One of our greatest assets is self-awareness. Our ability to have a third person perspective on our self allows us to control and modify our behaviour in real time. As we are self-aware we can make decisions in the moment and build information we can use for reflection. Self-awareness is different than reflection for self-awareness is a present cognitive function whereas reflection is an awareness of our self in the past.
Observing our selves is greatly in our advantage for it dramatically increases our ability to learn from our mistakes or modify our behaviour to optimize our goals and fulfillment of our experience. There are ways that we can enhance our cognitive capacity for self-awareness and making those behaviours habit can only benefit us.
Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy, our judgment of how well we do in completing tasks, is founded on self-awareness. Our ability to understand our mistakes and flaws contributes to our ability to assess and judge our success in completing tasks. The more we can accurately assess our ability or power to change situations and our skills, the higher the chance that they will act in a way to do so.
Increasing our self-awareness can lead to an increased self-efficacy which will lead to greater control over our lives and the limitations on them. People with high self-efficacy will view challenging tasks as something that they can master rather than be avoided, increasing thier self-confidence. The goal of accurately tracking our progress through self-awareness is increasing our self-efficacy.
Red Spot Technique
The beginning of the scientific study of self-awareness was with Gordon Gallup who developed the Red Spot technique to distinguish between animals who have a higher capacity for self-awareness than those who do not. Gallup did this by checking if animals that look at themselves in a mirror who had a red dot placed on them could recognize something different about their physical appearance. Chimpanzees, orangutans, dolphins, the Eurasian magpie and Asian elephants have shown a capacity for detecting the red spot. Human infants develop self-recognition with the Red Spot technique around the age of 2.
Forms of Awareness:
1. Introspection
The process of examining one's mental state, thoughts and feelings first brought to psychology by Wilhem Wundt and his student Edward Titchener in the early 1900s. The problem with introspection as a means to gather knowledge is that it is highly susceptible to our biases like causal attribution, where we make inferences about the cause of our behaviour based on cultural biases and folklore. Unless we have a means to account for and rule out our tendency for bias, we will not be increasing our actual self-awareness or understanding.
2. Self-Reflection
The process of reflecting on one's life and learning from one's mistakes is not the same as introspection. Introspection is the process of examining one's present mental state, thoughts and feelings. The process of self-reflection is observing one's self in past situations and experiences and learning from them. The present self reflects on the past selves that lead to the present state and now has the opportunity to learn from past decisions and trajectories. Self-reflection is the essence of learning from our own mistakes and was initially discussed in Plato's dialogues of Socrates.
3. Mindfulness
Mindfulness is the state or process of bringing one's attention and awareness to the present moment derived from the Buddhist teachings of the eight fold path. One can achieve a state of present mindfulness through the practice of meditation by being aware of one's natural breathing patterns. As one's mind become distracted during this process, the goal is to bring one's attention back to the breathing without being judgmental about the distraction. See Mindfulness Tool for more info.
Components of Self:
1. Self-Concept
Knowledge of and properties of oneself composed of thoughts or beliefs about oneself, the known self or when we refer to ourselves as 'me,' and the self as an active processor of information, the essence of a 'knower' or when refer to ourselves as 'I.' The known aspect of our self is called the 'Self-Concept' whereas the 'knower' element of our self as self- awareness, or the act of thinking about ourselves. Both of these elements create a coherent sense of identify in a person.
How we view our self in the present is determined by personal factors such as self-image, self-esteem, mood and goals. Our present self is determined by situational factors such as social roles, social context, group size, recent events and contrasting ourselves with others in our group.
Self-concept is composed of self-schemas and the integration of self-concept, self-knowledge and self-esteem create the sense of self as a whole. The selves in the self-concept are time based being made of past, present and future possible selves.
Self-concept is based descriptions of oneself where as self-esteem is evaluative. However, having a clear and confident sense of self has positive implications for self-esteem. People who have a low sense of self are more likely to be neurotic, less aware of their internal states, will engage in chronic self-analysis and rumination, and are less likely to engage in reflection.
Predominantly, people in western cultures define themselves relative to their own thoughts, feelings and actions creating an independent view of self. In collectivist cultures, people tend to define themselves in terms of their relationships to others with an implication that their behaviour is largely determined by others.
In Western cultures, men tend to have an independent view of self, whereas women in Western cultures are more interdependent in their definition of self. When Western men do define themselves in terms of collective interdependence by attributing themselves to groups they belong to like sports teams. In collectivist cultures, both men and women defines themselves interdependently.
