(FROM) TOWARD UNDERSTANDING
ONESELF
PROLOGUE
Don Hamachek
STUDY NOTES
1. Perhaps the oldest and most familiar of all sayings in any language is the ancient injunction of Socrates: "Know thyself." Virtually everyone agrees on its importance, and many have tried to achieve it, but with results that are a mixed bag of satisfactions and disappointments.
2. Given that we humans are such complex and paradoxical creatures, this outcome is not so surprising. Think about it. It is sometimes easier for us to be warm and friendly to a person we don't like than to be loving and accepting to a person we care for deeply.
3. In each of our individual pursuits for knowing ourselves better, we are inescapably confronted with the problem of meaning--with the question of what life is all about and with how to make it as worthwhile as possible in the time that we have.
4. "Knowing" ourselves totally and completely is probably not possible, nor for that matter is it even necessary. But knowing ourselves better is possible. (Whether it is necessary or not is probably best left for you to decide.)
5. Ultimately, each of us is faced with three questions that must be addressed and answered to find what it is that will give our lives meaning and a sense of direction:
6. These are important questions, concerned as they are with personal identity, real and imagined strengths and weaknesses, personal goals, and life-style preferences.
7. They are, in a larger sense, existential questions, reflecting a they do our opportunities for personal choice, for exercising our freedom and responsibility, and for pointing, as each does, to the infinite number of options we have for living productive, useful lives and for giving meaning to our existence. They are questions that reflect this personal inner etching that we call our sense of self.
THE SELF: A PHILOSOPHICAL IDEA GROWS UP
8. Interest in the self, what it is and how it develops, is not a recent phenomenon. As a theoretical concept, the self has ebbed and flowed with the currents of philosophical and psychological pondering since the seventeenth century when the French mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes first discussed the "cognito," or self, as a thinking substance.
Cogito Ergum Sum = I think therefore I am
With Descartes pointing the way, the self was subjected to the vigorous philosophical examinations of such thinkers as Leibnitz, Locke, Hume, and Berkeley. As psychology evolved from philosophy as a separate entity, the self, as a related construct, moved along with it.
9. However, as the tides of behaviorism swept the shores of psychological thinking during the first 40 years of this century, the self almost disappeared as a theoretical or empirical construct of any stature. Study of the self was not something that could be easily investigated under rigidly controlled laboratory conditions. As a consequence, the subject was not considered appropriate for scientific pursuit. Nonetheless, it was kept alive during the early part of the twentieth century by such men as Cooley, Mead, Dewey,' and, James.' Since World War II, the concept of self has been revived and has exhibited remarkable vitality. For example, Allport writes,
In ... recent years the tide has turned. Perhaps without being fully aware of the historical situation, many psychologists have commenced to embrace what two decades ago would have been considered a heresy. They have re-introduced self and ego unashamedly and, as if to make up for lost time, have employed ancillary concepts such as self-image, self-actualization, self-affirmation, phenomenal ego, ego-involvement, ego-striving, and many other hyphenated elaborations which to experimental positivism still have a slight flavor of scientific obscenity.'
10. Although William James had written a brilliant, insightful chapter on "The Consciousness of Self" in his book Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, it took almost 60 years before systematic empirical research was generated to investigate questions and problems related to the self. Since Raimy's` initial research, which was related to self- references in counseling inter-views, appeared in 1948, almost 2,000 studies were conducted on self and self-concept problems in.just the next two decades.'
11.An enormous amount of research and writing related to the self' and its related components, self-concept, self-image, self- actualization, and the like, has been generated in the past 35 years or so, work that continues to this day. This work has provided the intellectual nutrients that have stimulated growth of the self from a purely metaphysical idea in its infancy to its current status as a legitimate psychological construct. In terms of where the self' is on a growth continuum, I suppose we could best describe it as being in its adolescence.
12. Born from philosophy's womb, nurtured by psycho-philosophical thinking, directed by psychological theory, and disciplined by empirical research, it is now going through the inevitable, lengthy period of refinement and alteration so characteristic of people and ideas as they progress through their own particular "adolescence" toward greater maturity and acceptance--which leads us to an important question.
WHAT IS THE SELF?
13. Anthropologists and philosophers have long sought to delineate those characteristics that make us humans clearly distinguishable from all other animal forms.
Not only can we think, but we can think about our thinking. Not only can we feel, but we can have feelings about our feelings. How many times have you heard yourself say, after a bit of reflection, "How could I have thought that way?" or "How could I have felt that way?"
14. As the self has evolved in psychological literature, it has come to have two distinct meanings. One meaning grows from what has been called the self-as-object definition, referring to our capacity to stand outside of ourselves and evaluate our attitudes, feelings, and behavior from a more or less detached point of view.
