision system that identifies the content of real photos.

“We essentially train a vision system without directly using any visual data,” says Tamar Rott Shaham, co-lead author of the study and an MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) postdoc at CSAIL. “Our team queried language models to write image-rendering codes to generate data for us and then trained the vision system to evaluate natural images. We were inspired by the question of how visual concepts are represented through other mediums, like text. To express their visual knowledge, LLMs can use code as a common ground between text and vision.” To build this dataset, the researchers first queried the models to generate code for different shapes, objects, and scenes. Then, they compiled that code to render simple digital illustrations, like a row of bicycles, showing that LLMs understand spatial relations well enough to draw the two-wheelers in a horizontal row. As another example, the model generated a car-shaped cake, combining two random concepts. The language model also produced a glowing light bulb, indicating its ability to create visual effects.  “Our work shows that when you query an LLM (without multimodal pre-training) to create an image, it knows much more than it seems,” says co-lead author, EECS PhD student, and CSAIL member Pratyusha Sharma. “Let’s say you asked it to draw a chair. The model knows other things about this piece of furniture that it may not have immediately rendered, so users can query the model to improve the visual it produces with each iteration. Surprisingly, the model can iteratively enrich the drawing by improving the rendering code to a significant extent.”

The researchers gathered these illustrations, which were then used to train a computer vision system that can recognize objects within real photos (despite never having seen one before). With this synthetic, text-generated data as its only reference point, the system outperforms other procedurally generated image datasets that were trained with authentic photos. The CSAIL team believes that combining the hidden visual knowledge of LLMs with the artistic capabilities of other AI tools like diffusion models could also be beneficial. Systems like Midjourney sometimes lack the know-how to consistently tweak the finer details in an image, making it difficult for them to handle requests like reducing how many cars are pictured, or placing an object behind another. If an LLM sketched out the requested change for the diffusion model beforehand, the resulting edit could be more satisfactory.

The irony, as Rott Shaham and Sharma acknowledge, is that LLMs sometimes fail to recognize the same concepts that they can draw. This became clear when the models incorrectly identified human re-creations of images within the dataset. Such diverse representations of the visual world likely triggered the language models’ misconceptions. While the models struggled to perceive these abstract depictions, they demonstrated the creativity to draw the same concepts differently each time. When the researchers queried LLMs to draw concepts like strawberries and arcades multiple times, they produced pictures from diverse angles with varying shapes and colors, hinting that the models might have actual mental imagery of visual concepts (rather than reciting examples they saw before).

The CSAIL team believes this procedure could be a baseline for evaluating how well a generative AI model can train a computer vision system. Additionally, the researchers look to expand the tasks they challenge language models on. As for their recent study, the MIT group notes that they don’t have access to the training set of the LLMs they used, making it challenging to further investigate the origin of their visual knowledge. In the future, they intend to explore training an even better vision model by letting the LLM work directly with it.

Sharma and Rott Shaham are joined on the paper by former CSAIL affiliate Stephanie Fu ’22, MNG ’23 and EECS PhD students Manel Baradad, Adrián Rodríguez-Muñoz ’22, and Shivam Duggal, who are all CSAIL affiliates; as well as MIT Associate Professor Phillip Isola and Professor Antonio Torralba. Their work was supported, in part, by a grant from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a LaCaixa Fellowship, the Zuckerman STEM Leadership Program, and the Viterbi Fellowship. They present their paper this week at the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference.

Share this news article on:

Related links.

• Project website
• Phillip Isola
• Tamar Rott Shaham
• Pratyusha Sharma
• Antonio Torralba
• Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
• MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
• Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Related Topics

• Computer science and technology
• Artificial intelligence
• Computer vision
• Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (eecs)

Related Articles

A simpler path to better computer vision

AI system makes models like DALL-E 2 more creative

Seeing the whole from some of the parts

Rewriting the rules of machine-generated art

Previous item Next item

More MIT News

Startup aims to transform the power grid with superconducting transmission lines

Read full story →

Designing for outer space

Professor Emerita Mary-Lou Pardue, pioneering cellular and molecular biologist, dies at 90

Helping nonexperts build advanced generative AI models

New Ragon Institute building opens in the heart of Kendall Square

Toward socially and environmentally responsible real estate

• More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

• Map (opens in new window)
• Events (opens in new window)
• People (opens in new window)
• Careers (opens in new window)
• Accessibility
• Social Media Hub
• MIT on Facebook
• MIT on YouTube
• MIT on Instagram

• DOI: 10.1521/SOCO.1982.1.3.191
• Corpus ID: 144186174

Self-Schemas and Judgments about Others

• G. Fong , H. Markus
• Published 1 September 1982
• Social Cognition

147 Citations

The role of self-cognition in the processing of personal information, attributions and other inferences: processing information about the self versus others, self-relevance and goal-directed processing in the recall and weighting of information about others, the effects of task-specific self-schemata on attributions for success and failure, self-schemata and personality traits: comparison of self-relevant information processing between two personality-trait dimensions, internal working models of self and others in adolescents: a social-cognitive perspective, the puzzle of negative self-views: an exploration using the schema concept., thinking about oneself and others: the relational-interdependent self-construal and social cognition., the recall of self-congruent and self-incongruent information about the personality of others, when do self-schemas shape social perception: the role of descriptive ambiguity.

