Social: 3. The Social Self

Social comparison theory: (1) When do we turn to others for comparative information? (2) Of all the people who inhabit the earth, with whom do we choose to compare ourselves?

(1) People engage in social comparison in states of uncertainty, when more objective means of self-evaluation are not available. Study: People may judge themselves in relation to others even when more objective standards are available. (2) When we evaluate our own taste in music, value on the job market, or athletic ability, we look to others who are similar to us in relevant ways. Exception: People often cope with personal inadequacies by focusing on others who are less able or less fortunate than themselves.

Strategic self-presentation: Two ways

1. Ingratiation: A term used to describe acts that are motivated by the desire to "get along" with others and be liked When people want to be liked, they put their best foot forward, smile a lot, nod their heads, express agreement, and, if necessary, use favors, compliments, and flattery. 2. Self-promotion: A term used to describe acts that are motivated by a desire to "get ahead" and gain respect for one's competence When people want to be admired for their competence, they try to impress others by talking about themselves and immodestly showing off their status, knowledge, and exploits.

Self-Discrepancy Theory: 3 factors

1. The amount of discrepancy 2. The importance of the discrepancy to the self 3. The degree to which we focus on our self-discrepancies

Impact bias: Why?

1. When it comes to negative life events—such as an injury, illness, or big fi nancial loss—people do not fully appreciate the extent to which our psychological coping mechanisms help us to cushion the blow. 1*. People are even more likely to overlook the coping mechanisms that others use. The result is a self-other diff erence by which we tend to predict that others will suff er even longer than we will 2. When we introspect about the emotional impact on us of a future event—say, the breakup of a close relationship—we become so focused on that single event that we neglect to take into account the effects of other life experiences. This bias disappeared, however, when the students first completed a "prospective diary" in which they estimated the amount of future time they will spend on everyday activities like going to class, talking to friends, studying, and eating meals.

Self-schema

A belief people hold about themselves that guides the processing of selfrelevant information Any specific attribute may have relevance to the self-concept for some people but not for others. The self-schema for body weight is a good example. Men and women who regard themselves as extremely overweight or underweight, or for whom body image is a conspicuous aspect of the self-concept, are considered schematic with respect to weight. For body-weight schematics, a wide range of otherwise mundane events—a trip to the supermarket, new clothing, dinner at a restaurant, a day at the beach, or a friend's eating habits—may trigger thoughts about the self. In contrast, those who do not regard their own weight as extreme or as an important part of their lives are aschematic on that attribute.

ABCs of the self

A for affect, B for behavior, and C for cognition Affect: How do people evaluate themselves, enhance their self-images, and defend against threats to their self-esteem? Behavior: How do people regulate their own actions and present themselves to others according to interpersonal demands? Cognition: How do people come to know themselves, develop a self-concept, and maintain a stable sense of identity?

Implicit egotism

A nonconscious form of self-enhancement

Self-Discrepancy Theory

According to E. Tory Higgins (1989), our self-esteem is defined by the match or mismatch between how we see ourselves and how we want to see ourselves. Study 1: On a blank sheet of paper, write down 10 traits that describe the kind of person you think you "actually are," "ought to be," "would like to be." The first list is your self-concept. The others represent your personal standards, or self-guides. (i) If there's a discrepancy between your actual and ought selves, you will feel guilty, ashamed, and resentful. You might even suffer from excessive fears and anxiety-related disorders. (ii) If the mismatch is between your actual and ideal selves, you'll feel disappointed, frustrated, unfulfilled, and sad. In the worst-case scenario you might even become depressed. Study 2: Participating in a study of body images, college women with high rather than low discrepancies between their actual and ideal selves were more likely to compare themselves with thin models in TV commercials, which further increased their body dissatisfaction and depression.

Ironic processes: Why and When?

According to Wegner, every conscious effort at maintaining control is met by a concern about failing to do so. This concern automatically triggers an "ironic operating process" as the person, trying hard not to fail, searches his or her mind for the unwanted thought. If the person is cognitively busy, tired, distracted, hurried, or under stress, then the ironic process, because it "just happens," will prevail over the intentional process, which requires conscious attention and effort. Study: Applying this logic to keeping secrets, other researchers have found that instructing word-game players to conceal hidden clues from a fellow player increased rather than decreased their tendency to leak that information.

BIRG: Well-being

Additional research confi rms that the failures of others with whom we identify can infl uence our own sense of well-being. Study: Avid sports fans temporarily lost faith in their own mental and social abilities after a favorite team suff ered defeat.

Self-esteem: Specific domains

Although a person's overall, or global, sense of self-worth may not be predictive of positive life outcomes, people with specific domains of self-esteem benefit in more circumscribed ways. In other words, research suggests that individuals with high selfesteem specifi cally for public speaking, mathematics, or social situations will outperform those who have less self-confi dence in the domains of public speaking, math, and social situations, respectively.

Boosting self-esteem

Although high selfesteem leads people to feel good, take on new challenges, and persist through failure, the correlational evidence does not clearly support the strong conclusion that boosting self-esteem causes people to perform well in school or at work, to be socially popular, or to behave in ways that foster physical health. The process of pursuing self-esteem itself is costly. Specifically, they point to research showing that in trying hard to boost and maintain their self-esteem, people often become anxious, avoid activities that risk failure, neglect the needs of others, and suff er from stress-related health problems.

Are there gender diff erences in self-esteem?

Among adolescents and adults, males outscored females on various general measures of self-esteem. Contrary to popular belief, however, the diff erence was very small, particularly among older adults.

Dialecticism

An Eastern system of thought that accepts the coexistence of contradictory characteristics within a single person "Beware of your friends, not your enemies." This thought style contrasts sharply with the American and European perspective, grounded in Western logic, by which people differentiate seeming opposites on the assumption that if one is right, the other must be wrong.

Self-esteem

An affective component of the self, consisting of a person's positive and negative self-evaluations The word esteem comes from the Latin aestimare, which means "to estimate or appraise." Self-esteem thus refers to our positive and negative evaluations of ourselves. (i) A feeling of self-worth is not a single trait etched permanently in stone. Rather, it is a state of mind that fl uctuates in response to success, failure, ups and downs in fortune, social relations, and other life experiences. (ii) Also, because the self-concept is made up of many self-schemas, people typically view parts of the self diff erently: Some parts they judge more favorably or see more clearly or as more important than other parts. (iii) As a general rule, self-esteem stays roughly the same from childhood through old age. Yet for some people in particular, self-esteem seems to fluctuate in response to daily experiences, which makes them highly responsive to praise and overly sensitive to criticism.

