PSYC 2600 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Shyness, T-Shirt, Metacognition
19 Jun 2018
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Week 9 Notes: Approaches to the Self & Sex, Gender, and Personality
Descriptive Component of the Self: Self-Concept
Self-Concept: how you view yourself, how you feel and understand yourself
- This then affects your behaviour
- The beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and knowledge you have about yourself
I: ontological self, unobservable self, how you feel about yourself, who you think you are and
who you feel about it
Me: the epistemological self, features of the self that you believe you possess, they are
displayed to other people
Development of the Self-Concept
- As people become socialized, they begin to realize that they are distinct from the rest of
the world
Rouge Test: if the infant touches the red dot on the mirror, the self-concept hasn’t developed
yet, if they touch their nose then the self-concept has developed
- Most babies can pass the rouge test by 15-18 months
Ages 2-3: they associate themselves with their age and gender
- they include themselves as part of the family important, important to feel safe
Ages 3-4: they develop skills and abilities
- before ages 3-4 children are very honest, they can’t lie because they think what they are
thinking is known by everyone
Ages 5-6: children learn how to lie and keep secrets, they learn that no one can see their inner
world and thoughts
- more socializing
- they compare themselves with other people
Teen years: metacognition is developed, they can take the perspective of someone else
- they develop objective self-awareness, this is what animals cannot develop
- thinking about thinking, thinking about what others are experiencing
Spotlight effect and Barry Manilow
- sometimes too much self-awareness is a bad thing, focusing too much on yourself
Spotlight Effect: most people have the idea that their thoughts, behaviours and features are
more salient to others than they actually are
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- people think others are paying more attention to them then they actually are
Gilovich et al. 2000
- People wore a t shirt with an embarrassing face on it
- The face of Barry Manilow was on the t-shirt
- People overestimated 2 times the amount of attention they attracted with the t-shirt
Shyness: When Objective Self-Awareness Becomes Chronic
- Shyness describes people who aren’t introverted, they want company with others, but
they feel intense anxiety about being negatively evaluated
- They avoid social situations and reduce their anxiety, but this leads to a cycle of
avoidance which increases anxiety to the point where they can’t function (they can’t go
to a job interview, go to class, etc.)
Shyness: a construct that has a biological and social component
- The people desire to interact with others but are held back by insecurities, and fears,
and anxieties
- As a child, parents can contribute to this by letting the child stay back and not socialize
- Parents should sign their shy kids up for camp, push them to get involved in sports,
these children overcome shyness, but parents who cater to the child’s fear, those
children do not overcome their shyness
Self-Schemata
- Part of the self-concept
- The belief of who we think we are
- We form a cognitive structure about ourselves- the structure is the self-schema
- Self-schemas can be positive or negative
Direct Attention: direct our attention towards the familiar and something we can relate to
- How we chose groups
Organize encoding: we remember things that are relevant to us, better
Influence Retrieval:
Possible selves/future schemas: most of us have a person we want to be, we want to reach
certain goals, we want to improve ourselves
Evaluative Component of the Self: Self-Esteem
Evaluation of Oneself
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- Our evaluations tell us how much we like ourselves
Self-Esteem: whether we evaluate ourselves positively or negatively
- It varies, but remains consistent over time
Self-Complexity: how you fine-tune your self, efforts and motivations in different areas in your
life
- School, family, friendships, sports, volunteering etc.
- The more roles people have, the higher the self-complexity, the higher the self-esteem
and the self-esteem will be less variable
Research on Self-Esteem
High Self-Esteem: they like themselves
- They look at failures as an opportunity to learn
- They are more successful, earn more money
- They are motivated by success
Low Self-Esteem: motivated by avoiding failure
Failure: everyone fails, people with high and low self-esteem
- People with high self-esteem experience disappointment but they focus on success in
other areas of their life
- People with low self-esteem generalize the failure to other areas of their life
Ex. If they fail a test, they think they’re stupid, then they think no one will want to be
friends with them
- People rate themselves as being above average on a lot of tasks, we think we are above
average (we are rewarded for things we do well but don’t get punished or negative
feedback for things we don’t do well)
People have different criteria for what they think is good or bad
Self-Efficacy: the belief that you will succeed if you persist at a task
It is very important to have high self-efficacy
Task Performance:
- High self-esteem: failure causes them to perform better
- Low self- esteem: they perform poorly on task, they give up more quickly
Unhelpful Thinking Styles: not on exam
Protecting vs. Enhancing the Self
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Document Summary
Week 9 notes: approaches to the self & sex, gender, and personality. Self-concept: how you view yourself, how you feel and understand yourself. The beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and knowledge you have about yourself. I: ontological self, unobservable self, how you feel about yourself, who you think you are and who you feel about it. Me: the epistemological self, features of the self that you believe you possess, they are displayed to other people. As people become socialized, they begin to realize that they are distinct from the rest of the world. Rouge test: if the infant touches the red dot on the mirror, the self-concept hasn"t developed yet, if they touch their nose then the self-concept has developed. Most babies can pass the rouge test by 15-18 months. Ages 2-3: they associate themselves with their age and gender they include themselves as part of the family important, important to feel safe.