• Highly Influenced
• 16 Excerpts

7 References

Self-schemata and processing information about the self., beliefs, personality, and person perception: a theory of individual differences, a partial resolution of the paradox of interference: the role of integrating knowledge, salience, centrality and self-relevance of traits in construing others., hypothesis-testing processes in social interaction, the perceiver and the perceived: their relative influence on the categories of interpersonal cognition., a comparison of ratings based on personal constructs of self and others., related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Foci, waves, excitability : self-organization of phase waves in a model of asymmetrically coupled embryonic oscillators

• Find this author on Google Scholar
• Find this author on PubMed
• Search for this author on this site
• ORCID record for Kaushik Roy
• For correspondence: [email protected]
• ORCID record for Paul Francois
• Info/History
• Preview PDF

The 'segmentation clock' is an emergent embryonic oscillator that controls the periodic formation of vertebrae precursors (or somites). It relies on the self-organization at the Pre Somitic Mesoderm (PSM) level of multiple coupled cellular oscillators. Dissociation-reaggregation experiments have further revealed that ensembles made of such cellular oscillators self-organize into an oscillatory bidimensional system, showing concentric waves around multiple foci. Here, we systematically study the dynamics of a two dimensional lattice of phase oscillators locally coupled to their nearest neighbors through a biharmonic coupling function, of the form sin θ + Λ sin 2 θ. This coupling was inferred from the Phase Response Curve (PRC) of entrainment experiments on cell cultures, leading to the formulation of a minimal Elliptic Radial Isochron Cycle (ERIC) phase model. We show that such ERIC-based coupling parsimoniously explains the emergence of self-organized concentric phase wave patterns around multiple foci, for a range of weak couplings and wide distributions of initial random phases, closely mimicking experimental conditions. We further study extended modalities of this problem to derive an atlas of possible behaviors. In particular, we predict the dominant observation of spirals over target wave patterns for initial phase distributions wider than approximately π. Since PSM cells further display properties of an excitable system, we also introduce excitability into our simple model, and show that it also supports the observation of concentric phase waves for the conditions of the experiment. Our work suggests important modifications that can be made to the simple phase model with Kuramoto coupling, that can provide further layers of complexity and can aid in the explanation of the spatial aspects of self-organization in the segmentation clock.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

https://github.com/kaushik-roy-physics/2D-ERIC-local

View the discussion thread.

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word about bioRxiv.

NOTE: Your email address is requested solely to identify you as the sender of this article.

Citation Manager Formats

• EndNote (tagged)
• EndNote 8 (xml)
• RefWorks Tagged
• Ref Manager
• Tweet Widget
• Facebook Like
• Google Plus One

Subject Area

• Animal Behavior and Cognition (5406)
• Biochemistry (12185)
• Bioengineering (9128)
• Bioinformatics (30103)
• Biophysics (15474)
• Cancer Biology (12566)
• Cell Biology (18036)
• Clinical Trials (138)
• Developmental Biology (9741)
• Ecology (14584)
• Epidemiology (2067)
• Evolutionary Biology (18746)
• Genetics (12535)
• Genomics (17193)
• Immunology (12294)
• Microbiology (28998)
• Molecular Biology (12022)
• Neuroscience (63114)
• Paleontology (462)
• Pathology (1931)
• Pharmacology and Toxicology (3363)
• Physiology (5175)
• Plant Biology (10784)
• Scientific Communication and Education (1707)
• Synthetic Biology (3002)
• Systems Biology (7530)
• Zoology (1691)

• Advanced Search

Learning self-target knowledge for few-shot segmentation

New citation alert added.

This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:

You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.

To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.

New Citation Alert!

Please log in to your account

Information & Contributors

Bibliometrics & citations, view options, recommendations, few-shot segmentation via complementary prototype learning and cascaded refinement.

Prototype learning has been widely explored for few-shot segmentation. Existing methods typically learn the prototype from the foreground features of all support images, which rarely consider the background similarities between the query images ...

Self-regularized prototypical network for few-shot semantic segmentation

• We propose a direct yet effective self-regularization module. Prototypes are generated, evaluated, and regularized under the supervision of support masks, ...

The deep CNNs in image semantic segmentation typically require a large number of densely-annotated images for training and have difficulties in generalizing to unseen object categories. Therefore, few-shot segmentation has been ...

Exploring Hierarchical Prototypes for Few-Shot Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation has recently attracted much attention due to its effectiveness in segmenting unseen object classes using a few annotated images. Many existing methods employ a global prototype generated by global average pooling (GAP) to ...

Information

Published in.

Elsevier Science Inc.

United States

Publication History

Author tags.

• Few-shot segmentation
• Two-level similarity matching
• Step-by-step mining
• Attention mechanism
• Research-article

Contributors

Other metrics, bibliometrics, article metrics.

• 0 Total Citations
• 0 Total Downloads
• Downloads (Last 12 months) 0
• Downloads (Last 6 weeks) 0

View options

Login options.

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Share this publication link.

Copying failed.

Share on social media

Affiliations, export citations.

• Please download or close your previous search result export first before starting a new bulk export. Preview is not available. By clicking download, a status dialog will open to start the export process. The process may take a few minutes but once it finishes a file will be downloadable from your browser. You may continue to browse the DL while the export process is in progress. Download
• Download citation
• Copy citation

We are preparing your search results for download ...

We will inform you here when the file is ready.

Your file of search results citations is now ready.

Your search export query has expired. Please try again.