15. Statements we may make like "I'm the sort of person who is or "I would describe myself as reflect that capacity.
16. The other meaning stems from what is referred to as the self-as-process definition. In this case, the self is a doer, in the sense that it includes an active group of processes such as thinking, remembering, perceiving, performing, and so forth.
17. Statements such as "I am going to study hard for the exam tomorrow" or "I recall thinking that way once, but my ideas have since changed" reflect the idea that the self is not just what we have and what we are, as suggested in the self-as-object definition, but also what we do.
18. Indeed, a very strong case can be made (and will be made, in the pages ahead) for the idea that what we do is enormously instrumental in determining to ourselves and others who we are.
19. What, then, is the self? Jersild is probably as clear as anyone about what the self is:
A person's self is the sum total of all he can call his. The self includes, among other things, a system of ideas, attitudes, values, and commitments. The self is a person's total subjective environment; it is the distinctive center of experience and significance. The self constitutes a person's inner world as distinguished from the outer world consisting of all other people and things.'
20. The self is not just a physical entity surrounded by skin; it is a psychological construct in which the concept of me and my are blended into an unique identity.
IS THERE ONE SELF OR MANY?
21. You may recall the advice of Polonius to his son, Laertes, in Shakespeare's Hamlet (Scene 1, Act 111):
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
Polonius no doubt was filled with true and noble intentions; his counsel to Laertes seems both reasonable and uncommonly wise. It has a ring of validity and seems to coincide with our ideas about playing straight, being who we are openly, and behaving in a way that is consistent with the self we want to be. But in the non-Shakespearian world of real life and real people, it seems not to work out in quite that way.
22. If someone were to follow you for one week and record all your behavior on camera, how do you think the film record would look? Would we see one self consistently behaving in the same way at all times? Or would we see slightly different versions of that self, depending on the circumstances and the people involved? Consider, for example, how you typically behave when in the company of your very best friend or loved one. Contrast that with how you usually behave when you're with someone you've just met for the first time.
23. If you are like most people, you can quickly see that it is difficult to find a single, basic self to which you can be true. It is not so much that your basic self changes, but rather your presentation of that basic self changes to fit the situation. William James no doubt had this idea in mind when, many years ago, he observed,
Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.... We may practically say that he has as many different social selves as there are distinct groups of persons about whose opinion he cares. He generally shows a different side of himself' to each of these groups.... We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers and to the laborers we employ ... as to our intimate friends.)
24. James was saying here that we have a variety of social selves because we act differently with different types of people. We do not become a different person (after all, we cannot change who we are), but we do have the capacity to show different aspects of the person we are to different people.
25. In his insightful book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, " Goffman suggested that the way we do this is through alterations in the manner or presentations or "face" we show others, which is a kind of staged performance or "front" that we put up in hopes that it will satisfy the expectations we feel others have for us at the moment.
26. When it is done primarily for the purpose of behaving the way we feel others expect us to, it is rightly called impression management. Some people engage in impression management more often-and with greater skill-than others.
(You may have noted that politicians go through their most difficult moments when they have to talk to diverse groups representing different points of view at the same time.) If you have ever been interviewed for a job, you may know what impression management is about from your own experience in presenting what you hoped to be your "best self."
27. The very expression "presenting one's best self" suggests that we have an assortment of "selves" in our psychological closet, which further suggests that there are choices we can make for the 11 self" we wear at any given time. Please note that the self we have been examining is the self we present to others, or our "public self," which involves how we want others to see us. There is another, more private aspect of the self called self-concept, which involves how we see ourselves, an idea that we will be turning to shortly. However, before we do there is an important question we need to address.
WHY DO WE PRESENT DIFFERENT SELVES?
28. Most people in our social world see only an edited version of our behavior, which is usually staged to present a certain image. Goffman described those stagings as theatrical performances in which each of us acts out a "line," which is basically a set of carefully chosen verbal and nonverbal acts that expresses the self we feel we have to be at a particular moment. In Goffman's view, each of us seems to be merely the sum of our various performances.
29. The question remains: Why do we behave in this way? Essentially, it's a matter of necessity. Goffman, for example, argued that societal norms are such that we expect to present ourselves in certain ways when interacting with our superiors, parents, peers, co-workers, subordinates, and so forth. Goffman also pointed out that social norms for what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior also support other people's acceptance of' our efforts to present ourselves in certain ways.
30. Though people may be skeptical and even wary of another person's self-presentation, they rarely challenge it. For example if a salesperson approaches you with gushing enthusiasm for his or her product, are you apt to question that person's honesty, even when you have doubts about it? If an acquaintance, in passing, hopes you have a "nice day," are you inclined to question his sincerity, even when you strongly suspect it is missing-, Maybe you, as an individual, would raise those questions, but it is likely that most people would not. Most of the time, we respond to each other's presentations of the public self in predictable, ritualistic ways. Unless our self-presentation is so blatantly out of line with what could be considered normal behavior, we tend to keep our suspicions to ourselves. We politely listen to the gushy salesperson; we express the hope that our acquaintance also has a pleasant day.
