Me, Myself & I - Concepts of the Self

Self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-interest, self-deception, self-esteem, self-concept… So many terms are out there that are about… well, the self. But what is the self?

It is rather difficult to find one core definition of what the self actually is. One important aspect of the self is that it, for the most part, exists inside your own mind. It consists of information. It exists as soon as you pay attention to yourself. It grows when you develop concepts and ideas about yourself. Baumeister (2010), after trying to unite all the research that has already been conducted on the self into one single framework, arrived at the conclusion that not one single, but at least three important types of phenomena were providing the basic roots of selfhood.

The first basis for selfhood is the consciousness about yourself, so inwards focused.

As humans, we are the only living creatures that have a consciousness - animals for example are not aware to think about their actions, become aware of their thoughts or strategically alter and shape their cognitive and behavioural actions.

This “reflexive consciousness” includes everything from thinking about a mistake you’ve made, to reading your horoscope in the newspaper, taking a personality test online, seeing if last year’s Jeans still fit or if you’ve gained weight, touching your elbow after an accident to see how badly its injured, counting the times you’re able to score a basket in a row, reading about the latest tech start-up and wondering if your own job is still right for you, imagining yourself winning the Nobel Prize and pretty much any other thing that has to do with thinking and learning stuff about yourself.

All these processes vary depending on how aware of yourself you are, how much data you have already collected about yourself and how much biases cloud your judgments about yourself.

The second basis of selfhood evolves around interpersonal relationships. In this category, the self does not develop from within yourself, but from interactions and bonds with other people.

One function of your self in this realm is to create and keep up (hopefully positive) relationships, to deliver on certain roles of yourself or expected by others, and to make you attain a favourable position in the social system(s) you’re a part of. This includes actions and thinking such as putting on a fancy shirt for a first date, deciding to study medicine because both of your doctor parents expect you to do so, shaking your hips just a tat more when you’re walking by your crush, admitting to a mistake made with your partner, weighing the consequences of giving your child one more cookie or rather make them eat the apple you brought, or cheering for your teammates when its their turn to compete. In all of these situations the self is defined by how it is connected and perceived by others, and it puts its efforts into making these relationships strong and lasting.

The third basis of selfhood is about making actual choices, and exerting control of your own life. You choose certain goals and then try to achieve them by exerting effort or making choices to get there. You thus follow through on previous commitments, you face decisions and you take them, and by doing so you exert control over your self and don’t just let it do the “thinking”.

Aspects of self-regulation and the self as decision maker include shutting down the TV after vowing to do some more work after one episode of Breaking Bad.

Resisting that cake your colleague brought to work because you put yourself on a diet until your wedding day in a few weeks.

Deciding not to lie to your partner about where you went last night because you promised to be honest with each other.

You pay back your Dad for the money he lent you to afford the loan for the new car.

You keep practicing that one shot so, despite multiple failures and lots of frustration, you want to make it in the next game.

Thus, you exert control over yourself even though it might not be easy, automatic or encouraging to do so. But you take action to follow up on what you had in mind for your self.

There are so many startling observations about the self out there, and how it influences our daily lives in subtle to major ways. People like things that are associated with their selves. For example, they like the letters in their names better than other letters in the alphabet. People named George were even found more like to move to Georgia (US), and people names Virginia were found more likely to move to Rhode Island.

Hah, got ya! Just kidding, they slightly moved more often to Virginia, obviously.

Larry or Lauras are more likely to become lawyers than Dennis or Denises, who more often become dentists. I would say this is a rather major way of influence - namely on big life decisions! People place higher value on lottery tickets they chose themselves compared to ones given to by strangers, and people like things more when they own them than when not.

I will now quickly give you a quick intro to some of the most important and often named aspects of the first basis of the self, those things related to the consciousness of yourself. Everything starts with yourself. So, this is where we’ll start for now, and in the future we will also explore the other two bases. (If you have read my blog post about irrational behavior and the executive control system, you already got some insights into the third basis of selfhood!)

