Idea Transcript
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE SELF ROY F. B A U M E I S T E R, Case Western Reserve University
INTRODUCTION What is the self? In some ways, the thousands of journal articles dealing with the self have seemed to make the answer to that fundamental question more elusive rather than clearer. Even finding a way to sort and group that mass of information is intimidating. This overview of the social psychology of self begins with the proposition that there are three important roots of selfhood. These are powerful, prototypical patterns of experience in which people grasp the basic meaning of self. The first is the experience of reflexive consciousness, that is, conscious attention turning back toward its own source and gradually constructing a concept of oneself. When you lie awake in bed late at night, thinking about your failures and inadequacies, or glorying in your triumphs; when you look in the mirror or step on the scale or read your resume; when after hearing about someone else's heroic or heinous action, you pause to wonder whether you are the sort of person who could ever do such a thing; when you contemplate your future or your spiritual center or your dwindling resources; or when you try to answer some questions honestly about your opinions, traits, habits, qualifications, and past experiences-these are the sort of experiences that involve reflexive consciousness. Without them, self would have no meaning or value and would hardly exist at all. Self begins when awareness turns around in a circle, so to speak,
I thank NIMH Grant 51482 for support, Steve Hastings and Brenda Wilson for research assistance, and Todd Heatherton, Kristin Sommer, Dianne Tice, and social seminar members for comments on a draft.
The second root is the Interpersonal When someone looks into your says your name, and you have a or the same happens and you feel join a group, or quit it; when you celebrate an anniversary; when you pression on someone or live up to tions; when you discover that someone you and you blush; when you keep
when you attend your upon Chil~,'~~s~:~;i?~~ humiliated and jealous had romantic contact with after defeating a major rival in an or despair after losing same-c-tnese ences reveal the interpersonal aspect of most unthinkable outside a social vital for making interpersonal ,e,aw,,'~ tions possible. Selves are handles other people. The third is the executive function, troller, the origin. When you when you drag yourself out of morning; when you decide what it to buy or work on or become; when acting on an impulse, such as to to hit someone, or to sleep with you vote, or when you take out a sist fatigue and temptation and maximum effort, beyond the experiences involve the executive tive agent and decision-maker. Without would be a mere helpless spectator use or importance.
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Chapter 15 I The Self
ee types of experience are what constitute selfthree things are what bodies do, and they cornajor experiences of selfhood. At present they te to encompass social psychology's wide ascontributions to the psychology of self, and group the research findings according to asic facets of self. nt chapter is decidedly not trying to coin new pose new concepts. These terms (reflexive s, interpersonal being, and executive function) 'generic terms borrowed from prior usage. e advantage of being broad and precise, and inked to or based on any of the particular curabout the self, ld understand all the ways that these three asare interrelated, one would attain to a deep and ariding of the nature of selfhood, but that is at decades away. For the present, there is suffinge in merely fleshing out the three categories, ~lybeginning to address the questions of intessounds as if a full understanding of the self is Off, and it is, but that does not detract from the ial psychology has made enormous progress.
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self-evaluation maintenance, self-interest, self-monitoring, self-perception, self-presentation, self-protection, self-reference, self-regulation, self-serving bias, self-verification. Providing a comprehensive overview of the research literature on self is further complicated by the fact that the research community has repeatedly shifted its interests and emphases among the many subtopics. In the 1970s, research on self-perception, identity crisis, self-monitoring, and self-concept nourished, while self-presentation and self-schema received only sporadic interest. The latter two topics came into their own in the early 1980s, but interest had diminished by the end of that decade, when self-regulation was instead attracting heavy interest from multiple perspectives. Meanwhile, interest in self-awareness and self-esteem has been perennial, but the concepts, methods, and theories have changed, in some cases radically. Looking ahead to the tum of the century, it seems safe to predict that the self will continue to be in the center of social psychology, but it is much more hazardous to guess which subtopics will capture the interest and efforts of the leading researchers.
Definitions Background eading and influential social psychologist wrote ay safely predict that ego-psychology will teasingly" (Allport, 1943), The subsequent has abundantly confirmed that prediction. Ingh Allport himself once proposed that the attimost important concept in social psychology, alclaim. A recent survey of articles in psychol1,550 abstracts dealing with self during the two 4-1993, which is roughly the same tally found (Ashmore & Jussim, in press). It is clear that self has preoccupied social psychologists and ues, as indicated by a steady flow of special ,special issues of journals, and edited books, c ordinary flow of scientific publications. Tryabreast of the research on self is like trying to from a fire hose. culty in compiling a comprehensive overview lpsychology of self has multiple sources, beer volume of information. One source of diffiself is not really a single topic at all, but rather te of loosely related subtopics. Indeed, if one all the terms used by social psychologists that he prefix self, one would have a long list that u.to show the diversity and heterogeneity of self :i'study.A partial list of such subtopics would inself-appraisal, self-as-target effect, self-concept, self-construal, self-deception, behavior, self-enhancement, self-esteem,
Although the word self is probably spoken by nearly everyone every day, especially if one includes part-word usages (e.g. yourself), it is quite difficult to define, Probably the term is rooted in such widespread common experience and basic linguistic, communicative needs that linguistic definitions may often fail to do it justice. Even dictionaries are quite unhelpful for defining self It is a word that everyone uses but no one defines. The present treatment assumes that everyone is familiar with colloquial usages of the word self, and the word here is used in the same meaning that it has in such everyday speech. A particular source of confusion in social psychology is the occasional use of self and self-concept as if the two terms were interchangeable. A self-concept is an idea about something; the entity to which the self-concept refers is the self. As we shall see, there are important reasons for confusing the two, beyond mere conceptual sloppiness or laziness, because part of the nature of selfhood involves cognitive construction. Yet it is easy to see the fallacy: If the self were only a concept, how could it make decisions or carry on relationships to people? A well-known paper by Epstein (1973) criticized the notion of a self-concept and said that it may be more appropriate to speak of a self-theory. That is, people have ideas about the nature of the self, about the world, and about the interactions between the two. This view effectively distinguishes the self from the self-concept (a.k.a. self-theory), as well as placing self-knowledge in an appropriately pragmatic context.