Downward social comparison: Temporal comparison

Anne Wilson and Michael Ross (2000) note that in addition to making social comparisons between ourselves and similar others, we make temporal comparisons between our past and present selves. Studies: In one study, these investigators had college students describe themselves; in another, they analyzed the autobiographical accounts of celebrities appearing in popular magazines. In both cases, they counted the number of times the self-descriptions contained references to past selves, to future selves, and to others. The result was that people made more comparisons to their own past selves than to others, and most of these temporal comparisons were favorable. Conclusion: Keenly aware of how "I'm better today than when I was in the past," people use downward temporal comparisons the way they use downward social comparisons as a means of self-enhancement.

Self-enhancement: Perfectionism

Another tactic is to set one's goals too high, as perfectionists like to do, which sets up failure that would not be interpreted to reflect a lack of ability.

Strategic self-presentation: Ingratiation and Self-promotion: Caution

As the term brown-nosing graphically suggests, ingratiation tactics need to be subtle or else they will backfire. People also do not like those who relentlessly trumpet and brag about their own achievements or who exhibit a "slimy" pattern of being friendly to their superiors but not to subordinates.

Self-enhancement

At least in Western cultures, most people think highly of themselves most of the time. Consistently, and across a broad range of life domains, research has shown that people see positive traits as more self-descriptive than negative traits, evaluate themselves more highly than they do others, rate themselves more highly than they are rated by others, exaggerate their control over life events, and predict that they have a bright future. Research shows that people overrate their effectiveness as speakers to an audience (Keysar & Henly 2002), overestimate their own contributions to a group and the extent to which they would be missed if absent (Savitsky et al., 2003), and selectively recall positive feedback about themselves while neglecting the negative (Green et al., 2008). People also overestimate their intellectual and social abilities across a wide range of domains. (*) What's particularly interesting about this tendency is that those who are least competent are the most likely to overrate their own performance. Study: College students with the lowest scores on tests of logic, grammar, and humor were the ones who most grossly overjudged their own abilities (on average, their scores were in the lowest 12 percent among peers, yet they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd percentile). Th ese investigators found that when the low scorers were trained to be more competent in these areas, they became more realistic in their self-assessments. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

Excuses

Behaviors designed to sabotage one's own performance in order to provide a subsequent excuse for failure On occasion, people make excuses for their past performance. Sometimes they even come up with excuses in anticipation of future performance. Particularly when people are afraid that they might fail in an important situation, they use illness, shyness, anxiety, pain, trauma, and other complaints as excuses. The reason people do this is simple: By admitting to a limited physical or mental weakness, they can shield themselves from what could be the most shattering implication of failure—a lack of ability.

Self-handicapping

Behaviors designed to sabotage one's own performance in order to provide a subsequent excuse for failure Under certain conditions, this strategy is taken one step further, as when people actually sabotage their own performance. It seems like the ultimate paradox, but there are times when we purposely set ourselves up for failure in order to preserve our precious self-esteem. Study: To demonstrate, Berglas and Jones recruited college students for an experiment supposedly concerning the effects of drugs on intellectual performance. All the participants worked on a 20-item test of analogies and were told that they had done well, after which they expected to work on a second, similar test. For one group, the problems in the fi rst test were relatively easy, leading participants to expect more success in the second test; for a second group, the problems were insoluble, leaving participants confused about their initial success and worried about possible failure. Before seeing or taking the second test, participants were given a choice of two drugs: Actavil, which was supposed to improve performance, and Pandocrin, which was supposed to impair it. Although no drugs were actually administered, most participants who were confident about the upcoming test selected the Actavil. In contrast, most males (but not females) who feared the outcome of the second test chose the Pandocrin. Follow-up: Although self-handicapping occurs when the experimenter witnesses the participants' drug choice, it is reduced when the experimenter is not present while that choice is being made.

Self-perception: Vicarious self-perception

Bem argued that people sometimes learn about themselves by observing their own freely chosen behavior. But might you also infer something about yourself by observing the behavior of someone else with whom you completely identify? Yes. [Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini (2007)]

Does membership in a minority group, such as African Americans, deflate one's sense of self-worth?

Black American children, adolescents, and adults consistently score higher—not lower—than their white counterparts on measures of self-esteem. Jean Twenge and Jennifer Crocker (2002) confi rmed the African American advantage in selfesteem relative to whites but found that Hispanic, Asian, and Native American minorities have lower self-esteem scores. Why: Some researchers have suggested that perhaps African Americans—more than other minorities—are able to preserve their self-esteem in the face of adversity by attributing negative outcomes to the forces of discrimination and using this adversity to build a sense of group pride.

Is it possible to counteract self-regulation fatigue through psychological intervention alone, without the calories associated with glucose consumption?

Brandon Schmeichel and Kathleen Vohs (2009) reasoned that people may be able to restore their capacity for self-control by stopping to mentally bolster or "affirm" their sense of who they are. Study: To test this hypothesis, they asked participants to write a short story. To vary the exercise of self-control, some but not others were prohibited from using certain letters of the alphabet (try writing even a short paragraph without using the letters a or n and you will appreciate the discipline that is needed!). Afterward, all participants were administered a classic pain tolerance task that required them to soak one hand in a tub of circulating ice-cold water for as long as they could, until it was too painful to continue. Between the two tasks, "self-affirmation" participants were given a chance to express a core value by writing an essay about the one personal characteristic they find most important (such as family relations, friendships, creativity, or athletics). Others wrote about some less important characteristic. Among participants in the no-affirmation condition, the prior act of self-control sharply reduced their tolerance to cold pain from an average of 78 seconds to 27 seconds. Among those who were prompted to self-affirm, however, the adverse effect of the first self-control task on pain tolerance was erased.

Alcohol and Self-esteem

Claude Steele and Robert Josephs (1990) believe that alcoholic intoxication off ers more than just a means of tuning out on the self. By causing people to lose touch with reality and shed their inhibitions, it also evokes a state of "drunken self-inflation." Study: participants rated their actual and ideal selves on various traits—some important to self-esteem, others not important. After drinking either an 80-proof vodka cocktail or a harmless placebo, they re-rated themselves on the same traits. As measured by the perceived discrepancy between actual and ideal selves, participants who were drinking expressed infl ated views of themselves on traits they considered important.

