Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 4 The Self Answering the Question
“Who Am I?”
103
O U T L I N E
Self-Presentation: Managing the Self in Different Social Contexts
Self–Other Accuracy in Predicting Our Behavior
SOCIAL LIFE IN A CONNECTED WORLD Does Facebook Use Change Our Offline Behavior?
Self-Presentation Tactics
Self-Knowledge: Determining Who We Are
Introspection: Looking Inward to Discover the Causes of Our Own Behavior The Self from the Other’s Standpoint Who Am I?: Personal versus Social Identity
Who I Think I Am Depends on the Social Context
Who I Am Depends on Others’ Treatment The Self Across Time: Past and Future Selves
Self-Control: Why It Can Be Difficult to Do Self-Esteem: Attitudes Toward Ourselves
The Measurement of Self-Esteem EMOTIONS AND THE SELF
Does Talking Positively to Ourselves Really Work?
Is High Self-Esteem Always Beneficial?
Do Women and Men Differ in Their Levels of Self-Esteem?
Social Comparison: How We Evaluate Ourselves
Self-Serving Biases and Unrealistic Optimism
The Self as Target of Prejudice Emotional Consequences: How Well- Being Can Suffer
Behavioral Consequences: Stereotype Threat Effects on Performance
I
n the movie To Die For, Nicole Kidman, who plays the generally clueless main character, comments somewhat insightfully about the impact of television on the perception of ourselves: “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV. On TV is where we learn about who we really are.” Being on the Internet today, like being on TV then, may be thought of, in a philosophical sense, as providing a similar public forum for validating the personal self. So, in a sense, a person might “come alive”because they exist in a profile on Facebook; indeed, for some, not being on Facebook could be like being excluded from an important social group—and represent a kind of social death.
Is the converse also true? Does being on Facebook provide a way for people to extend their personal existence and that of their loved ones? Perhaps it is worth considering whether, when a person dies, if their self continues to be represented on Facebook—if you can still find their profile there—is something crucial about that person still here with us? Jack Brehm, a great social psychologist who spent most of his career at the University of Kansas, died in 2009 at the age of 81. After his death, a memorial page was set up for him on Facebook. Since then, it has been rather amazing to see over 150 people become “friends” of his online, and several hundred people visit Jack’s Facebook page every month. Perhaps people “check in” at his Facebook page to enhance their memories of him by seeing photos from his life; it is possible too that writing comments about their experiences with him is a means of “keeping him alive.” Do you think it is possible to claim that Jack and others live on in any real sense by their continued existence on Facebook? According to Newsweek’s (Miller, 2010) coverage of this growing trend of people creating tributes for friends using Facebook, and the high number of requests to maintain the Facebook pages of people who are deceased (“R.I.P. on Facebook”), this year Facebook changed its policy to allow people’s pages to remain active in perpetuity.
By providing this sort of cradle-to-grave social existence of the self, Facebook may be regarded as a new and important social environment. Although Facebook is a constructed environment, we argue that it is one in which many interesting aspects of self and identity can be readily observed. Like the social environment of your family, your school, work, or ‘other’ social life, the Facebook environment is one where you can expect to have friends, carry on conversations with others, and express yourself and your preferences (e.g., indicate your favorite books and movies). You may even use Facebook as a place where you document your personal growth—many people post photos of themselves at different stages throughout their lifespan.
As the largest social networking site, Facebook meets the criteria for a genuine social environment. It is a social network in that it makes your friends available to connect with—
regardless of whether they are actu- ally online at the time you post or not.
As suggested in Figure 4.1, Facebook allows people to become friends with others they may otherwise have never met in real life. So the question is, Is a “friend” on Facebook, whom you’ve never met in real life, an actual friend?
To answer that, let’s take a quick look backward. Once upon a time, many people had “pen pals.” A pen pal was a friend with whom one commu- nicated by letter, without ever having met that person. In some ways, you may think of the pen-pal idea as being ahead of its time, a precursor to the Internet. No one thought they had an obligation to meet a pen pal, but they were nevertheless a real social connection.
On the other hand, no one would have thought that their privacy could be massively com- promised with a pen-pal letter. Sharing of information is a significant way in which Facebook (and other social networking sites) has created a different kind of social environment. On Face- book, unlike in real life, your privacy may be compromised in ways that allow marketers to target you. Whether you see this as a big problem or a minor inconvenience is determined by how much you value your privacy. Older people seem to want to guard their privacy more than younger ones, who don’t seem to care as much. But, when you put yourself out there in today’s online world, you can expect to be directly marketed to, often with the ads being based on the information you provided online about yourself!
