PSYCH 104 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Egocentric Bias, Social Comparison Theory, Psych
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Psych 104
Social Psych
Spring 2019
The Self (Social Aspects of the Self)
● Self concept: cognitive component (knowledge of self)
● Self-esteem: affective component (how you feel about yourself)
● Self presentation: behavioral component (how do you manage the impression we give
off for ourselves)
Self Concept: knowledge of self (traits, abilities, etc.), self-schema
● Self schema tends to be very complex
● Tends to be compartmentalized, there are different parts
● Self schema tends to be complex but your self schema tends to be different depending on
the role you are in during that time/moment
● How gathered?
○ Introspection
■ how we turn inward to find that knowledge about ourselves
○ Look to others
■ “Looking glass self”
● William James: looking glass is a mirror; we gather knowledge
about our traits and abilities oftentimes by looking at how other
people respond to us
■ Social Comparison theory
● a lot of times we may not have objective evidence to be able to
evaluate ourselves, we may not have a clear understanding about
where we stand in terms of a trait or ability; under these
conditions, we are especially motivated to compare ourselves to
other people to gather knowledge about ourselves. When we don’t
have a way of evaluating ourselves, we look to other people to
compare ourselves to and this gives us knowledge on where we
stand on a particular trait or ability.
● This depends on who you compare yourself to. Comparison to
similar others tends to matter the most.
● 3 groups: epinephrine informed, epinephrine uninformed, no
epinephrine informed.
○ The person next to you acts angrily or happily, not directed
at you, just in general; epinephrine uninformed took on the
mood of the person next to them. Epinephrine informed
didn’t change, neither did the sugar pill. The epinephrine
uninformed didn’t know how to act so they looked at the
person next to them.
● Once gathered:
○ Complex and resistant to change
■ We tend to avoid information that’s inconsistent with our schema and pay
attention to info that’s consistent with our self schema.
○ Ego-centric bias: