PSYC333 Lecture 6 - Jan. 31
• Perceived superiority (and inferiority)
• When we make judgments about the self, it is often by way of comparisons to oth-
• Where does our sense of self come from?
• (How) do others influence our sense of self?
• Others’ appraisals (of us) shape self understanding:
•The Looking Glass Self (Cooley, 1902)
• Our sense of self is based on how others see us...
Symbolic Interactionism (Mead, 1934):
• The self is developed and understood in the social realm
Others’ appraisals shape our understanding of ourselves
• How others see us is the way we see ourselves
• Correlations between self-views and other views are small
•Very little correlations between realistic view of self and others REALLY see us
However, self views correlate highly with how we think others see us
• Some distortion when we think about the self (illusions)
• We distort the feedback we receive from others
• We overestimate the attention we attract
People do not always tell us what they really think of us
• What are we transmitting…
Self Presentation (and the Search for Social Validation):
• Attempts to convey information about and/or images of the self to others
• Act of regulating one’s identity for real or imagined audiences; why?
• • Gain an identity
•Our identity is determined/defined based on how we interact with others
How Favourable an Image to Convey?
• Test on “social and non-social intelligence”
Ps given negative feedback about abilities
• Expect to perform privately or publically
• Self-present to group about abilities - who boasts? Who is modest?
• Only those who will perform privately boast
• But what if you can’t boast?
Enhancing with Friends vs. Strangers (Tice et all, 1995):
• Strangers can’t contradict claims
• Most interpersonal interactions take place between people who known each other
• Self presentation to friends more modest than to strangers
• Also, requires cognitive effort to override friend/modesty and stranger/enhance-
• Tested Ps of memory after presentation
• Those who were in friend/modesty and stranger/enhancement had better memory;
counter group had impaired memory
Failure to Recognize Self-Presentation (Vorauer & Miller, 1997):
Does positivity or negativity of the other influence presenter?
• We tune our presentation based on the people we are presenting to
• Match behaviour of the other person
• Learn the other person has either:
• High self esteem and positive experiences
Low self esteem and negative experiences
• Interviewed by the other person
• If the observers thought they were interacting with something with the positive
condition, they rated them higher; those with a negative condition were rated
lower • The Ps who were not informed of the condition of the interviewer had the same
Self Presentation & Self-Fulfilling Prophecies - Study 1:
• When a person has a certain expectation about another person, they elicit the be-
haviour of the expectations
• When we think another person has a certain expectation of us, we act in those
ways to verify the expectations
• Study 1: Impression formation
• Pre-questionnaire: agree/disagree with traditional female stereotypic traits
• “Men should be the dominant person in relationships”
• “You’re going to interact with a male student”
• Form impression based on information provided
• “Ideal woman would be quiet at a cocktail party…”
• Ps then competed questionnaire about themselves (pre-study questionnaire) to
give to partner
• Do they conform to male stereotype?
• If unattractive, no (“who cares what he thinks?”)