Self Concept
Our sense of self
The ideas & beliefs about yourself become a generalized “Self Schema”.
A Schema is a template of what we are like & is a model for how we understand the social world
around us. A schema becomes a pattern imposed on complex experiences to simplify, organize or
guide our response.
Schemas
• aid recall.
• direct behavior.
• aid automatic inference.
• speed up processing.
• aid information processing.
Self Reference Effect
Information relevant to ourselves is processed more quickly & we remember it better than other information.
Our focus is on self, we are at the center of our worlds.
We overestimate how much others focus on us & misperceive that their behavior is directed toward us or is in
response to our behavior, "spotlight effect". There is an “imaginary audience”, especially for adolescents.
As we mature realism prevails to some degree.
We often have the illusion that our emotions are transparent to others. The more self-conscious we are the
more we believe this "illusion of transparency".
Durability bias: the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events is touched
on but not directly labeled under the heading: Predicting Our Feelings: pages 31 - 33; however, Impact bias
is noted: it is the tendency for people to overestimate the length (durability) or the intensity of the impact of
future feeling states.
Ψ Dual Attitudes: Our automatic (implicit) attitudes regarding something or someone may differ dramatically
from our consciously controlled (explicit) attitudes. The findings of modern social psychologists seem to support
this conclusion. This means that we may not know how we really feel about something or someone,
i.e. Self- reports are often untrustworthy. Errors in self understanding limit the use use of subjective personal
reports (e.g. personality inventories).
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Social Psychology
Robert C. Gates