Emerging Perspectives on Self and Identity

Michael J. Bernstein, Elizabeth L. Haines

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367776954
• eBook ISBN: 9781000651515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The broad concept of the self is fundamental to psychology, serving as an anchor by which we perceive and make sense of the world as well as how we relate to and think about others. This book develops creative points of view of the self which have not previously been reviewed, creating a web of interconnected concepts under the umbrella of the self.

The various contributions to this book discuss these concepts, such as self-regulation, self-concept, self-esteem, self-awareness, social comparison, and self-reference. All of them are related to the self, and all would justify a review of their own, yet none of them have up to this point. As a whole, the book develops these new, creative points of view of the self—the integral (primary) component of our experience as social beings.

Offering numerous perspectives on various aspects of the self which can foster new thinking and research, this timely and important book makes suggestions for future research that will spur additional lines of work by readers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Self and Identity.

A review of the experience and consequences of self-aspect activation, number, and distinctiveness

Christina M. Brown

ABSTRACT
The self-concept is an elaborate memory structure, but it operates under the same basic processes as all cognition. Within the self-concept, self-knowledge (e.g., traits, behavioral representations) is organized into self-aspects. Self-aspects vary in their momentary accessibility, and individual self-aspects can become connected through shared associations (e.g., overlapping traits). This paper reviews the author’s research on (1) the consequences and experience of activating specific self-aspects, and (2) outcomes and correlates of self-complexity, which is the number and interrelatedness of self-aspects. Important self-aspects are easier to activate and harder to inhibit, and active self-aspects moderate the accessibility of related self-knowledge with consequences for social judgment and memory. In addition, self-complexity influences emotions, self-regulation, well-being, and social perceptions, and it varies across cultures.

The most elaborate and richly detailed memory structure is uncontestably the self-concept. Once self-awareness is fully developed around age four or five (Rochat, 2003), the experience of a “self” is a constant throughout life. The mental representation of oneself, the self-concept, contains both episodic (i.e., personal experiences) and semantic (i.e., abstract knowledge) information (Kihlstrom, Beer, & Klein, 2003). As a memory structure, its power and dominance is evident in phenomena like the self-reference effect (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). The self-concept’s heightened accessibility and numerous retrieval cues privilege any information associated with it (Klein & Loftus, 1988).

Although the self-concept is a unique collection of memories, it still operates according to basic cognitive processes (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984). The vast store of self-knowledge in long-term memory is not available all at once. Markus and Wurf (1987) introduced the idea of a working self-concept to explain how a person’s momentary self-definition can change depending on the self-knowledge currently available to conscious thought. As a result, people can have multiple self-aspects (i.e., identities, self-definitions), all of which are real and meaningful parts of their self-concept (McConnell, 2011). For example, one person may possess the following five self-aspects: self as a parent, with friends, husband self, at baseball games, ideal-self. Self-aspects are diverse, often representing contexts, roles, relationships, temporal states, and goals (McConnell, 2011). Aside from their differing content, self-aspects also vary in accessibility. This means that at any given moment, one self-aspect will usually be more active, or dominant, than others. Self-aspects can even be inhibited if they conflict with the current environment (Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2004), such as inhibition of a student self-aspect when at a party.

In this review, the nature and consequences of having multiple self-aspects is explored from two angles: momentary changes in active self-aspects and individual differences in self-aspect quantity and interrelatedness (i.e., self-complexity). A theme of the research reviewed here is that self-knowledge is governed by the same cognitive processes that underlie all thought, memory, and behavior. Because self-aspects organize much of self-knowledge and operate according to basic cognitive principles (e.g., activation potentials, inhibition, strength of associations), understanding a person’s self-aspects creates the ability to predict other self-relevant cognition and behavior (e.g., goal pursuit).

While this approach may seem to strip the self of its specialness by reducing various phenomena down to basic cognition, the opposite interpretation is equally true: Given the self’s privileged and invasive presence in memory (Klein & Loftus, 1988), most judgments and behaviors are self-relevant in some way (Dunning, 2003). Therefore, even simple phenomena like memory retrieval and concept accessibility are influenced by the self-aspects people possess.

