Social Psychology. Daniel W. Barrett
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that organize knowledge about particular objects of thought, such as concepts, experiences, or roles
Self-Schema: Schema that organizes information about oneself with respect to specific domains of one’s life
Self-Discrepancy Theory: Idea that each person has an actual, ideal, and ought self
Actual Self: Who one is
Ideal Self: Image of a hypothetical self that possesses the qualities and features that a person’s wishes he had
Ought Self: Image of a hypothetical self who a person believes important others think he or she should be
Self-Discrepancy Theory and Possible Selves
When you reflect on who you are, do you ever think about your possible selves, such as who you would like to be or what kind of a person you ought to be? Self-discrepancy theory postulates that each of us has an actual self, an ideal self, and an ought self (Hardin & Larsen, 2014; Higgins, 1989b, 1997; Stanley & Burrow, 2015). Our understanding of who we are is called our actual self and is closely tied to our self-concept. In addition, we can imagine the person we would like to be—called the ideal self—that consists of the qualities and features that we wish we had (Hardin & Larsen, 2014). Perhaps you work at Starbucks but would rather be interning at a local mental health center. When we feel a discrepancy such as this between our actual and ideal selves, we tend to feel frustrated, dissatisfied, or disappointed (Higgins, 1989).
People also have thoughts about who they think others think they should be—what is called the ought self. Your ought self comes into play, say, if your parents own the local hardware store and have been pressuring you to work there and eventually be the owner. You think that you ought to be following the career that your parents prefer, but you have elected to choose your own career path (see photos). Here you would experience an actual-ought discrepancy and may feel guilty, ashamed, or anxious (Higgins, 1989b). As you can see, discrepancies between the actual, ideal, and ought selves have important implications for how we evaluate or feel about ourselves, a theme we will return to later in this chapter in the context of self-esteem.
©iStockphoto.com/sturti.
Is, Ought, and Ideal Selves
Are you who your parents want you to be? Who you want to be? Perhaps you work in package delivery (is self), yet you want to be a basketball player (ideal self), and your parents want you to be a doctor (ought self).
©iStockphoto.com/annebaek.
©iStockphoto.com/Aksonov.
Think Again!
1 What is your self-concept? A schema?
2 What are your actual, ideal, and ought selves?
Knowing Who We Are: Introspection And Self-Perception
How do you know who you are? Sounds like an odd question, right? You are probably thinking something like “I know who I am because I can look inside and see myself.” Unfortunately, looking internally at the self to examine who we are, how we feel, and so forth—a process we call introspection—may not be as straightforward as it seems (Corallo, Sackur, Dehaene, & Sigman, 2008). As we’ll discuss in a moment, there is no guarantee that mere reflection will uncover important aspects of the self. When introspection falls short, we can engage in a second process called self-perception, during which we essentially examine ourselves from the outside, similarly to what others may do. A third method for learning about the self involves focusing on the responses that other people have to us. In these different ways, others can serve as mirrors that help us better understand who we are.
Cooley (1902) called this aspect of the self the looking-glass self, because we see ourselves partially through the eyes of others or, rather, how we think they perceive us (see Chapter 3). Not only can we gain self-knowledge by taking the perspectives of others, but we may also derive an element of our self-esteem from how we believe they appraise us, what are called reflected self-appraisals (Asencio, 2013; Carlson, Vazire, & Furr, 2011). The interdependence between our self-understanding and our relationships with others further demonstrates once again the close connection between two of our fundamental questions: the nature of the self and of our sociality.
Introspection
Who was your third-grade teacher? It probably took you a moment, but eventually the name popped into your mind. How did you produce this answer? Easily, you respond—I just thought about it! Or maybe—I just knew it! But if I were to press you further and ask you to explain how you retrieved this from your memory, you’d likely hesitate before offering an answer. This is because you typically do not have access to the “how” you generated your response but only the response itself. Let’s look at another scenario. Suppose I were to place four blue sweaters side-by-side on a shelf. I inform you that the sweaters are of differing quality and ask you and nineteen others to individually select your preferred sweater. Unbeknownst to all of you, the sweaters are identical. Judging by the results of a similar study by Nisbett and Wilson (1977), the vast majority would pick the sweater farthest to the right. When asked to explain why, most would likely state that the one on the right was of better quality than the other three. You would be unaware that the physical placement of the sweaters had an impact on your choice. Why? Because humans often have little access to and knowledge of our internal processes. Nisbett and Wilson (1977) have provocatively argued that, although we know the result of our thought processes (e.g., what our third-grade teacher’s name was), we often do not know how we arrived at that result.
All of us engage in introspection in our efforts to better understand ourselves.
David Grossman / Science Source.
In the fascinating book Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson (2002) reviews the vast research literature on this topic that provides convincing evidence regarding the limits of introspection. Wilson shows that not only are we unaware of how are thoughts are produced, we often don’t know who we are, what we feel, or why we do what we do! In another study, participants watched a film either while a very loud power saw was operated just outside of the room or with no distracting noise (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Respondents were asked to rate the film on a number of dimensions, and the distraction participants also indicated whether or not the noise affected their evaluations. A majority of the distraction participants reported, erroneously, that the noise had in fact lowered their evaluation of the film. Here, participants believed a stimulus affected them when in fact it did not, and again, introspection failed to uncover the truth.
There is another way in which introspection can fail us: The process of thinking about how we feel can itself change the way we feel (T. D. Wilson et al., 1993). In one study, participants evaluated two artistic and three humorous posters and later had the opportunity to bring one of them home after the experiment. Participants in the reasons condition described why they liked each of the posters, whereas those in the control condition did not. Wilson et al. predicted and found that participants in the reasons condition were more likely to bring home a humorous poster than were control participants, most likely because it was easier to provide a rationale for preferring the humorous poster to the art poster: it was funny. When all participants were asked at the end of the semester how happy they were with their poster choice, those who had earlier