2. Self-Schemas
Schemas are knowledge structures people use to understand our social life. Self-schemas are organized knowledge structures about the self based on memories compromising beliefs, experiences and generalizations of self that are used to understand, explain and predict our behaviour. Self-schemas also help people interpret new experiences and organize our autobiographical memories of our past thoughts, feelings and actions.
A self-schema is composed of what an individual believes that they are or identify in terms of traits or dispositions. An example of would be 'I am outgoing' and compose how they would act in certain kinds of situations like being sociable at a party.
Self-schemas become self-perpetuating because once a person comes to believe something about themselves, certain biases maintain those beliefs. Similar to self-schema is self-image which is a mental representation of how one view's themselves.
When we answer the question 'What am I like?' we are referring to our self-knowledge. Self-knowledge informs our mental representation of our self.
3. Self-Esteem
A person's subjective emotional value or feeling of their worth. The concept of self-esteem was first found in William James' discussion of the social self in 1892. Later, Abraham Maslow, 1970, discussed how he felt that self-esteem was mandatory for an individual's growth towards self-actualization. Carl Rogers, 1987, believed that self-esteem was a core element of peoples problems and developed the Unconditional Positive Regard approach within psychotherapy as a means to accept the patient with respect.
People can have contingent self-esteem where they are forced to please others, be successful and not make mistakes, and meet their standards and expectations even if they are unrealistic to hold value and a sense of worth for themselves. In contrast, one can adopt a non-contingent sense of self-esteem where they have value just because they are human and no matter what happens their value is not affected by it. Burns has a great chapter on self-esteem in his book. see Feeling Good Tool.
Modes of Knowing the Self:
1. Self-Perception
In 1972, Daryl Bem determined that when people are uncertain about their attitudes and feelings they will determine them by interpreting their own behaviour in the situation that the state occurs in. Self-perception theory also states that people will also determine if their behaviour if a reflection of how they really feel or if the situation was the cause.
Self-perception theory also has an influence on an individual's intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. If people are given a reward for an activity, they will attribute doing the activity to the reward, not because they like the activity. See overjustification effect in biases Tool.
Later, in 2006, Tiffany Ito tested external behaviour affecting attitude by having participants put a pencil in their mouth, simulating a smile, and conducting an implicit association test. The IAT test found that individuals attitude and prejudice changed as a result of their behaviour.
Self-Perception theory is more appropriate when people's attitudes are weak or vague and cognitive dissonance theory is better equipped at explaining attitude change when the attitudes are strong.
2. Self-Awareness Theory
In 1972, Duval and Wicklund determined that when we are focusing our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our behaviour to our internal standards and values. Being self-aware creates a state of being self-conscious through making objective, judgmental observations. People will then be motivated to change their behaviour to match their internal standards and values but if they are unable they will feel uncomfortable and stop being self-aware to avoid the negative feelings.
In 1991, Roy Baumeister attributed this escape of self-awareness to the onset of substances abuse or spiritual and religious practices as a means to not have negative feelings with oneself. The individual has the capacity to be either constructive or destructive when aware of unpleasant aspect of themselves.
3. Self-Assessment
From 1993 to 1997, Constantine Sedikides found that most people tend to want self-enhancement instead of self-assessments to protect their self-esteems unless they are motivated by offering the accuracy of an assessment.
The process of observing oneself to determine which aspects are important to one's identity is self-assessment. Self-evaluation, verification and enhancement all work together with self-assessment in an attempt to maintain a positive, accurate and coherent sense of who we are. Self-assessment is more focused on the accuracy of our self instead of an inflated sense that makes us feel good but is unrealistic. Due to the realism of self-assessment, it has the risk of damaging one's self-esteem. An individual gives up temporary self-esteem for long term achievement and future self-esteem.
Self-Protection:
1. Self-Discrepancy Theory
In 1987, Tory Higgins began work on the sense of being distressed when the sense of who we are or our actual self is inconsistency with our personal standards or self-conceptions. Higgins distinguishes between beliefs we have about our 'ideal' self, which is the person we aspire to be, and our 'ought' self, which is the type of person we believe we should be. When we compare our actual self with out ideal and ought selves we get a method of self-evaluation.
People will feel negative emotions of dejection, sadness, dissatisfaction and depressive-like symptoms when they become aware that their actual and ideal selves are different. With this discrepancy made aware, people will make efforts to minimize the gap between the actual and ideal.
When we are 'ideal' focused, we are promotion-orientated by being motivated to achieve our goals and gain positive outcomes. When we are 'ought' focused, we are prevention-orientated by making efforts to avoid negative outcomes and experiences.
