Self in a Social World
Chapter 6

THE SELF
• Self = our impressions + thoughts + feelings
• SCHEMA: A set of beliefs and feelings about
something. Examples include stereotypes,
prejudices and generalizations.
• Parts of the Self: Physical, Social, and Personal.
• Activity: Now take out a piece of paper and
fold it into 4 sections. Write your name in one
section.

PHYSICAL SELF
• Physical Self: Ones’ psychological sense of one’s
physical being (ex. height, weight, hair color, race, and
physical skill).
• How is it linked to self-esteem?
• Our adjustment to traits that are mostly permanent,
such as height, sex & race, is closely linked to self-
acceptance/esteem.
• However, other traits such as weight, fitness and hair
style can be modified.
• What are your “Physical Self” traits?

SOCIAL SELF
• Social Self: The social roles one plays— student,
worker, husband, mother, citizen, leader, and etc.
• Roles and masks are adaptive responses to the
social situation.
• However, when our entire lives are played behind
masks, it may be difficult to discover true inner
selves.
• What are some of the social roles you play?

PERSONAL SELF
• Personal Self: One’s private, continuous sense
of being oneself in the world. Personal Self
includes values, ethics, your name, self-
concept, self-esteem and the ideal-self
• Ethics: Standards for behavior. A system of
beliefs from which one derives standards for
behavior.
• What are some of your values and ethics?
• Now write your name or a name you identify
with in the last section of your paper.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
• Names can influence many things…such as
physical attractiveness and assumptions
people may place on us.
• Nicknames can reflect our attitudes towards
ourselves…(ex. Robert versus Bob versus
Bobby).

SELF-CONCEPT
• Self-Concept: Perception of oneself including one’s
traits and an evaluation of those traits.
• The self-concept includes one’s self-esteem and one’s
ideal self.
• Self-Esteem: Self-approval.
• One’s self-respect or favorable opinion of oneself.
• Self-esteem is neither fixed nor unchangeable.
• Though relatively stable over time, self-esteem can
fluctuate, for better or worse.
• Ideal self: One’s perception of what one “ought” to be
and do. Also called the self-ideal.

IDENTITY STATUSES
• Identity Achievement: individuals who have
resolved an identity crisis and committed to a
relatively stable set of beliefs or a course of
action.
• Identity Foreclosure: individuals who have
adopted a commitment to a set of beliefs or a
course of action without undergoing an identity
crisis.
• Often, they have adopted the views of their
parents without seriously questioning them.

IDENTITY STATUSES
• Identity Moratorium: individuals who are in
the throes of an identity crisis—an intense
examination of alternatives.
• Who feels that they are either in this status or
have been in this status?
• Identity Diffusion: individuals who have
neither arrived at a commitment as to who
they are and what they stand for nor
experienced a crisis.

DIVERSITY AND IDENTITY
• Something to reflect on:
• Researchers have found that identity
formation is often more complicated for
adolescents from ethnic minority groups.
These adolescents may be faced with two sets
of cultural values: those of their ethnic group
and those of the dominant culture.

Perception of Others
• Social Perception: The process by which we form
understandings of others in our social environment,
based on observations of how others act and
information we receive.
• Primacy Effect: The tendency to evaluate others in
terms of first impressions.
• Recency Effect: The tendency to evaluate others in
terms of the most recent impression.

Body Language
• Body language is an important contributor to forming
person schemas and first impressions. Examples: eye
contact patterns, body posture, touching, gazing and
staring.
• Body language does vary by culture. The same gesture
may have a different meaning in one culture than it does
in another. For example, people in Bulgaria shake their
heads up and down to signal “no”.

Using Body Language
• Be aware of what other people are telling you
with their body language.
• Pay attention to your own body language as a
way of helping to make the desired impressions
on other people.
• Pay attention to your own body language as a
way of learning about yourself.

PREJUDICE
• Prejudice: The belief that a person or group,
on the basis of assumed racial ethnic, sexual,
or other features will possess negative
characteristics or perform inadequately.
• Types of prejudice include sexism, racism,
classism and ageism.

Discrimination and Stereotypes
• Discrimination: The denial of privileges to a
person or group on the basis of prejudice
• Stereotypes: Fixed, conventional ideas about a
group that can lead us to process information
about members of the group in a biased
fashion.

Sources of Prejudice and Discrimination
• Dissimilarity: tend to like people who share our attitudes and we
tend to assume that people of different races have different
attitudes.
• Social Conflict: People of different races and religions often
compete for jobs, giving rise to feelings of prejudice.
• Social Learning: Children often acquire some of their attitudes by
observing other people, especially their parents.
• Information Processing: Prejudices serve as cognitive schemes,
filters through which people see the social world. It is easier to
attend to and remember instances of behavior that fit with our
prejudices.
• Social Categorization: People tend to divide their social world into
“us” and “them.” People tend to view others in their group more
favorably than those out of their group.

Attribution Theory
• Attribution Process: The process by which people
draw conclusions about the factors that influence
behavior.
• Dispositional Attribution: Ascribe a person’s
behavior to internal factors, such as personality traits
and free will.
• Situational Attributions: Attribute a person’s
actions to external factors, such as the social pressure
found in a situation.

Attribution Theory
• Fundamental Attribution Error: the tendency to assume
that others act on the basis of choice or will, even when
there is evidence suggestive of the importance of their
situations.
• Actor-Observer Effect: The tendency to attribute our
own behavior to external, situational factors but to
attribute the behavior of others to internal,
dispositional factors such as choice or will.
• Self-Serving Bias: The tendency to view one’s successes
as stemming from internal factors and one’s failures as
stemming from external factors.

Enhancing Self-EsteemEnhancing Self-Esteem

21 day
affirmations
Extra credit!!!