Self-esteem: Americans vs. Japanese

Do Japanese people really have a less positive self-esteem compared to North Americans? Or do Japanese respondents have positive self-esteem and simply feel compelled to present themselves modestly to others (as a function of the collectivist need to "fit in" rather than "stand out")? To answer this question, some researchers have tried to develop indirect, subtle, "implicit" tests of self esteem—tests that would enable them to measure a person's self-esteem without his or her awareness. Study 1: In a timed word-association study, researchers found that despite their lower scores on overt selfesteem tests, Asian Americans—just like their European American counterparts—are quicker to associate themselves with positive words like happy and sunshine than with negative words such as vomit and poison. Study 2: In keeping with the Eastern dialectical perspective described earlier, other implicit self-esteem research has shown that while East Asians, like Westerners, are quick to associate the self with positive traits, they are more likely to associate the self with contradictory negative traits as well. Conclusion: People from individualist and collectivist cultures are similarly motivated to think highly of themselves—that the burning need for positive self-regard is universal, or "pancultural." The observed differences, they argue, stem from the fact that cultures influence how we seek to fulfill that need: Individualists present themselves as unique and self-confident, while collectivists present themselves as modest, equal members of a group. From this perspective, people are tactical in their self-enhancements, exhibiting self-praise or humility depending on what is desirable within their cultural surroundings.

Introspection

Don't you know what you think because you think it? Don't you know how you feel because you feel it? Self-knowledge is derived from introspection, a looking inward at one's own thoughts and feelings.

Downward social comparison: Regret

Downward social comparison is also associated with an ability to cope with the kinds of life regrets that often haunt people as they get older. Adult development researchers have observed that aging adults often experience intense feelings of regret over decisions made, contacts lost, opportunities passed up, and the like—and these regrets can compromise the quality of their lives. Study: Isabelle Bauer and others (2008) asked adults ranging from 18 to 83 years old to disclose their biggest regret and then indicate whether their sameage peers had regrets that were more or less severe. Among the older adults in the sample, those who tended to see others as having more severe regrets than their own felt better than those who saw their others as less regretful.

Success of others: Culture

For some people—as in those from collectivist cultures, whose concept of self is expanded to include friends, relatives, co-workers, classmates, and others with whom they identify—the success of another may bolster, not threaten, self-esteem. Study: To test this hypothesis, Wendi Gardner and others (2002) brought pairs of friends into the laboratory together for a problem-solving task. They found that when they led the friends to think in collectivist terms, each derived pleasure, not jealousy and threat, from the other's greater success.

Facial feedback hypothesis: How?

How does facial feedback work? With 80 muscles in the human face that can create over 7,000 expressions, can we actually vary our own emotions by contracting certain muscles and wearing diff erent expressions? Laird argues that facial expressions affect emotion through a process of self-perception: "If I'm smiling, I must be happy." Study 1: The differences were particularly pronounced among participants who saw themselves in a mirror. (?) Study 2: Facial movements spark emotion by producing physiological changes in the brain. Smiling causes facial muscles to increase the flow of air-cooled blood to the brain, a process that produces a pleasant state by lowering brain temperature. Conversely, frowning decreases blood flow, producing an unpleasant state by raising temperature. ! ! ! Study 2*: As it turned out, ah and e (sounds that cause people to mimic smiling) lowered forehead temperature and elevated mood, whereas u and ü (sounds that cause us to mimic frowning) increased temperature and dampened mood. In short, people need not infer how they feel. Rather, facial expressions evoke physiological changes that produce an emotional experience.

Self-awareness: How much and How?

If you carefully review your daily routine—classes, work, chores at home, leisure activities, social interactions, and meals—you will probably be surprised at how little time you actually spend thinking about yourself. Study: In a study that illustrates this point, more than a hundred people, ranging in age from 19 to 63, were equipped for a week with electronic beepers that sounded every two hours or so between 7:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. Each time the beepers went off , participants interrupted whatever they were doing, wrote down what they were thinking at that moment, and fi lled out a brief questionnaire. Out of 4,700 recorded thoughts, *only 8 percent* were about the self. For the most part, attention was focused on work and other activities. (*) In fact, when participants were thinking about themselves, they reported feeling relatively unhappy and wished they were doing something else. "I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy." —Franz Kafka

Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore?

In an article entitled "Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore," Brett Pelham and his colleagues (2002) argue that people form positive associations with the sight and sound of their own name and thus are drawn to other people, places, and entities that share this most personal aspect of "self." Studies: esearchers examined several important life choices that we make and found that people exhibit small but statistically detectable preferences for things that contain the letters of their own first or last name. For example, men and women are more likely than would be predicted by chance to live in places (Michelle in Michigan, George in Georgia), attend schools (Kari from the University of Kansas, Preston from Penn State University), and choose careers (Dennis and Denise as dentists) whose names resemble their own. Indeed, marriage records found on various genealogical websites reveal that people are disproportionately likely to marry others with first or last names that resemble their own. In a subtle but remarkable way, we unconsciously seek out refl ections of the self in our surroundings. We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. —Anais Nin

Emily Pronin and others (2006) tested the related hypothesis that imagining an event before it occurs can lead people to think they had infl uenced it.

In one study participants watched a trained confederate shoot hoops on a basketball court. Before each shot, they were instructed to visualize his success ("the shooter releases the ball and it swooshes through the net") or an irrelevant event ("the shooter's arm curls to lift a dumbbell"). Alter the confederate's successful shooting spree, spectators rated the extent of their influence over his performance. As if linking thoughts to outcomes, they exhibited an illusion of mental causation, taking more credit for influence when they had visualized the shooter's success than when they had not.

Individualism vs. Collectivism: Self

Individualism: independence, autonomy, and self-reliance. Collectivism: interdependence, cooperation, and social harmony. Study 1: Most North Americans and Europeans have an independent view of the self. In this view, the self is an entity that is distinct, autonomous, self-contained, and endowed with unique dispositions. Yet in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, people hold an interdependent view of the self. Here, the self is part of a larger social network that includes one's family, co-workers, and others with whom one is socially connected. People with an independent view say that "the only person you can count on is yourself" and "I enjoy being unique and diff erent from others." In contrast, those with an interdependent view are more likely to agree that "I'm partly to blame if one of my family members or co-workers fails" and "my happiness depends on the happiness of those around me." Study 2: The Americans were more likely to fill in the blank with trait descriptions ("I am shy"), whereas the Chinese were more likely to identify themselves by group affi liations ("I am a college student"). It's no wonder that in China, one's family name comes before one's personal name. Study 3: People in individualistic cultures strive for personal achievement, while those living in collectivist cultures derive more satisfaction from the status of a valued group. Thus, whereas North Americans tend to overestimate their own contributions to a team eff ort, seize the credit for success, and blame others for failure, people from collectivist cultures tend to underestimate their own role and present themselves in more modest, self-effacing terms in relation to other members of the group. Study 4: American college students see themselves as less similar to other people than do Asian Indian students. Study 5: Our cultural orientations toward conformity or independence may lead us to favor similarity or uniqueness in all things. The American subjects liked the subfi gures that were unique or in the minority, while Korean subjects preferred those that "fit in" as part of the group. Study 6: The result: 74 percent of the Americans chose a uniquely colored pen and 76 percent of the East Asians selected one of the commonly colored pens!

