The Social Self

Cognitive, Interpersonal and Intergroup Perspectives

Joseph P. Forgas, Kipling D. Williams

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317762768
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

What is the nature of the 'self', how do everyday experiences shape it, and how does it influence our thinking, judgements and behaviors? Such questions constitute enduring puzzles in psychology, and are also of critical practical importance for applied domains such as clinical, counseling, educational and organizational psychology. In this book a select group of eminent international researchers survey the most recent advances in research of the self. In particular, they discuss the influence of cognitive and intra-psychic processes (Part 1), interpersonal and relational variables (Part 2), and inter-group phenomena on the self (Part 3).

1

The Social Self

Introduction and Overview

JOSEPH P. FORGAS

KIPLING D. WILLIAMS

This work was supported by a Special Investigator award from the Australian Research Council, the Research Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to Joseph P. Forgas, and an Australian Research Council grant to Kipling D. Williams. The contribution of Stephanie Moylan, Lisa Zadro, Cassie Govan, Simon Laham, and Norman Chan to this project is gratefully acknowledged.

Address for correspondence: Joseph P. Forgas, at the School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney 2052, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Introduction

The Evolutionary Origins of the Self

The Self as a Symbolic Social Construction: The Symbolic Interactionist Tradition

Integrative Themes: Linking the Individual, Relational, and Collective Aspects of the Self

Overview of the Volume

Part I: Individual and Intrapsychic Aspects of the Self

Part II: Inerpersonal and Relational Aspects of the Self

Part III: Intergroup, Cultural, and Collective Aspects of the Self

Summary

INTRODUCTION

What is this mysterious entity we call “the self”? How does it arise, how do everyday experiences shape it, and how do people go about maintaining and enhancing a positive sense of selfhood? And how in turn does a sense of self shape our thinking, judgments and behaviors? Questions such as these constitute some of the most enduring puzzles in all of psychology. Despite the massive advances in experimental psychology in recent years, the self remains one of those imponderables that we still cannot fully understand. As Pinker (1997) wrote recently, “What or where is the unified centre of sentience that comes into and goes out of existence, that changes over time but remains the same entity, and that has a supreme moral worth?” (p. 558). Psychological theorizing about the self often emphasizes distinctions between various self-components, such as the material, social, and spiritual aspects of the self (James, 1890/1950); the conflict between id, ego, and superego as in Freud’s theorizing; and the links between actual and various ideal selves (Higgins, 1987). In contrast, much contemporary research, including many of the papers presented here, focuses on more specific objectives, such as the understanding of particular self-processes that link the psychological, interpersonal, and collective aspects of the self-system (Sedikides & Brewer, 2001).

A better understanding of the notion of selfhood is not merely of passing theoretical interest. Ever since the first emergence of the philosophy of the enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the rapid adoption of the values and ideology of individualism in most developed industrialized countries since then, a better understanding of the way people think about themselves has also become an important practical problem. Cultivating and regulating the self-concept and developing appropriate levels of self-esteem are now also seen as critical issues for public policy, educational planning, and social engineering. Policy analysts, social workers, and psychologists now share an abiding interest in understanding how selfhood is created and maintained in our daily interactions. There is much evidence that in modern individualist societies many symptoms of social maladjustment, mental illness, violence, and criminality may be linked to inadequately developed or threatened selfhood (Baumeister, 1999; Williams, 2001).

The aim of this book is to survey some of the most recent advances in research on the self and to identify emerging, integrative principles that can help us develop a more comprehensive understanding of this elusive concept. Consistent with most contemporary theorizing (Sedikides & Brewer, 2001), the contributions to this book will also address three complementary aspects of the self: the self as an intrapsychic phenomenon (Part I), the influence of interpersonal and relational variables on the self (Part II), and the links between collective, intergroup phenomena on the self (Part III). Within each of these sections, leading international researchers present their most recent integrative theories and empirical research on the self. However excellent each of the individual chapters are, as editors, our hope is that the total contribution of this book will indeed amount to more than the sum of its parts. We believe that a proper understanding of the self can only be achieved by considering the interaction of the individual, relational, and collective aspects of the self as a dynamic self-system. This theme was also represented in an earlier volume of the Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology series, The Social Mind (Forgas, Williams, & Wheeler, 2001). In this introductory chapter, we want to offer some general theoretical and historical comments about the psychology of the self before outlining the structure and introducing the content of the book.

THE EVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF THE SELF

One view that is gaining popularity in recent psychological theorizing emphasizes the evolutionary origins of psychological phenomena (Buss, 1999). In evolutionary terms, we may think about the human mind as a complex, modular information processing device that was shaped by evolution to facilitate the solution of specific problems (Pinker, 1997). Accordingly, we may consider the emergence of a distinct sense of selfhood as either one of the many “mind modules” that developed because they confer distinct survival advantages over evolutionary time, or possibly, a mere by-product of such evolutionary pressures (Buss, 1999). What were the evolutionary pressures most likely to have produced the universal human capacity to conceive of and maintain a distinct sense of self?