2. Self-Evaluation Maintenance Theory
Tesser, in 1988, developed the self-evaluation maintenance theory to account for when an individual's self-concept becomes threatened by another person's behaviour due to the closeness of the relationship and the relevance of the behaviour. An example would be when we feel bad if a friend outperforms us in a task that we value to our identity or self-concept. The critical factor determining if we feel inspired or threatened when our friend performs well is determined by our belief that we can attain the same results as our friend or not. If we believe that we can do well too, we will feel inspired, if we feel that the results are unattainable then our self-evaluation will be negative.
When a person's self esteem is threatened by being outperformed by a friend, there are a few techniques they can do to replenish their feelings of worth. Firstly, the individual an distance themselves from the relationship, however, this approach can be damaging to our close family and friends. A second way that a person can repair their damages self-esteem when confronted with being outperformed is by reminding themselves of other positive qualities they have. Affirming our other positive qualities is constructive because we don't have to damage or neglect our close relationships.
Another way that people can repair their self-esteem when outperformed is by reframing the relevance of the task on their self-concept or identity. If we lower the value of the skill or task on our identity, we won't feel it as such a blow to our self-esteem when others do well.
Some people will engage in undermining the performance of others, even their friends, to make themselves feel better. Undermining others is a violation of the Ethical Intimacy code, see Tool, and can lead to the development of poor character traits and habit in the individual and the destruction of our close relationships or reputation. Sabotaging the performance of others is a false method for us to become better at something and self-deceiving.
The last and most constructive method to repair one's self-esteem that is damaged from being outperformed is to modify our belief or attitude from not thinking that we can become better to finding new methods and training techniques so we can become better. Adjusting out beliefs, attitudes and learning/training will produce the equivalence of our ideal and actual selves. Having an awareness of focusing on the process of learning as part of our self-concept instead of and end-state we achieve and try to maintain is valuable for we can maintain a coherent sense of learning and growing, whereas attempting to maintain being the best will be difficult to hold if we meet others who are skilled in the same area. Check the Feeling Good Tool for Burns' discusses this topic in his book.
3. Self-Enhancement
Self-enhancement occurs when people have an unrealistic positive view of themselves as a means of boosting their self-esteem. An example of this would be the false uniqueness effect: when people believe that other share the same weaknesses as them but they are unique in their strengths.
Another way to self-enhance is for people to seek our positive emotional experiences and avoid negative emotional experiences to increase their self-esteem. Self-enhancement can become problematic if we are unable to engage in negatively emotional experiences that are necessarily good for our growth.
Not all experiences will be positive and to discriminate life's experiences based on how they feel, not on the ethics or merit for our growth, can be problematic. We can engage in limiting ourselves unnecessarily and reducing our capacity to handle and deal with uncomfortable situations which often can come up in intimate relationships or other social contexts like business and work.
Learning to enjoy positive emotional experiences is important and avoiding harmful or unnecessarily abusive environments. Being able to discern when a negative emotional experiences would be best to engage with, like situations in parenting or when others frustrate us, is very important for our growth and maturity as a person.
4. Self-Verification
In 1990, Swann determined that people to seek confirmation of their self-concept irrelevant if their self-concept is positive or negative. People find it unsettling and confusing if the view they have of themselves is disconfirmed because people want to have a coherent and consistent sense of self and not have to change it often. People will also find it difficult to interact with others that view us differently than we view ourselves.
People who have negative beliefs about themselves have a conflict when others give them positive feedback for they want to feel good but at the same time are trying to uphold the sense of self they have. Sometimes people will maintain a negative, coherent view of themselves despite the sense that they could feel good with compliments from others.
The desire for accurate or positive feedback from others depends on which dimension we are being evaluated on and the nature of the relationship that the person is evaluating us from. People will generally only hold their negative self-beliefs if they think they are certain of them and if the consequences of being evaluated against their belief is not too high they will accept the positive feedback. Lastly, if people think don't think their abilities can change, they prefer positive over accurate feedback. If people feel a negative self-attribute can be changed with effort they prefer accurate feedback so they can improve.
So if someone knows that they are poor at a task but thinks they can get better they prefer you tell them the truth about their skill than lie to them. If someone doesn't think they can get better they would prefer that you lie to them instead of telling them the truth that hurts.
This tendency can be good if we are avoiding unjust criticism or a negative judgement from another, for we can disregard the inaccurate, malicious information. However, this bias can be counterproductive if we are unable to accurately assess our weaknesses in an area that are contrary to our existing self-concept. If we have an inflated sense of self, we will turn away from realistic information from others even if it is true. Our self-awareness is can be limited by our tendency for self-verification.