Are positive illusions adaptive?

Individuals who are depressed or low in self-esteem actually have more realistic views of themselves than do most others who are better adjusted. Their selfappraisals are more likely to match appraisals of them made by neutral observers, they make fewer self-serving attributions to account for success and failure, they are less likely to exaggerate their control over uncontrollable events, and they make more balanced predictions about their future. Conclusion: Positive illusions promote happiness, the desire to care for others, and the ability to engage in productive work—hallmark attributes of mental health: "These illusions help make each individual's world a warmer and more active and benefi cent place in which to live."

Intrinsic motivation vs. Extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation originates in factors within a person. People are said to be intrinsically motivated when they engage in an activity for the sake of their own interest, the challenge, or sheer enjoyment. In contrast, extrinsic motivation originates in factors outside the person. People are said to be extrinsically motivated when they engage in an activity as a means to an end, for tangible benefits. What happens to the intrinsic motivation once that reward is no longer available?

If extrinsic benefits serve to undermine intrinsic motivation, should teachers and parents not offer rewards to their children? Are the employee incentive programs that are so often used to motivate workers in the business world doomed to fail, as some have suggested?

It all depends on how the reward is perceived and by whom. If a reward is presented in the form of verbal praise that is perceived to be sincere or as a special "bonus" for superior performance, then sometimes it can actually enhance intrinsic motivation by providing positive feedback about competence—as when people win competitions, scholarships, or a pat on the back from people they respect. Study: The notion that intrinsic motivation is undermined by some types of reward but not others was observed even among 20-month-old babies.

Self-enhancement: Procrastination

One form of excuse-making that many of us can relate to is procrastination—a purposive delay in starting or completing a task that is due at a particular time. According to Joseph Ferrari (1998), one "benefit" of procrastinating is that it helps to provide an excuse for possible failure.

Implicit egotism: Consciousness

It's not that we consciously or openly flatter ourselves. Th e response is more like a reflex. Indeed, when research participants are busy or distracted as they make self-ratings, their judgments are quicker and even more favorable.

If self-esteem is infl uenced by our links to others, how do we cope with friends, family members, teammates, and co-workers of low status?

Observation: Again, consider sports fans, an interesting breed. They loudly cheer their team in victory, but they often turn and jeer their team in defeat. Th is behavior seems fickle, but it is consistent with the notion that people derive part of their self-esteem from associations with others. Study: In one study, participants took part in a problem-solving team that then succeeded, failed, or received no feedback about its performance. Participants were later off ered a chance to take home a team badge. In the success and no-feedback groups, 68 and 50 percent, respectively, took badges; in the failure group, only 9 percent did. It seems that the tendency to bask in reflected glory is matched by an equally powerful tendency to CORF—that is, to cut off reflected failure.

Self-regulation: Resource hypothesis

Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister (2000) theorize that self-control is a limited inner resource that can temporarily be depleted by usage. 1. All self-control eff orts draw from a single common reservoir. 2. Exercising self-control is like flexing a muscle: Once used, it becomes fatigued and loses strength, making it more diffi cult to reexert self-control—at least for a while, until the resource is replenished. Study: Muraven and Baumeister (1998) had participants watch a brief clip from an upsetting film that shows scenes of sick and dying animals exposed to radioactive waste. Some of the participants were instructed to stifle their emotional responses to the clip, including their facial expressions; others were told to amplify or exaggerate their facial responses; a third group received no special instructions. Both before and after the movie, self-control was measured by the length of time participants were able to squeeze a handgrip exerciser without letting go. As predicted, those who had to inhibit or amplify their emotions during the film—but not those in the third group— lost their willpower in the handgrip task from the first time they tried it to the second. Conclusion: After people exert self-control in one task, their capacity for self-regulation is weakened—causing them to talk too much, disclose too much, or brag too much in a later social situation.

Self-serving cognitions: Optimism

Most of us are also unrealistically optimistic. Study: College students who were asked to predict their own future compared with that of the average peer believed that they would graduate higher in their class, get a better job, have a happier marriage, and bear a gifted child. They also believed that they were less likely to get fired or divorced, have a car accident, become depressed, be victimized by crime, or suffer a heart attack. Other studies: In sports, politics, health, and social issues, people exhibit an optimistic bias—essentially a case of wishful thinking—about their own future, judging desirable events as more likely to occur than undesirable events.

Are positive illusions adaptive? - Maybe, but . . .

Not everyone agrees with the notion that it is adaptive in the long run to wear rose-colored glasses. Roy Baumeister and Steven Scher (1988) immediately warned that positive illusions can give rise to chronic patterns of self-defeating behavior, as when people escape from self-awareness through alcohol and other drugs, selfhandicap themselves into failure and underachievement, deny health-related problems until it's too late for treatment, and rely on the illusion of control to protect them from the inescapable odds of the gambling casino. Others have similarly noted that people sometimes need to be self-critical in order to improve. Study 1: In a study on success and failure feedback, Heine and others (2001) found that whereas North American college students persisted less on a task after an initial failure than after success, Japanese students persisted more in this situation. Study 2: From an interpersonal standpoint, C. Randall Colvin and others (1995) found that people with infl ated rather than realistic views of themselves were rated less favorably on certain dimensions by their own friends. In their studies, self-enhancing men were seen as boastful, condescending, hostile, and less considerate of others; self-enhancing women were seen as more hostile, more defensive and sensitive to criticism, more likely to overreact to minor setbacks, and less well liked. People with inflated self-images may make a good first impression on others, but they are liked less and less as time wears on. Conslusion: Do positive illusions motivate personal achievement but alienate us socially from others? Is it adaptive to see oneself in slightly inflated terms but maladaptive to take a view that is too biased?

Self-handicapping: Downside

Of course, this strategy is not without a cost. Sabotaging ourselves—by not practicing or by drinking too much, using drugs, faking illness, or setting goals too high—objectively increases the risk of failure. What's worse, it does not exactly endear us to others. Frederick Rhodewalt and his colleagues (1995) found that participants did not like their partners in an experiment when they thought that these partners had self-handicapped by claiming they did not care, were anxious, or were medically impaired. Women in particular are suspicious and critical of people who self-handicap.

The need of self-esteem: Why?