One plausible suggestion is that having a clear and stable representational and motivational system focused on the self confers distinct evolutionary advantages because it makes sophisticated interaction with other members of our species more predictable and manageable. Humans are an intrinsically social and gregarious species, and there can be little doubt that much of our evolutionary success is due to our highly sophisticated ability to interact with each other. The human capacity for cooperation and complex, coordinated interaction largely depends on our cognitive, computational ability to represent, plan, and predict the behaviors of others and ourselves and to internalize the norms of the groups to which we belong (see also Crandall, O’Brien, & Eshleman; Malle; this volume). Indeed, there are some suggestions that the evolution of an immensely powerful computational device, the human brain, was itself a consequence of the need to manage ever-more complex interaction processes within successful emerging human groups (Pinker, 1997).

As phenomenological social psychologists such as Heider (1958) also observed, perhaps the most fundamental problem faced by human beings is to understand and predict the behaviors of others (see also Malle, this volume). This is largely accomplished by moving from observations of external behaviors to inferences about the internal causes of those behaviors, a task that is made possible by assuming that the subjective world of other people is similar to our own. A well-defined sense of self may thus be a powerful aid in solving the problem of inter-subjectivity: what are other people like? What do they think? Why do they act as they do? In other words, it is through having a clear concept of ourselves as agents and social actors that we are able to mentally model and represent the subjective worlds of others. The phenomenological sense of agency and selfhood thus appears to provide a powerful and universal model for understanding others (Heider, 1958). Convergent evidence from developmental psychology also suggests that children tend to develop a distinct “theory of mind” as well as a distinct sense of selfhood by about age three (Wellman, 1990). It is these developments that make it possible for people to rely on their subjective experiences to draw inferences about the internal states, desires, and intentions of others (Bless & Forgas, 2000).

Having a sense of self may also be adaptive for another reason. As a “mind module” and a distinct computational and representational device, the self allows us to systematize and accumulate the various kinds of social information and feedback we receive from others, and thus helps to modify our behaviors so as to optimize the way people respond to us. Leary (this volume) suggested that in a profoundly social species such as humans the need to constantly monitor signs of acceptance and rejection from others—what he called the operation of a “sociometer”—is indeed one of the most fundamental functions of the self. Others, such as Baumeister, Twenge, and Ciarocco, and Tice, Twenge, and Schmeichel (this volume) have shown how rejection and exclusion often produce maladaptive and self-defeating behavior patterns, attesting to the critical importance of interpersonal feedback to selfhood (see also Williams, 2001).

Thus, it appears that having a clear sense of self may have evolved to solve at least two kinds of adaptational problems. The self is the repository of the social feedback we receive from others, and is thus a major influence guiding successful and adaptive interpersonal strategies. The notion of self is also useful because it allows us to model and understand the internal, subjective worlds of others, making it easier to infer intentions and causes that lay behind observed behaviors, thus improving our interaction efficacy (Heider, 1958). There are plausible arguments, then, why the human self may be considered as an evolved psychological mechanism that gave humans improved behavioral flexibility and a superior ability to engage in complex, coordinated interactions with others (Buss, 1999; Pinker, 1997). Of course, the processes whereby integrated selves are constructed and the way symbolic processes enable human beings to create enduring representations of themselves can be inordinately complex. Symbolic interactionist theorists, such as George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley and psychologists such as William James have done much of the early work to elucidate these mechanisms.

THE SELF AS A SYMBOLIC SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION:
THE SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST TRADITION

Our sense of selfhood is one of the most private, unique, and special characteristics we all possess; yet at the same time, the self is also a fundamentally social creation, a product of our interactions with others (see also Ickes; Kashima, Kashima, & Clark; LaFrance; this volume). Symbolic interactionist theorists such as George Herbert Mead provided a unique insight into this paradox. According to Mead, the self is a product of the symbolic representations about ourselves that we construct on the basis of interactions with others. One of the paradoxical characteristics of the self is that it is an object to itself; it is both the observer and the observed (Mead, 1934/1970). William James (1890/1950) proposed a somewhat similar idea by distinguishing between the “I” self as the active agent of experience, the “thinker,” and the “me” self as the object of experience, the target of observation and thought. But how can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself?

It is the uniquely human ability to construct enduring symbolic representations of ourselves and others based on direct interpersonal experiences that is the essential prerequisite for a distinct sense of selfhood to develop, according to Mead. Thus, “the individual experiences himself … not directly, but only indirectly from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoints of the social group as whole to which he belongs” (1934/1970, p. 138). Along the same lines, James (1890/1950) also believed that the “social me” is in essence the repository of others’ reactions to us; people may thus process a multiplicity of selves incorporating the reactions they receive from a multiplicity of interaction partners. Remarkably, these insights about the social construction of the self have received strong confirmation in contemporary self research, as the chapters here by Biernat and Eidelman; Brewer and Pickett; Cooper and Hogg; Otten; and Wright, Aron, and Tropp illustrate.