Social Self
1. Social Comparison
In 1954, Leon Festinger first proposed the theory of social comparison where people compare themselves to others in an attempt at self-evaluation. People are more likely to compare themselves with others that are similar to themselves. There are two types of social comparisons identified by Wills in 1981, Downward and Upward. Downward social comparison is when we look at someone who is worse off than us whereas upward social comparison is when we contrast ourselves with someone who is better off than ourselves. Individuals will usually use downward social comparisons to increase their self-esteem, whereas an upward social comparison elicits the tendency to lower one's self esteem by perceiving the other as of more value.
1a. Downward Social Comparison
The awareness of a downward social comparison is important because it is best to not engage in condescending or patronizing thought to increase our sense of self worth or self-esteem. If we think about others in either of these two forms, the way we interact with them will be rooted in these thoughts. When a downward social comparison occurs, it is best to perceive the other with compassion for their situation and their progress in whatever property we are comparing. Evidence shows that when we compare ourselves to others that are lower on a desired that than ourselves, we feel good about ourselves. We only gain the boost in self-esteem through downward social comparison if we are confident that the other person's poor fate cannot fall on us. However, we can also increase our self-esteem by comparing our present self with our past self on some form of performance.
1ai. Sense of Worth in Comparisons
It is also important to recognize that a person's worth is not relative to their achievements for their worth is relative to their essence of being a conscious human not the capacity of their productivity. Productivity and achievements are relative to a persons situation, motivational factors, social support, skill set, available resources and more. The output capacity of my productivity is relative to the things which allow me to be productive or achieve my goals. My worth as a human is a different category for it resides in properties of my humanness that are shared by all people. People vary in their ability to achieve due to situational and dispositional factors like self-efficacy.
If I limit my own worth, and the worth of others, to their productivity or achievements I will forever be chasing my worth and others will always be reduced to work output. Whenever I achieve something, I will now have to find something new to achieve and repeat. I will never be satisfied with myself as I am for my worth is relative to the attainment of a goal, not my intrinsic value of existing as a loving, conscious being.
When I reduce the value of others worth to their achievements or productivity, I remove their human essence and replace it with a mechanical one. If I am functioning as a manager or employer, my employees will develop resent for me because I treat them like machines instead of people who cooperate on a task with me. When a group of people need to complete a task, their ability to complete that task well is greatly increased when we recognize that they are humans and have worth in their own right. If I treat them with respect, they will become motivated internally to cooperate with me, instead of feeling forced to do something for someone that limits their worth to what they have accomplished. Ironically, if I value someone just because they exist, they will produce more.
We can attempt to now engage in a downward social comparison, however humans have this tendency build in them. So, if we do compare ourselves automatically in a downward way, let us not only recognize that we are valuable and worth loving as human, but also remember that different people have different personal traits and situations that make their success either more or less difficult. When our minds engage in downward social comparison, we can ask 'What could I do or say that I have learned from my life that would help this person with theirs?' Refer to the Feeling Good post for Burns has a great discussion on this topic in his book on reducing our self-worth to our achievements.
1b. Upward Social Comparison
In contrast, we can develop a constructive attitude for Upward Social Comparisons where when we see someone who is successful in a specific area, we can learn from those people and use their existence as motivation that if they can do it so can we. Some people will fall in the trap of having their self-esteem lowered or feeling resentful towards others success. This kind of approach or attitude is problematic for it is not constructive and does not offer the individual any way of learning or gaining from the Upward Social Comparison.
in 2000, Lockwood found that when people compare their 'best' selves to someone who is much better their self-esteem was negatively affected. If someone compares their 'usual' self to another who is much more skilled, they don't have an issue in self-esteem. In 2002, Mills found that when our 'actual' self is being related to someone who is more skilled than us, it can inspire aspirations that we can become better. If our attention is on our idea self, comparing to someone who has surpassed us can be discouraging. Depending on how we frame our attitudes towards others, we can create motivation to become better when we compare with someone who s better than us.
James Davis developed the Frog Pond effect theory in 1966 to account for the tendency of people to evaluate themselves worse off when they are in a group of individuals that are higher in performance than themselves. A response to becoming aware of this is relative to our self-esteem not being relative to those around us but an intrinsic factor to our human existence. If we are in situations with higher performance individuals, we could develop an attitude of being saturated with some of the best people that we can learn from. Becoming aware of the Frog Pond effect is the first step and constructing a positive attitude with out thoughts that promotes our growth is the second step. We can engage in CBT techniques of recording the automatic thoughts that are associated with how we feel in the social context and affirm to ourselves a reconstructed, positive set of thoughts so we can learn from the group.