Active self-aspects

Accessibility refers to the ease with which constructs in long-term memory are retrieved and made available to working memory, where they can then influence perception, judgment, and behavior (Bruner, 1957). Accessibility can be increased passively through recent encounters with related stimuli (i.e., priming; Higgins, 1996), or it can be actively sought by conscious retrieval of memories (e.g., Roediger & Butler, 2011). Once accessible, these constructs shape attention, memory, and judgment (e.g., Higgins, 1996). Constructs that are repeatedly activated develop higher baseline accessibility, which grants them greater activation potential (Srull & Wyer, 1980). When a construct is accessible at baseline and influences attention, memory, and judgment in the absence of recent contextual priming, it is considered chronically accessible.

Although a construct need not be relevant to the self to have chronic accessibility, constructs central to a person’s identity are more likely to receive the regular activation necessary to achieve chronicity. As such, early research on chronic constructs included self-relevance as one criterion for determining chronicity. For example, in a measure of chronicity by Higgins, King, and Mavin (1982), participants reported traits that described themselves and specific friends, and a trait was considered chronic either if it described themselves and at least one friend or if it was used to describe three or more friends. Self-descriptive traits overwhelmingly appeared in descriptions of friends, with over 92% of accessible traits being self-descriptive (Higgins et al., 1982).

A chronic construct that is intimately tied to the self is considered a self-schema, and it guides information processing and memory like any other schema (Markus, 1977; Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985). This means that although chronic constructs are identified through their importance to the self, they influence what information people attend to, remember, and use when processing information about other people (Higgins et al., 1982; Markus et al., 1985).

If self-knowledge is organized into self-aspects and self-aspects can be activated and inhibited, then the accessibility of “chronically accessible” constructs may be tied to the self-aspects to which they belong. To test this, we identified participants’ chronic constructs during pre-testing and brought them back to the lab on a later date to manipulate their active self-aspect (Brown & McConnell, 2009a). During the pre-test, participants completed two measures of trait accessibility. The first, a reaction time task, involved categorizing 40 traits as “me” or “not me” as quickly as possible. The traits appeared individually in the center of a computer screen and participants responded by keystroke. Each trait was shown a total of six times, and the average response time (RT) was recorded. A trait was considered chronic if (1) the mean RT for that trait was among the five fastest, and (2) the participant also selected it as one of the five most important traits for evaluating themselves or potential friends (e.g., Markus, 1977).

Participants additionally completed a measure of self-concept organization devised by Linville (1985, 1987) and modified for computer administration by McConnell et al. (2005). They were shown the same 40 traits and instructed to sort them into groups representing meaningful aspects of themselves. Participants provided a name for each group (i.e., self-aspect). They could use traits in more than one group, they did not have to use all traits, and they could create as many groups as were meaningful to them. This self-concept organization task (traditionally used to measure self-complexity; Linville, 1985; McConnell et al., 2005) allowed us to identify self-aspects associated with chronically accessible traits.

Using the data from this task, we identified self-aspects that were relevant or irrelevant to participants’ chronic traits. Relevant self-aspects contained at least one chronic trait, while irrelevant self-aspects contained none. Participants returned to the lab on a later date and were instructed to write for 10 min about a specific self-aspect. This writing task served to activate a relevant or irrelevant self-aspect. Participants then completed a second round of the Me/Not-me categorization task.

If accessibility of chronic traits is truly fixed and pervasive, activating a self-aspect irrelevant to those traits should not reduce their accessibility. However, we found that active self-aspect moderated the accessibility of chronic traits. Response time was unchanged relative to pre-testing when participants’ active self-aspect was relevant to those traits, whereas RT became significantly slower after activating a self-aspect unassociated with the traits. This suggests self-aspects can both activate and inhibit other self-knowledge.