People are inherently social animals and that the desire for self-esteem is driven by this more primitive need to connect with others and gain their approval. In this way, our sense of self-esteem serves as a "sociometer," a rough indicator of how we're doing in the eyes of others. The threat of social rejection thus lowers self-esteem, which activates the need to regain approval and acceptance.

Private self-consciousness vs. Public self-consciousness and Self-discrepancy

People are motivated to meet either their own standards or the standards held for them by significant others. If you're privately self-conscious, you listen to an inner voice and try to reduce discrepancies relative to your own standards; if you're publicly selfconscious, however, you try to match your behavior to socially accepted norms. There may be "two sides of the self: one for you and one for me."

Autobiographical memory: Truthfulness

People are often motivated to distort the past in ways that are self-inflated. Ex. Although he correctly remembered the gist of his White House meetings, he consistently exaggerated his own role and importance in these events. Study 1: People whose attitudes about school busing were changed by a persuasive speaker later assumed that they had held their new attitude all along. Study 2: Overall, the majority of grades were recalled correctly. But most of the errors in memory were grade infl ations—and most of these were made when the actual grades were low. Study 3: Both groups recalled plenty of positive events, but older adults recalled fewer negative memories. These findings bring to mind sociologist George Herbert Mead's (1934) contention that our visions of the past are like pure "escape fancies . . . in which we rebuild the world according to our hearts' desires."

BIRG: Physiology

Reflected failure may even have physiological effects on the body. Study: Paul Bernhardt and others (1998) took saliva samples from male college students before and after they watched a basketball or soccer game between their favorite team and an archrival. By measuring changes in testosterone levels after the game, these investigators found that men who witnessed their team in defeat had lowered levels of testosterone, the male sex hormone, compare to those who had watched their team win.

Self-handicapping: Why?

People who are low in self-esteem use self-handicapping to set up a defensive, face-saving excuse in case they fail, while those who are high in self-esteem use it as an opportunity to claim extra credit if they succeed.

Positive self-image vs. Negative self-image

People with positive self-images tend to be happy, healthy, productive, and successful. They also tend to be confi dent, bringing to new challenges a winning attitude that leads them to persist longer at difficult tasks, sleep better at night, maintain their independence in the face of peer pressure, and suffer from fewer ulcers. In contrast, people with negative self-images tend to be more depressed, pessimistic about the future, and prone to failure. Lacking confi dence, they bring to new tasks a losing attitude that traps them in a vicious, self-defeating cycle. Expecting to fail and fearing the worst, they become anxious, exert less eff ort, and "tune out" on important challenges. And when they fail, they tend to blame themselves, which makes them feel even less competent. Low self-esteem may even be hazardous to your health. Indeed, some research suggests that becoming aware of one's own negative attributes adversely aff ects the activity of certain white blood cells in the immune system, thus compromising the body's capacity to ward off disease.

Self-serving cognitions: Optimism: Why?

Perhaps one reason that people are eternally optimistic is that they harbor illusions of control, overestimating the extent to which they can influence personal outcomes that are not, in fact, within their power to control. Study: College students bet more money in a chance game of high-card when their opponent seemed nervous rather than confi dent and were more reluctant to sell a lottery ticket if they'd chosen the number themselves than if it was assigned.

Memory and the Self

Philosopher James Mill once said, "The phenomenon of the Self and that of Memory are merely two sides of the same fact." Who would you be if you could not remember your parents or your childhood playmates, your successes and failures, the places you lived, the schools you attended, the books you read, and the teams you played for? "The nice thing about having memories is that you can choose." —William Trevor By linking the present to the past and providing us with an inner sense of continuity, autobiographical memory is a vital part of—and can be shaped by—our identity.

Private self-consciousness vs. Public self-consciousness

Private: A personality characteristic of individuals who are introspective, often attending to their own inner states Public: A personality characteristic of individuals who focus on themselves as social objects, as seen by others People who score high on a test of private self-consciousness tend to fill in incomplete sentences with first-person pronouns. They also make self-descriptive statements and recognize self-relevant words more quickly than other words. In contrast, those who score high on a measure of public self-consciousness are sensitive to the way they are viewed from an outsider's perspective. Study 1: When people were asked to draw a capital letter E on their foreheads, 43 percent of those with high levels of public self-consciousness, compared with only 6 percent of those with low levels, oriented the E so that it was backward from their own standpoint but correct for an outside observer. Study 2: People who are high in public self-consciousness are also particularly sensitive to the extent to which others share their opinions.

Introspection and Self-knowledge: + or -

Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson (1977) found that research participants often cannot accurately explain the causes or correlates of their own behavior. This observation forced researchers to confront a thorny question: Does introspection provide a direct pipeline to self-knowledge? Wilson found that introspection can sometimes impair self-knowledge. In a series of studies, he found that the attitudes people reported having about different objects corresponded closely to their behavior toward those objects. Yet after participants were told to analyze the reasons for how they felt, the attitudes that they reported no longer corresponded to their behavior. Conclusion: Human beings are mentally busy processing information, which is why we so often fail to understand our own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Apparently, it is possible to think too much and be too analytical, only to get confused. ? ? ? People overestimate the positives. Most people, most of the time, think they are better than average, even though it is statistically impossible for this to happen.

Flashbulb memories

Roger Brown and James Kulik (1977) coined the term flashbulb memories to describe these enduring, detailed, high-resolution recollections and speculated that humans are biologically equipped for survival purposes to "print" dramatic events in memory. These flashbulb memories are not necessarily accurate or even consistent over time. Ex. When asked, for example, how he heard about the infamous September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush gave diff erent accounts on three occasions when asked what he was doing and who told him the news.

Self-awareness theory states that if a successful reduction of self-discrepancy seems unlikely, individuals will take a second route: escape from self-awareness.

Roy Baumeister (1991) speculates that drug abuse, sexual masochism, spiritual ecstasy, binge eating, and suicide all serve this escapist function. Even television may serve as a form of escape. Study 1-2: Sophia Moskalenko and Steven Heine (2003) brought college students into a laboratory and tested their actual-ideal self-discrepancies twice. Half watched a brief TV show on nature before the second test. In a second study, students were sent home with the questionnaire and instructed to fill it out either before or after watching TV. In both cases, those who watched TV had lower self-discrepancies on the second measure. Study 3: Students who were told they had done poorly on an IQ test spent more time watching TV while waiting in the lab than those who were told they had succeeded. Perhaps TV and other forms of entertainment enable people to "watch their troubles away." Study 4: Hull and Richard Young (1983) administered what was supposed to be an IQ test to male participants and gave false feedback suggesting that they had either succeeded or failed. Supposedly as part of a separate study, those participants were then asked to taste and rate diff erent wines. As they did so, experimenters kept track of how much they drank during a 15-minute tasting period. As predicted, participants who were prone to self-awareness drank more wine after failure than after success, presumably to dodge the blow to their self-esteem.