FIGURE 4.1 Online Interaction or Live Interaction: The Same or Different?
Perhaps the self-presentational aspects of Facebook differs in a number of respcets from self-presentation IRL (in real life)? IRL, friends for this fellow might be considerable harder to come by than they are on Facebook.
The nature of the self and how we think and feel about ourselves have been central topics of research in social psychology. While examining a number of important issues that have been investigated concerning the nature of self, we’ll also consider the impact of Inter- net technology on how we experience and present ourselves to others. As the cartoon in Figure 4.2 suggests, we can choose to withhold some crucial information about ourselves
when communicating over the Internet. So, how does our ability to control what others learn about us via social networking sites and other Internet venues affect how we see ourselves and, impor- tantly, how others see us? Who is more accurate in predicting our behavior—ourselves or others who know us well? In this chapter we examine research that has examined these questions.
After we consider the issue of whether people present them- selves online differently from how they present themselves to others offline, and whether we ourselves change as a result of Internet use, we turn to the larger question of the methods that people use to gain self-knowledge. We also consider whether people have just one self or many selves and, if each of us has many selves, then a critical issue is whether one aspect of the self is more true or predictive of behavior than another. Do people experience themselves the same way all the time, or does their experience of themselves depend on the context and the nature of the social comparison it evokes? What role does social comparison play in how we evaluate ourselves?
After considering these questions, we turn to several important issues related to self-esteem: What is it, how do we get it, and how do we lose it? Is there a downside to having high self-esteem? Are there group differences in average level of self-esteem? Specifically, do men and women differ in their levels of self-esteem? Finally, we look in depth at how people manage when their self is a tar- get of prejudice. What are the consequences of feeling excluded or devalued based on group membership for a number of self-related processes, including the emotional and performance consequences of such potential rejection of the self by others.
Self-Presentation: Managing the Self in Different Social Contexts
William Shakespeare said long ago in his play As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” In social psychological terms, this means that all of us are faced with the task of presenting ourselves to a variety of audiences, and we may play different roles (be different selves) in different contexts (act in different plays). Nowhere is the choice of how to present ourselves more obvious than on social networking sites such as Facebook. We can choose to reveal a lot about who we think we are—including photographic evidence of our behavior on Facebook—or we can, to some extent, limit who can have access to such information (e.g., by setting the privacy controls so that only official “friends” can access our wall postings and photo albums).
But, how much can we really control what others learn about us and the inferences they draw based on that information? In fact, is it possible that others might know more about us—and be better at predicting our behavior—than we are ourselves?
Self–Other Accuracy in Predicting Our Behavior
There are many reasons to think people really do know themselves better than anyone else does. After all, each of us has access to our internal mental states (e.g., feelings, thoughts, aspirations, and intentions), which others do not (Pronin & Kruger, 2007;
Wilson & Dunn, 2004). For this reason alone, it seems intuitively obvious that it must be the case that we must know ourselves best—but is it true? Indeed, research evidence
FIGURE 4.2 Not All Aspects of Ourselves Are Equally Available When We Communicate Over the Internet
As shown in this cartoon, it may be easier to conceal important information about ourselves on the internet than in face-to-face encounters. (Source: Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, page 61 of July 5, 1993).
suggests that having access to our intentions, which observers do not have, is one rea- son why we are sometimes inaccurate about ourselves (Chambers, Epley, Savitsky, &
Windschitl, 2008). Consider the following example. My friend Shirley is chronically late for everything. Frequently, she’s more than a half hour late; I simply cannot count on her to be ready when I arrive to pick her up or for her to arrive on time if we are meeting somewhere. You probably know someone like this too. But, would she charac- terize herself that way? Probably not. But, you might ask, how could she not know this about herself? Well, it could be that precisely because she knows her intentions—that she means to be on time and has access to how much effort she puts into trying to achieve that goal—that this information could lead her to believe she actually is mostly on time! So, at least in this regard, might I fairly claim that I know her better than she knows herself—because I certainly can more accurately predict her behavior, at least in this domain?