In the context of being competitive, even when a person out matches or best's us, we can develop an attitude of respect and appreciation for their skill, assuming they are being fair. If they are not being fair, then we know that even with the disadvantage, the added pressure will only make us better.
2. Looking Glass Self: Reflected Appraisals
In 1902, the sociologist Charles Cooley first discussed the Looking Glass Self as what we think others perception of us is and our feelings towards that hypothetical perception. Cooley believed that we develop an understanding of ourselves based on our perceptions of how others see us or seeing ourselves through the eyes of the other.
Later, in 1963, John W. Kinch modified Cooley's model by reformulating his conception as actual appraisals of what the person actually thinks, perceived appraisals of we what think they think, and self-appraisals which is thoughts/feelings we get from our perception of the others's appraisals.
Recently, in the 1990s Mark Baldwin has conducted several studies where they primed participants by looking at photos of people they knew or thinking of individuals in their life that were meaningful. Baldwin then had the participants reveal how they evaluated themselves and found interesting results. We have an internal audience in our minds, the committee of selves discussed in the Unity of Self Tool, and depending on how the audience perceives us in a supportive or negatively critical, we will see ourselves as having either positive or negative traits/ characteristics. Baldwin found that if people were primed with negative judgments from others, they would look at themselves in a negative way, and when primed with supportive individuals, they would see themselves in as possessing positve traits.
3. Self-Monitoring
In 1974, Mark Snyder developed the first assessment for self-monitoring, which is our tendency to modify and change our behaviour to accommodate social situation and the perceptions of others. People who are high in self-monitoring are very sensitive to social cues, situational contexts and will modify their behaviour to suit situational demands. High self-monitors are more likely to change their beliefs and opinions in situations and view their self a produce of social interactions. High self-monitors have the hazard of being susceptible to groupthink and conformity.
In contrast, low self-monitors view their self as a product of dispositional character traits and focus on their own internal states, beliefs and attitudes as constant within situational contexts. Low self-monitors suffer more social problems than high self-monitors as others will perceive them as aggressive and uncompromising and often suffer rejection, anger, anxiety, and depression.
Our brain's capacity to monitor our self is relatively limited. By learning some simple techniques, we can greatly increase our capacity for self-awareness.
Techniques to Increase Self-Awareness:
1. Reflective Mindful Meditation
The first Tool, the Relaxation Response, I discuss Benson's discovery of the benefits of Transcendental Meditation. One of the other things that occurs through slow deep breathing and the calming of one's mind is the increase capacity for mindfulness. Mindfulness is defined as bringing one's attention to the present moment. This skill can be developed through the act of meditating
2. Development of Non-Contingent Self-Esteem
As we have see from the theories of self-enhancement and self-verification, people are heavily biased to support existing self-concepts or positive self-esteems at the risk of inaccurate information. If one is able to become comfortable with changing one's self-concept founded upon a stable sense of worth, then the individual can be realistically aware of themselves without having the negative elements of a lack of self worth.
Becoming familiar with some of the Tools like Burns' cognitive distortions mentioned in the Feeling Good Tool, the Reflective Mind Map, Meditation Techniques, and Mindfulness we can have a better chance of not only creating a stable sense of self-esteem but maintaining our existing self-esteem when negative emotions or inconsistencies in our self-concept arise.
3. Reflective Mind Mapping
We can record our self-concepts and progress over time with as much accuracy as our self-esteem will allow us. If we are able to construct a realistic, growth and process orientated sense of self-esteem, we will protect ourselves from self-deception and have a better understand of where we are in our life. Depending on how we conduct ourselves, what we anchor our identities to and our ability to develop a realistic set of attitudes and beliefs, we develop a realistic and constructive sense of self-awareness.
4. Development of Social Phalanx
If we are able to surround ourselves with the loving and supportive kind of individuals discussed in the Social Phalanx Tool, we will have the social support to better understand our self and develop a realistic sense of self-awareness.
Self-awareness is an ongoing journey and approximation towards self-mastery. Only by being active towards this kind of goal can we be successful.
AJ 15.2.18, 14.3.18, 27.3.20
Link to Elliot Aronson's 'Social Psychology':
https://www.amazon.ca/Psychology-Canadian-MyPsychLab-Pearson-Package/dp/0132918358/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
ISBN: 978-0132918350
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