Self-awareness theory: Solutions

Self-awareness theory suggests two basic ways of coping with such discomfort: (1) "shape up" by behaving in ways that reduce our self-discrepancies or (2) "ship out" by withdrawing from self-awareness. The solution chosen depends on whether people think they can reduce their self-discrepancy and whether they're pleased with the progress they make once they try. If so, they tend to match their behavior to personal or societal standards; if not, they tune out, look for distractions, and turn attention away from the self.

Self-regulation and phisiology

Self-regulation fatigue sets in because exerting self-control is physically taxing, as measured by the extent to which it consumes glucose, a vital source of bodily energy. Consistently, they found that acts of self-control—relative to similar acts not requiring self-control—were followed by reduced blood glucose levels and a lessened capacity for additional self-control. (*) What's more, these researchers were able to counteract these adverse eff ects merely by feeding participants sugared lemonade between tasks, which restored glucose to the bloodstream.

Looking-glass self, Relations and Significant others

Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1902) introduced the term looking-glass self to suggest that other people serve as a *mirror* in which we see ourselves. Expanding on this idea, George Herbert Mead (1934) added that we often come to know ourselves by imagining what *significant others* think of us and then incorporating these perceptions into our self-concepts. Picking up where the classic sociologists left off, Susan Andersen and Serena Chen (2002) theorized that the self is "relational"—that we draw our sense of who we are from our past and current *relationships* with the significant others in our lives. It is interesting that when Gallup tested his apes, those that had been raised in *isolation*—without exposure to peers—did not recognize themselves in the mirror. Only after such exposure did they begin to show signs of self-recognition. Among human beings, our self-concepts match our *perceptions* of what others think of us. But there's an important hitch: What we think of ourselves often does not match what specific others *actually* think of us.

Self-handicapping: Who and How?

Some people use self-handicapping as a defense more than others do, and there are different ways to use it. For example, some men self-handicap by taking drugs or neglecting to practice, while women tend to report stress and physical symptoms.

Strategic self-presentation

Strategic self-presentation consists of our efforts to shape others' impressions in specific ways in order to gain influence, power, sympathy, or approval.

Self-presentation

Strategies people use to shape what others think of them

Dialecticism: Self

Study 1: Asian Americans vary their selfconcepts more to suit different relationship situation—though they are consistent within these situations. Study 2: East Asians are more willing than Americans to see and accept contradictory aspects of themselves—as seen in their willingness to accept both positive and negative aspects of themselves at the same time.

It appears that we can control ourselves only so much before self-regulation fatigue sets in, causing us to "lose it." What might this mean, then, for people who are constantly regulating their behavior?

Study 1: To find out, Kathleen Vohs and Todd Heatherton (2000) showed a brief and dull documentary to individual female college students, half of whom were chronic dieters. Placed in the viewing room—either within arm's reach (high temptation) or 10 feet away (low temptation)—was a bowl filled with Skittles, M&Ms, Doritos, and salted peanuts that participants were free to sample. After watching the movie, they were taken to another room for an ice-cream taste test and told they could eat as much as they wanted. How much ice cream did they consume? Th e researchers predicted that dieters seated within reach of the bowl would have to fi ght the hardest to avoid snacking—an act of self-control that would cost them later. Th e prediction was confi rmed. As measured by the amount of ice cream consumed in the taste test, dieters in the high-temptation condition ate more ice cream than did all nondieters and dieters in the low-temptation situation. Study 2: What's more, a second study showed that dieters who had to fight the urge in the high-temptation situation were later less persistent and quicker to give up on a set of impossible cognitive problems they were asked to solve.

Unfortunately, it's not always possible to defend the self via downward social comparison. Think about it. When a sibling, spouse, or close friend has more success than you do, what happens to your self-esteem?

Study: Abraham Tesser (1988) predicted two possible reactions. On the one hand, you might feel proud of your association with this successful other, as in the process of basking in reflected glory. If you've ever bragged about the achievements of a loved one as if they were your own, you know how "reflection" can bolster self-esteem. On the other hand, you may feel overshadowed by the success of this other person and experience social comparison jealousy—a mixture of emotions that include resentment, envy, and a drop in self-esteem. According to Tesser, the key to whether one feels the pleasure of refl ection or the pain of jealousy is whether the other person's success is self-relevant. When close friends surpass us in ways that are vital to our self-concepts, we become jealous and distance ourselves from them in order to keep up our own self-esteem. When intimate others surpass us in ways that are not important, however, we take pride in their triumphs through a process of reflection.

Terror Management Theory: Self-esteem

Study: In a series of experiments, these investigators found that people react to graphic scenes of death or to the thought of their own death with intense defensiveness and anxiety. When people are given positive feedback on a test, however, which boosts their self-esteem, that reaction is muted. Self-esteem is a protective shield designed to control the potential for terror that results from awareness of the horrifying possibility that we humans are merely transient animals groping to survive in a meaningless universe, designed only to die and decay. From this perspective, each individual human's name and identity, family and social identifications, goals and aspirations, occupation and title, and humanly created adornments are draped over an animal that, in the cosmic scheme of things, may be no more significant or enduring than any individual potato, pineapple, or porcupine.

Self-serving cognitions

Study: SAT scores 1. The students overestimated their actual scores by an average of 17 points. This infl ationary distortion was most pronounced among those with relatively low scores, and it persisted somewhat even when students knew that the experimenter would check their academic files. 2. A majority of students whose SAT scores were low described their scores as inaccurate and the test in general as invalid. In fact, the SATs for the group as a whole were predictive of their grade point averages. Other studies: 1. When students receive exam grades, those who do well take credit for the success; those who do poorly complain about the instructor or test questions. 2. When researchers have articles accepted for publication, they credit the quality of their work; when articles are rejected, they blame the editors and reviewers. 3. When gamblers win a bet, they marvel at their skillfulness; when they lose, they blame fluke events that transformed near-victory into defeat. Conclusion: Across a range of cultures, people tend to take credit for success and distance themselves from failure—all while seeing themselves as objective, not biased.

Are people from disparate cultures locked into thinking about the self in either personal or collective terms, or are both aspects of the self present in everyone, to be expressed according to the situation?

Study: Students who took the test in English focused more on personal traits, while those who took the test in Chinese focused more on group affiliations. Conclusion: It appears that each of us have both personal and collective aspects of the self to draw on—and that the part that comes to mind depends on the situation we are in.