A second study conceptually replicated this effect with a different operational definition of chronicity (from Higgins et al., 1982) and a new dependent variable. Accessible constructs shape construal of ambiguous information, causing the information to be interpreted as consistent with whatever is accessible (Srull & Wyer, 1980). This effect had previously been observed with self-schemas and chronic constructs: ambiguous social behaviors were interpreted as consistent with these constructs, revealing that the constructs are accessible even without recent environmental exposure (Markus et al., 1985). As with our first study, we manipulated participants’ active self-aspect to be relevant or irrelevant to their chronic traits, and then we exposed them to social behaviors that could be interpreted as evidence of a chronic trait or a different trait (e.g., “Andrea tries to have lunch with her best friend almost every day of the week,” could be interpreted as the chronic trait friendly, or the non-chronic trait dependent). For experimental control, participants made ratings of behaviors that could be interpreted as evidence of another participant’s chronic traits (i.e., a yoking procedure) or alternative traits.

Participants were more likely to construe an ambiguous behavior as consistent with a chronic trait only when their active self-aspect was relevant to the trait. When the active self-aspect was irrelevant, those traits were no longer privileged over other traits (e.g., the yoked participant’s chronic traits). Collectively, these two studies show that the accessibility of a construct is intimately tied to an individual’s self-concept. That is, constructs that appear to be chronically accessible are actually only chronic when a relevant self-aspect is activated.

Because self-aspects organize self-knowledge, it is sensible that their activation and inhibition influences the accessibility of information connected to that specific self-aspect. However, self-knowledge that is associated with more than one self-aspect creates the opportunity for spreading activation in memory. When an active self-aspect is connected to another self-aspect via a shared trait, spreading activation will boost the accessibility of the second self-aspect. For example, in another set of reaction time studies, we found that two self-aspects can prime each other when they share some of the same self-descriptive traits (McConnell, Rydell, & Brown, 2009).

Do self-aspects only influence the accessibility of self-knowledge, or could their reach extend further? Perhaps self-aspects function as internal contexts, producing encoding specificity effects observed with physical contexts and internal states (e.g., context-dependent and state-dependent memory). To test this, we (Garczynski & Brown, 2013) first activated a specific self-aspect by having participants write about it for five minutes. This became the “encoding self-aspect.” Next, participants viewed 40 words sequentially and made a Yes/No judgment for each. Half of the judgments were self-descriptive (“Does this word describe me?”) and the other half were semantic (“Is this word a synonym for ____?”). After a delay, allowing memory of the words to fade, participants wrote another five-minute essay about either the same self-aspect or a different one. This became the “retrieval self-aspect,” because the next task was a surprise memory test of the previous 40 words.

If participants exhibit superior recall when encoding and retrieval self-aspects match relative to when they differ, this would indicate self-aspect dependent memory. Critically, we found that participants recalled all words better – regardless of whether they were previously encoded via a self-descriptive or semantic judgment – when encoding and retrieval self-aspects matched. Thus, self-aspects not only organize self-knowledge, they also serve as internal contexts capable of producing context-dependent memory more broadly.

The description of self-aspects as internal contexts is key. Although self-aspects will often covary with physical environments, such as student self at school and spouse self at home, the physical environment isn’t necessary to activate a self-aspect. As our essay primes reveal, simply thinking about an identity or experiences associated with it is sufficient. A momentary experience can activate a self-aspect passively, such as when a student reads a text message from her boyfriend during class and experiences activation of her girlfriend self, despite her current physical setting. Current goals can also consciously activate self-aspects, such as when a professor must activate her work self to write a manuscript while at home with her family on a weekend.

Switching between self-aspects may be akin to switching tasks or mindsets more generally, which cognitive psychologists find requires executive function and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The self as a central tenet of our psychology: New perspectives on the self
• 1 A review of the experience and consequences of self-aspect activation, number, and distinctiveness
• 2 On using what we know about ourselves in thinking about others: Not so fast
• 3 Investigating how ostracizing others affects one’s self-concept
• 4 Show me what threatens you, and I can tell who you are: Perception of threat and the self
• 5 Universal stories: How narratives satisfy core motives
• 6 Why are they being so nice to us? Social identity threat and the suspicion of Whites’ motives
• 7 The multiplicity of belonging: Pushing identity research beyond binary thinking
• 8 Gender is what you look like: Emerging gender identities in young children and preoccupation with appearance
• 9 Aspects of identity: From the inner-outer metaphor to a tetrapartite model of the self
• Index