Despite such examples, many people strongly believe that they know them- selves better than others know them, although, ironically enough, those same people claim that they know some others better than those others know themselves (Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky, & Ross, 2001). In deciding who is most accurate—ourselves or close others—part of the problem for research on this question has been that people provide both their own self ratings and they also report on their behavior. As I’m sure you can see, such behavioral self-reports are hardly an objective criterion for determining accuracy! Continuing with our example of Shirley, she’d be likely to say she might be occa- sionally late, but that she tries hard to always be on time—and she might even recall a few instances where that was true. But, still, might we have some basis for being suspicious of those behavioral self-reports?
So is the self–other accuracy prob- lem simply impossible to address?
New research has found a clever way to at least deal with the problem of collecting both self perceptions and behavior frequencies from the same source. To develop a more objective index of how a person actually behaves on a daily basis, Vazire and Mehl (2008) had participants wear a digi- tal audio recorder with a microphone that recorded the ambient sounds of people’s lives during waking hours, coming on approximately every 12.5 minutes for 4 days. Research assis- tants later coded the sounds recorded according to the categories shown in Table 4.1. Before the participants’
actual behaviors were assessed in this way, they provided self-ratings con- cerning the extent to which they per- form each behavior (more or less than TABLE 4.1 Who Is More Accurate About Our Behavior: Self or Others?
Relationships between the frequency of behaviors and the participant’s self-ratings was sometimes higher (e.g., talking to same sex) than any one close others’ ratings of the participant or the aggregated ratings of the three close others. But, often, a close other’s ratings of the participants’ behavioral frequencies (e.g., attending class) was more strongly related to actual behavioral frequencies. So, sometimes we can predict ourselves better than others can, but not always!
BEHAVIOR SELF
AGGREGATED INFORMANTS
SINGLE INFORMANT
With other people .14 .36** .30**
On the phone .37** .40** .32**
Talking one-on-one -.06 .25* .22*
Talking in a group .25* .20* .25*
Talking to same sex .34** .25* .13
Talking to opposite sex .31** .32** .18
Laughing .23* .25* .13
Singing .34** .29** .34**
Crying .18 .16 .19
Arguing .28** -.05 .09
Listening to music .40** .34** .26*
Watching TV .55** .39** .36**
On the computer .29** .31** .20
At work .25* .35** .22*
Attending class .07 .33** .26*
Socializing .18 .30** .27*
Indoors .16 .16 .20
Outdoors .11 .05 .10
Commuting .27** .16 .14
At a coffee shop/bar/
restaurant
.27** .15 .24*
Source: Based on research by Vazire & Mehl, 2008.
the average person) on a daily basis. These researchers also recruited three informants who knew each participant well (e.g., friends, parents, romantic partners) to provide the same ratings concerning the frequency that the participant engages in each behavior, using the same average person as a comparison. As you can see in Table 4.1, sometimes the participant’s own rating was more strongly related to the frequency of their actual behavior, but sometimes others’ ratings of the participant was more strongly related to actual behavior. So, at times, other people do seem to “know” us better (can predict our behavior) better than we ourselves can.
Some people may put information about themselves on the Web (e.g., myspace.
com) because they believe such information better reflects who they are than does the “live” impression they leave in the “real world.” Marcus, Machilek, and Schütz (2006) confirmed that the “self and other” agreement about what a person is like was higher for Web-based social interactions than for real-world interactions. That is, when interacting with another person via their self-constructed Web page, view- ers infer attributes that agree with the self-image of the person who constructed the page. Of course, this might just mean that people who present themselves on the Web can more easily manage others’ impressions of them than they can when the interaction is face to face because they have total control over what information is being conveyed on the Internet. (To learn more about how our behavior can change by interacting with other people over the Internet, please see our special section
“SOCIAL LIFE IN A CONNECTED WORLD: Does Facebook Use Change Our Offline Behavior?”.)
(continued)
Does Facebook Use Change Our Offline Behavior?
C
yber-optimists and cyber-pessimists are locked in an ongoing intellectual skirmish about the effects of Facebook, the most popular social networking site.Some argue that such Internet communication is ruining the brains of young people, whereas others claim that it repre- sents an entirely new and creative way of interacting. One way to assess the validity of these positions is to examine people’s motivations for joining a social networking site. If some people actually seek to interact on the Internet for dif- ferent reasons than other people, then it might well be that some could be negatively affected whereas others might be positively affected.