For Mead, a person

enters his own experience as a self … not by becoming a subject to himself, but only insofar as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him … and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment … the importance of what we term “communication” lies in the fact that it provides a form of behavior in which the organism or the indvidual may become an object to himself. (1934/1970, p. 138)

In other words, the genesis of the self can be found in social interaction and communication, and it arises as a function of the accumulated reactions we receive from others (see also chapter by LaFrance, this volume). Thus, it is impossible to conceive of a self arising outside of social experience (Mead, 1934/1970). At the same time, the self is also an intrapsychic individual construct, the sum total of our accumulated symbolic representations and memories about ourselves. This symbolic interactionist analysis of the self as a symbolic social construction has received strong support from experimental social psychology. Seminal experiments by Jones and his colleagues (e.g., Jones, Davis & Gergen, 1961) have shown that self-presentations that are successful and validated by the responses of others are incorporated into the self, but unsuccessful self-presentations are excluded.

However, as does James’ (1890/1950), Mead’s conception of the self recognizes that the self incorporates both a socially determined component, the “me,” and a uniquely individual, subjective component, the “I.” “The “I” is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes” (p. 175). “Me” is the sum total of a person’s perception and knowledge of how others see and respond to him/her. However, the “I” remains a fundamentally subjective and indeterminate entity, one that infuses a sense of freedom, flexibility, and uniqueness into how the self is conceived. It is the “I’s” sometimes unexpected responses to social situations that provide a source of creativity, change and innovation to social life. The dynamic relationship between the “I” and the socialized “me” continues to be the focus of recent influential self-regulatory theories, such as Higgins’ (1987) self-discepancy model.

In other words, although the self is to some extent a social construction, in turn, the social world is also an individual’s construction. Within Mead’s system, neither the social nor the individual realms have primacy. Rather, both social worlds and individual selves emerge in the course of symbolic interaction between individuals. Every encounter we have with others is the crucible within which individual selves and social systems are created, maintained, or changed.

As a number of contributors to this volume will show, the exploration of the precise nature of the interaction between the individual and the interpersonal, social aspects of the self has remained one of the key research questions to this day (see also Forgas et al., 2001; Sedikides & Brewer, 2001). How do social and cultural experiences actually produce the cognitive representational patterns of the self (Kashima et al.; Smith; this volume)? How do people shift the social standards they judge themselves by as a function of subtle contextual changes (Biernat & Eidelman, this volume)? How does the self respond to rejection and exclusion by others (Baumeister et al.; Leary; Tice et al.; this volume)? What are the processes people use to make judgments (and misjudgments) about the way they appear to others (Forgas; Gilovich; this volume)? How do we use our membership in important groups to construct a stable and positive sense of self (Brewer & Pickett; Cooper & Hogg; Otten; Wright et al.; this volume)?

Clearly, the subjective, phenomenological experience of the individual, and the external, interpersonal, social, and cultural information we continuously receive relevant to the self are in an organic, interactive relationship. Sometimes, the collective self is a source of individual self-definitions, and sometimes, it is the individual self that serves as a source of definining the collective self. This can occur, for example, when ingroups are novel, ambiguous, or loosely defined and we use self-knowledge to assign meaning to the group (Otten, this volume). As Mead (1934/1970), and more recently Sedikides and Brewer (2001), argued, emphasizing the social to the exclusion of the individual would be just as misleading as focusing on the subjective self to the exclusion of the social self. People’s subjective representations about how others see them may be wildly inaccurate, as Gilovich’s work on the spotlight effect (this volume) shows, yet concern with feedback from others remains a crucial determinant of self-conceptions (Crandall et al.; Leary; Tice et al.; Baumeister et al.; Rhodewalt & Tragakis; Hirt & McCrea; this volume).

INTEGRATIVE THEMES: LINKING THE INDIVIDUAL, RELATIONAL, AND COLLECTIVE ASPECTS OF THE SELF

Although it has been clearly recognized at least since Mead’s (1934/1970) work that the self is a product of the interaction of individual cognitive and symbolic mechanisms with interpersonal and group influences, empirical research on this interaction is a much more recent phenomenon (Bless & Forgas, 2000; Forgas et al., 2001). Several chapters here focus on the precise mechanisms that are responsible for the way individual and collective aspects of the self interact. For example, Smith (this volume) outlines a connectionist distributed parallel processing theory that can account for the emergent quality of subjective self-representations produced by the ever-changing social inputs we receive from others. Kashima et al. cover somewhat similar ground by analyzing the interface between sociocultural variables and self-construction. Although social inputs about the self may change quite rapidly, the cumulatively established connection weights that ultimately determine subjective self-perceptions are more stable and change only gradually. This may account for the fact that individual and social self-conceptions (the way we see ourselves, and the way others see us) may sometimes be temporarily disjointed (see also Gilovich, this volume). Different contextual inputs should activate different patterns of weighting individual and social self-attributes, producing different self-responses.

The processes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 The Social Self Introduction and Overview
• I Individual and Intrapsychic Aspects of the Self
• II Interpersonal and Relational Aspects of the Self
• III Intergroup, Collective, and Cultural Aspects of the Self
• Author Index
• Subject Index