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Chapter 15
PartFour / Personal Phenomena
Unity versus Multiple Selves Although most theories of self and identity have emphasized unity as a defining criterion, several treatments in social psychology have discussed multiple selves. But the concept of self loses its meaning if a person has multiple selves, and the discussions of multiplicity should be regarded as heuristics or metaphors. The essence of self involves integration of diverse experiences into a unity. As Loevinger (1969) wrote, "to integrate ... experience is not one ego function among many bnt the essence of the ego" (p. 85). In a famous, often-quoted passage, William James wrote, "A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind" (1892, p. 179). Taken literally, the sentence is plainly absurd. If each person who knew the man knew a different self, his acquaintances could not even talk about him as the same person. More likely, they know the same self and disagree about some of his attributes. Even such disagreements will tend to be small, if only because of cognitive convenience. As Tesser and Moore (1986) pointed out, it is extremely difficult to maintain very many different impressions in different acquaintances. James himself began backing off from that dramatic assertion immediately, by saying that it would be more correct to propose that there are as many social selves as groups of individuals who know him, and that changes in behavior with different audiences resulted in "practically" a division into different selves. The multiplicity of selfhood is a metaphor. The unity of selfhood is its defining fact. The attributes, therefore, cannot be mistaken for the being of the self. This point was made cleverly long before James. David Hnme (1739) wrote that if the self is understood to be the totality of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, then as soon as one learns or forgets anythingthereby altering the sum totality-one has a new self. A similar argument refutes the notion that memory constitutes the self. Instead, memory seems to presuppose self. As Shoemaker (1963) explained, without presupposing selfhood, a man could not remember that he broke the front window last week; he could only remember that someone broke the front window last week. More recently, Singer and Salovey (1993) have explored how the self constructs memory. Seemingly minor events may become focal, important memories because they embody important motivational themes of the self. Such self-defining events can continue to evoke emotional responses long after the fact, simply because of their continuing relevance to the self's goals. This issue of unity versus multiplicity has not been fully resolved. Most people would say that being a wife or a lawyer is part of someone's identity. Yet if the person gets a divorce or changes jobs, is she nOW someone else? Similar misunderstandings have produced differing interpretations of Markus and Nurins's (1986) widely cited concept of
"possible selves." They explained ple concepts of how they mighLt weight self, the slender self, the Sue prison, the self as parent, and so.fo are all conceptions of the samese stances (and with different attribu In short, unity is one of the hood and identity. Concepts of.ll1111 dramatic metaphors for discusSiI1gi~ mention their usefulness in science undermining the basic concept 0 have different perspectives onth may be variations among the cog the self (e.g., Higgins, 1987), buUt Nature of Selfhood Thus, wha the meaning of self? Ideally there phenomenon that would be canst cieties, and one could point to that hood. Instead of one, however;'! pose several, because not all II same basic phenomenon. Three selfhood will be emphasized he the organizing scheme for this c categories of self-experience began. Let us briefly offer definit amples given earlier. First, 'the experience of reflexive to be common to all normal huma the nature of selfhood. By reflexiv the experience in which the pe~s9 term reflexive is used here in .its.li ring back to self, and it has n0th.in Reflexive consciousness is whale: tell themselves apart. In a seerni.e the information-processing ca~:l aware of their environments cart come aware of self. Without this be absent or meaningless. Second, the self is an interpel'S develop and flourish as atcmisti tentialists were once fond of rema (and leaves) the world alone; but cally false: People are always bot ers, and they only survive to adult sive social contact. Furthermor what they are from other peopl identities as members of social close personal relationships to the development of selfhc,od·A his or her entire life in social tainly have a stunted and Third, the self is an entity sions, initiates action, and ta1The general conclusion is that high selfsociated with more thorough, accurate, and ex_knowledge than low self-esteem. These findfrom Campbell (1990) except as otherwise e summarized as follows. ople with high self-esteem give themselves e self-ratings than people with low selfpIe with low self-esteem tend to give themrmediate, noncommittal ratings (even on ive dimensions), consistent with the view that have definite self-knowledge. Further relevant