So why do people join Facebook? Zywicka and Dan- owski (2008) conducted a study to examine this question and test two competing hypotheses. The first, “The Social Compensation” hypothesis, argues that introverts and socially anxious adolescents who have difficulty develop- ing friendships are likely to use Facebook because they seek to substitute online contacts for an undesirable offline social life. An investigation into Internet use by Caplan (2005) had previously suggested that individu- als who lack self-presentational skills are more likely to be attracted to online social interaction relative to
face-to-face communication, a view that is amusingly illustrated in Figure 4.3. The second, “The Social Enhance- ment” hypothesis, in contrast, suggests that extroverted and outgoing adolescents are motivated to add online contacts to their already large network of offline friends to create an image of themselves that reflects their exist- ing positive self-view (Valkenburg, Schouten, & Peter,
FIGURE 4.3 Is Online Living Equivalent to Having a Satisfying “Real-Life”?
To what extent are our “virtual selves” different or the same as our “real-life” selves?
2005). Some evidence emerged to support both of these hypotheses. That is, less socially skilled people find that online interaction welcomes them more than their “real life.” On the other hand, socially skilled individuals are motivated to add friends to enhance their already posi- tive self-view.
In studying the social capital—the number of social ties each person has among other Facebook users—Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) found stronger evidence in support of the Social Compensation hypothesis than the Social Enhancement hypothesis. Those who were lower in life satisfaction and lower in self-esteem developed more social capital by using Facebook—they related to more diverse others and developed a variety of useful relation- ships on Facebook. In addition, Joinson (2003) points out that anxious teens may ask for a date using Facebook, instant messaging, or e-mail because it disguises their ner- vousness! So, this research revealed that socially skilled users maintain their high self-esteem by high use of Facebook, while users with initially poor skills increased their self- esteem as their Facebook usage increased. These results may explain why users with both high and low self-esteem find the Facebook culture desirable.
Based on research conducted by Bargh, McKenna, and Fitzsimons (2002), it appears that people who are shy and less socially skilled are able to express what they perceive to be their “true selves” more accurately over the Internet than in face-to-face interaction. So,
perhaps some Facebook users may not be trying to manage their image so much as they are attempting to express their true selves, which they find difficult to do in other formats.
Consistent with this idea, after involvement in a chat session, introverted individuals reported finding their “true self” online, while extroverts typically find it in face-to-face interactions (Amichai-Hamburger, Wainapel,
& Fox, 2002). This suggests that introverts may have a sig- nificant motivation for joining Facebook.
Is there any possibility that people may capitalize on their Facebook experi- ence subsequently in the offline world? Joinson (2003)
suggests that as users are accepted on Facebook and they make some friends, they may activate a hoped-for,
“possible self” as a popular, socially skilled person. In turn, this may cause them to interpret their offline experi- ences differently. Thus, those who receive validation for their hoped-for or possible self may want to experience that same self in real life as well, fostering higher offline self-esteem and, possibly, increased offline social success (Bargh et al., 2002).
Sheeks and Birchmeier (2007) tested this idea and concluded that shy, socially anxious people were able to gain some social skills and social success by going online.
As can be seen in Figure 4.4, some social skills gained by online interaction were transferred to “real life,” and this was primarily among those who were initially shy, non- skilled people.
So, who’s right—cyber-optimists or cyber-pessimists?
Cyber-optimists predict increased social success following online activities, compared with their offline interactions before the online experience. That is, in the offline environ- ment, there may be a wider disparity between people lack- ing social skills on the one hand, and the socially skilled on the other, but that this is less true following Internet experi- ence. It would seem, then, based on this research, that cyber- optimists are right.
SOCIAL LIFE
in a
CONNECTED WORLD (continued)FIGURE 4.4 Less Socially Skilled People Do Benefit from Facebook Social Interactions
In a longitudinal study of teens who initially differed in their levels of social skills, during the Facebook phase of the study the shy and socially anxious individuals gained confidence and online friends. Importantly, these teens were able to transfer their new skills to their “real life” in the post-Facebook phase, although they still remained somewhat less socially skilled than the socially skilled group. (Source: Based on research by Sheeks & Birchmeier, 2007).
Pre-Facebook phase Facebook
phase
Post-Facebook Offline phase
Initial Differences
in Persons Level of
Social Success
Socially Skilled Persons
Shy, less socially skilled persons
Social Skills Slightly Improved
Remain Skilled
Social Skills Substantially
Improved
Skills Improvement
Retained