1 / 16

THE SELF EARLY THEORISTS OF ‘THE SELF’ William James, Charles Cooley SELF-CONCEPT & SELF-ESTEEM Pelham & Swann (

THE SELF EARLY THEORISTS OF ‘THE SELF’ William James, Charles Cooley SELF-CONCEPT & SELF-ESTEEM Pelham & Swann (1989) Gender differences? Self-objectification theory. EARLY THEORISTS OF THE ‘SELF’. WILLIAM JAMES (1842--1910) “ Principles of Psychology” Duality of Self:

cheryl
Download Presentation

THE SELF EARLY THEORISTS OF ‘THE SELF’ William James, Charles Cooley SELF-CONCEPT & SELF-ESTEEM Pelham & Swann (

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. THE SELF EARLY THEORISTS OF ‘THE SELF’ William James, Charles Cooley SELF-CONCEPT & SELF-ESTEEM Pelham & Swann (1989) Gender differences? Self-objectification theory

  2. EARLY THEORISTS OF THE ‘SELF’

  3. WILLIAM JAMES(1842--1910) • “Principles of Psychology” • Duality of Self: • Self as object than can be observed • I have property X • “me” • Self as agent doing the observing • Self as the perceiver • “I” • Related to consciousness: the “I” does the perceiving, feeling,

  4. CHARLES COOLEY(1864-1929) • “Human Nature and the Social Order” • The Social Self: • Self can’t be understood in isolation--must be studied in interaction with others • Self is not an inherent property of human nature but rather a socially-constructed entity: our sense of self is built upon the life-long experience of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others (“looking-glass self”) • James, Mead, Cooley --> SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

  5. SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM(Social) reality is an illusion, nothing is inherently real, only the meanings and symbols we collectively construct and use to describe reality are real; these symbols can be deconstructed to reveal who develop them and how they are useful to particular groups.

  6. SELF-CONCEPT & SELF-ESTEEM

  7. PARADOX: Often there is no obvious relationship between people’s accomplishments and virtues and their global self-esteem • Augusto Pinochet (1915-?) Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) • Undeserved high self-esteem ? Undeserved low self-esteem ? How do people move from having specific knowledge about their attributes to global evaluations of their self-worth?

  8. PELHAM & SWANN (1989) • GLOBAL SELF-ESTEEM (GSE) • General affective evaluation of own’s worth or importance. 2 components: • (1) Affective component: COLOR • Basic sense of pride/shame about oneself. • Largely rooted in temperament (individual differences in basic tendency to feel positive and negative emotions) and early childhood experiences; stable, fuzzy, unconscious, hard to verbalize, spontaneous, irrational (“feeling is believing”) • Also known as trait self-esteem • (2) Cognitive component:CONTENT • Known as self-concept (SC) • Hierarchically organized set of specific mental self-views about one’s characteristics (roles, abilities, etc.) and their evaluation • Dynamic, clear, verbalized, rational (“seeing is believing”) • Framing factors:DYNAMICS • 1. Attribute importance • 2. Attribute certainty determine impact of SC on • 3. Actual/Ideal/Ought Self discrepancy GSE

  9. FRAMING FACTORS: 1. Attribute importance 2. Attribute certainty 3. Actual/Ideal/Ought discrepancy POSITIVE & NEGATIVE AFFECT SELF-CONCEPT (COGNITIVE COMPONENT) TRAIT SELF-ESTEEM (AFFECTIVE COMPONENT) GLOBAL SELF-ESTEEM

  10. Gender differences in global self-esteem ? • Not reliable and/or sizable differences have been found in adults(Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974) • Sources of global self-esteem associated to different things for men and women • (Josephs, Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992) • Differences in agency and communion

  11. GIRLS SELF-ESTEEM (Gilligan, 1990) • Girl’s self-confidence fairly high until age11 or 12 • Assertive about feelings • At adolescence • Many girls accept stereotyped notions of how they should be (behavior and looks) • Repress true feelings • Adopt a “nice” and woman-like self-presentation

  12. PHYSICAL SELF IN YOUNG WOMEN

  13. SELF-OBJECTIFICATION (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997) American culture socializes women to adopt observers' perspectives on their physical selves. This self-objectification is hypothesized to (a) produce body shame  restrained eating, and (b) consume attentional resources.

  14. Highly recommended reading !! Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge (1998). That swimsuit becomes you: Sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating, and math performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  15. Question for the class: Why is self-esteem in (Caucasian) girls lower than for the other ethnic groups?

More Related