PSYC20009 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Acculturation, Hazel Rose Markus, Asian Australians
10 May 2018
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Week 8
- Sources of self-knowledge: psychology, astrology, religion
- William James: one of the fathers of Modern psychology, wrote a book in 1890
called Principles of Psychology, brother of Henry James (famous American author),
chapter called The consciousness of self, self-feelings: feelings and emotions that
constituents of self arouse, self-seeking and self-preservation: “the actions to which
they prompt”
- Constituents of self: Empirical Self/Me (aspect of self that is the object of attention,
how we think about our attributes, our personalities, our minds, I am an intelligent
person, describing self) and pure Ego (the I, aspect of self that actively experiences
the world, I am, I do, I think, stream of consciousness that gives us our sense of
personal identity, “it is the sense of a sameness perceived by thought and predicated
of things thought-about”, our sense of being person going through time, more about
philosophy
- The Me (the empirical self): contains all the ways people think about themselves, no
clear line between what is me and mine, we feel and act at times about our things as
we feel and act about ourselves, 3 categories: material self (all tangible objects,
people, or places that carry the designation my or mine), social self (how we are
regarded and recognised by others, we have a many social selves as people who
recognize us, my belief of how you see/evaluate me), spiritual self (all things that are
not tangible that carry the designation my or mine, attributes or abilities, pleasure and
pain, things that go on in head, think about ourselves as thinkers)
- Self-feelings: 2 opposite kinds of self-feelings (affections for self) which are
elementary endowments of human nature (we all have them) → self-complacency or
self-satisfaction (happy or satisfied with how we are), and self-dissatisfaction (things
we are not happy with), not just expectations of pleasures and pain, results from our
actual successes and failures, primitive emotions → like rage and pain
- Actions of the self: fundamental impulses that are designed to either improve the self
(provide for the future) or maintain the self (sustain the present), these are self-
seeking and self-preservation actions → prompted by emotions (self-feelings),
material and social self-seeking involve things such as providing for our needs and
social things such as being friendly or curious or emulating others (want to keep
friends), spiritual self-seekings involves every impulse towards psychic progress,
including intellectual, moral, and spiritual pursuits in the narrow sense (getting
education, becoming better person in moral or spiritual domain)
- Self-strivings - things we want to attain, sometimes in conflict
- Markus & Nurius: possible selves - many ideas about what we would like to
become, not possible to become all the things we would like to be because they are
incompatible (party animal and philanthropist), we have to “stake our salvation” on
one and relinquish all others, wanting to be parent and party animal (once parent,
cannot be party animal), our self-feelings are based on what we “back ourselves to
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be” (the self-striving that we decide to go for), self-esteem = success/pretensions
(success divided by pretensions), one way to improve self-esteem is to get rid of
pretensions
- Markus (1977): Hazel Markus self schema → cognitive generalisations about the
self, derived from past experience, organise and guide the processing of self-related
information that are part of the individual’s social experience, form a coherent set of
beliefs that are abstract
- Self schema properties: cognitive representations derived from specific events and
situations involving us and more general representations, based on what we have
experienced, represent the way that self has been differentiated and articulated in
memory (self → a whole lot of different selves, think of self in different domains [what
i’m like as lecturer, as a parent, as a friend etc., are typically different]), reflect
invariances people have discovered in their own social behaviour (patterns that have
been observed repeatedly)
- Schema functions: determine whether info is attended to, how it is structured, how
much importance is attached to it, and what happens to it subsequently; allow
inferences to be made from scant information or to quickly streamline and interpret
complex sequences of events (makes information processing easier); go beyond
currently available info (relevant to schema we have, can predict what is going to
happen); only when a self-description derives from a well-articulated generalization
(schema) about the self can it be expected to converge and form a cognitive pattern
with the individual’s other judgments, decisions, and actions; should consider
schematicity of self descriptions
- Study 1 (1977): impact of self-schema on info selection and processing, behaviour
evidence should be easily retrievable (generalisation of self → this is how we
behave), individual differences in the form of self-schemata should be evident
(differences among people on how schematic they are on certain things), information
relevant to self-schemata should be processed with relative ease, confident
predictions about future, resist counter-schematic info (don’t want info that isn’t
consistent with our schema); experimental group: group of participants, given
personality traits, had to say how self-descriptive the trait was, how important the trait
was to how they saw themselves, 11-point scales, findings: consistent pattern found
on independence-dependence, independent (rated descriptiveness and importance
of independent traits high (8-11 on 2 of 3 scales), dependents (rated descriptiveness
and importance of dependent traits high (8-11 on 2 of 3 scales), aschematics (rated
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