"Self-Presentation Can Be Hazardous to Your Health"

Suggesting that "Self-Presentation Can Be Hazardous to Your Health," Mark Leary and his colleagues (1994) reviewed evidence suggesting that the need to project a favorable public image can lure us into unsafe patterns of behavior. For example, self-presentation concerns can increase the risk of AIDS (as when men are too embarrassed to buy condoms and talk openly with their sex partners), skin cancer (as when people bake under the sun to get an attractive tan), eating disorders (as when women over-diet or use amphetamines, laxatives, and forced vomiting to stay thin), drug abuse (as when teenagers smoke, drink, and use drugs to impress their peers), and accidental injury (as when young men drive recklessly to look fearless to others).

Spotlight effect

Th omas Gilovich and others (2000) found that people are so self-conscious in public settings that they are often subject to the spotlight effect, a tendency to believe that the social spotlight shines more brightly on them than it really does. Study 1: In one set of studies, participants were asked to wear a T-shirt with a fl attering or embarrassing image into a room full of strangers, after which they estimated how many of those strangers would be able to identify the image. Demonstrating that people self-consciously feel as if all eyes are upon them, the T-shirted participants overestimated by 23-40 percent the number of observers who had noticed and could recall what they were wearing. Study 2: When people commit a public social blunder, they later overestimate the negative impact of their behavior on those who had observed them.

Downward social comparison

The defensive tendency to compare ourselves with others who are worse off than we are Study: Research shows that people who suffer some form of setback or failure adjust their social comparisons in a downward direction and that these comparisons have an uplifting effect on their mood and on their outlook for the future.

Self-verification

The desire to have others perceive us as we truly perceive ourselves According to William Swann (1987), people are highly motivated in their social encounters to confirm or verify their existing self-concept in the eyes of others. People selectively elicit, recall, and accept personality feedback that confirms their self-conceptions. In fact, people sometimes bend over backward to correct others whose impressions are positive but mistaken. Study: In one study, participants interacted with a confederate who later said that they seemed dominant or submissive. When the comment was consistent with the participant's self-concept, it was accepted at face value. Yet when it was inconsistent, participants went out of their way to prove the confederate wrong: Those who perceived themselves as dominant but were labeled submissive later behaved more assertively than usual; those who viewed themselves as submissive but were labeled dominant subsequently became even more docile.

Ironic processes

The harder you try to inhibit a thought, feeling, or behavior, the less likely you are to succeed.

Facial feedback hypothesis

The hypothesis that changes in facial expression can lead to corresponding changes in emotion Participants rated what they saw as funnier and reported feeling happier when they were smiling than when they were frowning. Facial feedback can evoke and magnify certain emotional states. It's important to note, however, that the face is not necessary to the subjective experience of emotion.

Self-awareness theory: Consequences

The more self-focused people are in general, the more likely they are to find themselves in a bad mood or depressed. People who are self-absorbed are also more likely to suff er from alcoholism, anxiety, and other clinical disorders.

Affective forecasting

The process of predicting how one would feel in response to future People also have difficulty projecting forward and predicting how they would feel in response to future emotional events—a process referred to as affective forecasting.

Self-regulation

The processes by which we seek to control or alter our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and urges

Self-concept vs. Self-schema

The self-concept is made up of cognitive molecules called self-schemas: beliefs about oneself that guide the processing of self-relevant information. Self-schemas are to an individual's total self-concept what hypotheses are to a theory or what books are to a library.

Self-concept

The sum total of an individual's beliefs about his or her own personal attributes

Overjustification effect

The tendency for intrinsic motivation to diminish for activities that have become associated with reward or other extrinsic factors When someone is rewarded for listening to music, playing a game, or eating a tasty food, his or her behavior becomes overjustified, or overrewarded, which means that it can be attributed to extrinsic as well as intrinsic motives. This overjustification effect can be dangerous: Observing that their own efforts have paid off, people begin to wonder if the activity was ever worth pursuing in its own right. Study 1: When people start getting "paid" for a task they already enjoy, they sometimes lose interest in it. Study 2: People are more creative when they feel interested and challenged by the work itself than when they feel pressured to make money, fulfill obligations, meet deadlines, win competitions, or impress others.

Cocktail party effect

The tendency of people to pick a personally relevant stimulus, like a name, out of a complex and noisy environment 1. Human beings are selective in their attention. 2. The self is an important object of our own attention.

Terror Management Theory

The theory that humans cope with the fear of their own death by constructing worldviews that help to preserve their self-esteem According to this provocative and influential theory, we humans are biologically programmed for life and self-preservation. Yet we are conscious of—and terrified by—the inevitability of our own death. To cope with this paralyzing, deeply rooted fear, we construct and accept cultural worldviews about how, why, and by whom the earth was created; religious explanations of the purpose of our existence; and a sense of history filled with heroes, villains, and momentous events. These world views provide meaning and purpose and a buffer against anxiety.

Social comparison theory

The theory that people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others When people are uncertain of their abilities or opinions—that is, when objective information is not readily available—they evaluate themselves through comparisons with similar others. "Who are you?" - When asked this question, people tend to describe themselves in ways that set them apart from others in their immediate vicinity. Conclusion 1: Change someone's social surroundings, and you can change that person's spontaneous self-description. Conclusion 2: The self is "relative," a social construct, and each of us defines ourselves in part by using family members, friends, acquaintances, and others as a benchmark. Study: Temporarily, our standards of self-comparison can even be influenced by our fleeting, everyday exposures to strangers.

Self-awareness theory

The theory that self-focused attention leads people to notice self-discrepancies, thereby motivating either an escape from self-awareness or a change in behavior Most people are not usually self-focused, but certain situations predictably force us to turn inward and become the objects of our own attention. When we talk about ourselves, glance in a mirror, stand before an audience or camera, watch ourselves on videotape, or behave in a conspicuous manner, we enter into a state of heightened self-awareness that leads us naturally to compare our behavior to some standard. This comparison often results in a negative discrepancy and a temporary reduction in self-esteem as we discover that we fall short. Study: Research participants who are seated in front of a mirror tend to react more negatively to their self-discrepancies, often slipping into a negative mood state. Interestingly, Japanese people—already highly concerned about their public "face"—are unaffected by the added presence of a mirror.

