The Self & Self-Esteem

Question 1

The self

Answer 1

how we interpret who we are
-> dependent on cultural and social aspects (different values entailed in each culture)
(idea of who and what you are in the world)
-> different types of selves can be primed in different situations
-> there is something in the brain encoding the self (see self vs mother brain imaging study)

Question 2

individualistic culture (WEIRD culture)

Answer 2

• self as center of the world
• personal attributes, desires, talents, …
  -> independent

Question 3

collective culture

Answer 3

• collective more important than self (group harmony, others well being)
• social roles and relationships
  -> more interdependent

Question 4

independent view of self

Answer 4

• self is stable, unique, made up of own special attributes
• in-group = friends and family still have impact; on how you see yourself (we are most important to ourselves on how we define ourselves)
• out-group = everyone else -> can become part of the in-group

Question 5

interdependent view of self

Answer 5

self is connected and sustained by relationship with various significant others (consider others first) -> right with the selves around one

Question 6

self-esteem

Answer 6

• self-image (especially important in WEIRD cultures)
• how you feel you are doing in the world -> comparison; deeply social trait
• ranges from high to low (Rosenbergs SE scale)

Question 7

Why SE is important in individualistic cultures

Answer 7

1. most people have high SE (does not necessarily reflect how people are actually doing, using self-perceived success to measure it, people often exaggerate how good they are)
2. engaging in self-serving cognitive biases to enhance or maintain their SE (encoding and recall biases; fail to encode things which make us feel bad, lost in long term memory, helps to cope with failure/compensatory self enhancement, discounting/hard for us to own bad things to ourself/take more credit for things which went well for us and taking blame away from us when things went wrong -> internal/external attributions)
3. we do everything to maintain positive SE (associate with winners (basking in reflected glory), dissociate from people that are not doing well, downwards social comparison let’s us feel good, don’t like to admit that others are better, using basking = borrow greatness of others to yourself, putting others down to boost own SE, self-handicapping (in success, even better, by failure, it’s ok, due to handicap) -> more used by people with high SE (more to protect))

Question 8

Study on “how much you know about your school” quiz

Answer 8

-> shows how people use language, associate with others dependent on situation
- when feeling good about yourself you are more likely to own your groups failure (does not harm own SE)
- basking used when SE low in order to boost it

Question 9

Tesser’s SE maintenance model

Answer 9

-> when you are likely to
compare and when to bask
1. how relevant is performed task to yourself and your SE
2. relationship of target (close person hurt you more but it is also more joyful if they do something great)
-> basking happens when person is close to you or task is relevant to you
-> comparison in close relationships and high relevance