Self-awareness is awareness that is directed inwards instead of outwards, and it describes the process by which attention turns around towards its source, yourself. Self-knowledge would be impossible without self-awareness.

Self-knowledge is actually influenced by three different types of motives: diagnosticity, which is the motive to learn the truth about the self no matter what, self-enhancement is the preference for favourable information about the self, and consistency motives as self-verification or -confirmation about what they already believe about themselves. Consistency and enhancement motives often clash, in such a way that praise is emotionally favoured but may be cognitively met with skepticism and thus not quite believed. People’s desire to learn the truth about themselves is a genuine and true motive, but as the self-enhancement motive is stronger than the diagnosticity one, it is outshone by both their desire for praise and flattery and their wish to have their preconceptions confirmed.

It incorporates the concept of self-consciousness, which has two dimensions: private self-consciousness means how much people tend to reflect on their inner selves and are aware of thinking and feeling states and processes. Public self-consciousness on the other hand measures how well one is aware of how others regard him or her, and others’ perceptions of the self. Being more self-aware is associated with understanding our emotions better, improving self-regulation, increased performance and better socially desirable behaviors, but it also carries significant costs and drawbacks. Examples are many pathological symptoms, depression, binge-eating or alcohol use as attempts to lose some of the painful self-awareness.

Regarding people’s resistance to downward change, enhancement and verification motives work together and that quite strongly, so people can be very self-defensive in some cases, up to a point of self-deception.

Self-deception is very startling, from a philosophical standpoint at least, because it implies that one person is both the deceiver and the deceived, and thus must both know something and not know it at the same time. Oh, how I love philosophy! (Maybe this is why I’m working on a Doctor in it).

Self-deception pretty much means that self-concepts are more favourable than objective facts could offer grounds for or vallidate. The funny thing (and what I have always assumed) is that distorted self-perceptions are part of a good mental health, and make us less vulnerable to unhappiness and mental illnesses.

Self-deceit can influence your self-esteem, and self-esteem (and its relation to clearer and more consistent self-concepts) has been found to contribute to feeling good and happy, promotion-focused (achievement oriented) behavior, a higher resilience to stress and failures and greater emotional stability. This is why positive thinking, optimisms and a high self-esteem are so important for happiness - they simply make you happier, even if they are not 100% justified or called for.

So make more use of self-serving biases (assign more responsibility to external causes for failure than for your successes), be selectively critical of evidence that depicts you in a more negative light and less critical of beneficial feedback, compare yourself to targets that make you feel good about yourself and keep telling yourself that all your good traits are unique and special and your rather bed traits are widely shared and common, thus negligible.

Self love is the biggest middle finger of all times!

As long as you keep a certain, healthy level of self-deception, no-one can make you feel bad, even if people judge, laugh at or talk about you. When it gets to the point where you get important, well-meant and potentially negative feedback from friends or loved ones, or superiors who will have an impact on your career, maybe its time to become a bit more (honestly) self-aware and self-improving. It is a fact, unfortunately, that the pursuit of self-esteem can be destructive, too, to the self and to others. It can for example reduce learning, empathy and prosocial behavior. You have all heard of narcissism, a relatively obnoxious form of (too) high self-esteem, right?

So, be aware of how much you want to deceit yourself and when it becomes time to actually change some of your habits, behaviors and interactions with those around.

But when it comes to things that don’t harm others, and don’t hurt your own goals achievement, happiness and success, be a bit more biased towards the good parts about yourself. You probably already critique yourself enough in other aspects or parts of your life, so why not ignore some of the evidence brought up against you? I, for myself, will stop believing my family and some friends when they say I can’t sing (shush, I can hear your outcry of despair reading this), and will keep up singing along to my favourite songs as much as I want to (okay, maybe I do have to rethink that one again, because I just said its okay until you hurt someone else, and I might actually hurt someone’s sense of hearing).

Well, I’ll keep singing under the shower. I hope you do, too.

xx

Valli

Sources:

Baumeister (2010) - The self. In: Baumeister & E. J. Finkel (Eds.), Advanced social psychology: The state of the science.