Two-factor theory of emotion

The theory that the experience of emotion is based on two factors: physiological arousal and a cognitive interpretation of that arousal Study 1: When people were frightened into thinking they would receive painful electric shocks, most sought the company of others who were in the same predicament. Yet when they were not fearful and expected only mild shocks or when the "others" were not taking part in the same experiment, participants preferred to be alone. "Misery doesn't just love any kind of company; it loves only miserable company." Could it be that when people are uncertain about how they feel, their emotional state is actually determined by the reactions of others around them? First, the person must experience the symptoms of physiological arousal—such as a racing heart, perspiration, rapid breathing, and tightening of the stomach. Second, the person must make a cognitive interpretation that explains the source of the arousal. And that is where the people around us come in: Their reactions help us interpret our own arousal. Study 2: Drug-informed group, placebo group, drug-uninformed group. Conclusion: When people are unclear about their own emotional states, they sometimes interpret how they feel by watching others. The "sometimes" part of the conclusion is important. For other people to influence your emotion, your level of physiological arousal cannot be too intense or else it will be experienced as aversive, regardless of the situation. Note: Other people must be present as a possible explanation for arousal before its onset. Once people are aroused, they turn for an explanation to events that preceded the change in their physiological state.

Self-perception theory

The theory that when internal cues are diffi cult to interpret, people gain self-insight by observing their own behavior People can learn about themselves the same way outside observers do—by watching their own behavior. To the extent that internal states are weak or difficult to interpret, people infer what they think or how they feel by observing their own behavior and the situation in which that behavior takes place. People do not infer their own internal states from behavior that occurred in the presence of compelling situational pressures such as reward or punishment. In other words, people learn about themselves through self-perception only when the situation alone seems insufficient to have caused their behavior. When people are gently coaxed into saying or doing something and when they are not otherwise certain about how they feel, they often come to view themselves in ways that are consistent with their public statements and behavior. "How can I tell what I think 'til I see what I say?"

Self-regulation: Athletes

There's another possible downside to self-control that is often seen in sports when athletes become so self-focused under pressure that they stiffen up and "choke." Unless trained to perform while self-focused, athletes under pressure often try their hardest not to fail, become self-conscious, and think too much—all of which disrupts the fluid and natural flow of their performance.

Affective forecasting: Impact bias

Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert (2003, 2005) asked research participants to predict how they would feel after various positive and negative life events and compared their predictions to how others experiencing those events said they actually felt. Consistently, they found that people overestimate the strength and duration of their emotional reactions, a phenomenon they call the "impact bias."

Bask in reflected glory (BIRG)

To increase self-esteem by associating with others who are successful To some extent, your self-esteem is influenced by individuals and groups with whom you identify. According to Robert Cialdini and his colleagues (1976), people often bask in reflected glory (BIRG) by showing off their connections to successful others. Study 1: To evaluate the eff ects of self-esteem on BIRGing, Cialdini gave students a generalknowledge test and rigged the results so half would succeed and half would fail. The students were then asked to describe in their own words the outcome of a recent football game. In these descriptions, students who thought they had just failed a test were more likely than those who thought they had succeeded to share in their team's victory by exclaiming that "we won" and to distance themselves from defeat by lamenting how "they lost." Study 2: In another study, participants coming off a recent failure were quick to point out that they had the same birth date as someone known to be successful—thus BIRGing by a merely coincidental association.

"There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger coaches 20 or 30 miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work then they would resign."

Twain's hypothesis: reward for an enjoyable activity can undermine interest in that activity.

Strategic self-presentation: Cognitive burden

Whatever the goal may be, people find it less effortful to present themselves in ways that are accurate rather than contrived. Study: To illustrate this point, Beth Pontari and Barry Schlenker (2000) instructed research participants who tested as introverted or extroverted to present themselves to a job interviewer in a way that was consistent or inconsistent with their true personality. Without distraction, all participants successfully presented themselves as introverted or extroverted, depending on the task they were given. But could they present themselves as needed if, during the interview, they also had to keep an eightdigit number in mind for a memorization test? In this situation, cognitively busy participants self-presented successfully when asked to convey their true personalities but not when asked to portray themselves in a way that was out of character.

Memory: Recency rule and its exceptions

When people are prompted to recall their own experiences, they typically report more events from the recent past than from the distant past. 1. Older adults tend to retrieve a large number of personal memories from their adolescence and early adulthood years—a "reminiscence bump" found across many cultures that may occur because these are busy and formative years in one's life. 2. People tend to remember transitional "firsts."

Self-awareness: Values and Ideals

When people are self-focused, they are more likely to behave in ways that are consistent either with their own personal values or with socially accepted ideals. Study 1: Although the children were asked to take only one piece, 34 percent violated the request. When a full-length mirror was placed behind the candy bowl, however, that number dropped to 12 percent. Study 2: Customers at a lunch counter were trusted to pay for their coffee, tea, and milk by depositing money into an unsupervised "honesty box." Hanging on the wall behind the counter was a poster that featured a picture of flowers or a pair of eyes. By calculating the ratio of money deposited to drinks consumed, researchers observed that people paid nearly three times more money in the presence of the eyes.

Self-perception: Body posture

When people feel proud, they stand erect with their shoulders raised, chest expanded, and head held high (expansion). When dejected, however, people slump over with their shoulders drooping and head bowed (contraction). Can people lift their spirits by expansion or lower their spirits by contraction? Yes. Study 1: Those forced to sit upright reported feeling more pride after succeeding at a task than did those who were placed in a slumped position. Study 2: Participants who were instructed to lean forward with their fists clenched during the experiment reported feeling anger, while those who sat slumped with their heads down said they felt sadness.

Downward social comparison: Health implications

When victimized by tragic life events (perhaps a crime, an accident, a disease, or the death of a loved one), people like to affiliate with others in the same predicament who have adjusted well, role models who offer hope and guidance. But they tend to compare themselves with others who are worse off, a form of downward social comparison. Clearly it helps to know that life could be worse, which is why most cancer patients tend to compare themselves with others in the same predicament but who are adjusting less well than they are. Study: In a study of 312 women who had early-stage breast cancer and were in peer support groups, Laura Bogart and Vicki Helgeson (2000) had the patients report every week for seven weeks on instances in which they talked to, heard about, or thought about another patient. They found that 53 percent of all the social comparisons made were downward, to others who were worse off , while only 12 percent were upward, to others who were better off (the rest were "lateral" comparisons to similar or dissimilar others). (*) Bogart and Helgeson also found that the more often patients made these social comparisons, the better they felt.

Consciousness: Spotlight

Whether you are mentally focused on a memory, a conversation, a foul odor, the song in your head, your growling stomach, or this sentence, consciousness is like a "spotlight." It can shine on only one object at a point in time, but it can shift rapidly from one object to another and process information outside of awareness.

Self-enhancement: Sandbagging

Yet another paradoxical tactic used to reduce performance pressure is for people to play down their own ability, lower expectations, and publicly predict that they will fail—a selfpresentation strategy known as "sandbagging."