31. To sum up: we tend to present different aspects of the self at different times to different people as part of an overall impression management effort. It appears that we engage in impression management for essentially two reasons:
32. The idea of turning on a particular aspect of the public self depending on the situation is perfectly normal behavior and all of us do it. The fact that we don't tell the boss what we really feel about her, that we don't behave at a dignified social function the way we might at a raucous party, or that we don't confront John's efforts to be sincere when we think he's being the opposite has obvious social advantages.
33. It helps us avoid needless, endless interpersonal conflicts (think about anyone you happen to know who seems to enjoy telling people what he or she really thinks about them and you'll have an idea of what I mean here). It also helps us behave appropriately and in a manner that fits the situation.
34.You may, for example, really want to give that so-and-so boss of yours a piece of your mind, but to do so now, in this particular situation at this time, may not be timely or appropriate, so you are patient, even friendly-you put on a "face," as Goffman would say-and wait for a better moment.
Each of us, then, has a certain number of "selves" from which to choose for a particular self-presentation. Although we all engage in some impression management behavior, we differ greatly in how much.
DIFFERENCES IN SELF-PRESENTATION: HIGH VERSUS LOW SELF-MONITORS
35.You no doubt have seen that some people are particularly sensitive to the ways they present and express themselves in social situations-at meetings, parties, job interviews, encounters of all kinds in which an individual might choose to create and maintain a certain kind of appearance. On the other hand, there are people who seem to present a "self" that is basically the same from one situation to another.
36.According to theory and research,"," high self-monitors are good "people-readers"; they are people who have developed the ability to monitor carefully their own behavior and to adjust skillfully the self they are presenting when signals from others tell them that they are not having the desired effect. They tend to be good impression managers. Low self-monitors, on the other hand, seem not so concerned about the social cues that surround them; instead, they tend to express what they feel rather than tailor their presentation of self to fit the situation. This is quite different from the behavior of high self-monitors who, as Lippa's studies' have shown, may be such polished actors that they can successfully adopt the mannerisms of a friendly, outgoing, extraverted personality and then do an about-face and convey, just as convincingly, a somewhat shy, withdrawn, and introverted individual.
37. Research has pointed to some other interesting behavioral differences between high and low self-monitors. (Do you see yourself in any of these findings?)
1 . High self-monitors are more accurate in judging other people's emotional states.'s
2. Both men and women who are high self-monitors are more likely than the lows to notice and accurately remember information about others."
3. High self-monitors tend to be less shy and more assertive.")
4. High self-monitors are more likely to emerge as leaders of a group (perhaps because of the very behaviors just mentioned).
38.As Snyder and his colleague observed, there sometimes is minimal correspondence between the private attitudes and public behaviors of high self-monitoring individuals. Their words and deeds may reveal little information about their true inner feelings or attitudes, either to others or to, of all people, themselves. If people are successful for a long enough time at playing various roles, they may begin to wonder who they really are. This sometimes happens to professional performers, who, precisely because they have become so adept at playing various roles, arc anxious and uncomfortable in social situations in which there are no parts to play, no scripts to guide them.
39.Although high self-monitors are skilled practitioners of impression management, it would not be accurate to say that they necessarily use these skills for deceptive or manipulative purposes. Indeed, in their ongoing relationships with friends and acquaintances, they seem eager to use their self-monitoring abilities to facilitate smooth social interactions.
40.We find some evidence for this in an interesting study by Ickes and Barnes," who arranged for pairs of strangers to spend time together in a waiting room, ostensibly to wait their turn to participate in an experiment. All possible pairings of same-sex high, moderate, and low self-monitors were represented. Using videotapes and audiotapes, the researchers recorded the behavior of each pair (unknown to them) over a five-minute period and then analyzed the interactions. Not surprisingly, high self- monitors took an active and controlling role in the conversation soon after meeting the other person. They were the ones who usually talked first and who kept the conversation going. They not only talked more but also were viewed by themselves and their partners as having a greater need to talk more. It was as if high self-monitoring persons were somewhat more concerned about managing themselves in such a way as to create, facilitate, and maintain smooth interactions. Interestingly, the longest silences occurred among high and low self-monitors paired together, and the ones who felt most self-conscious were the high self-monitors within the high-low pairs. This is not surprising. Because high self-monitors depend on as many social cues as possible to present themselves in ways they hope will be appropriate, they may indeed become self- conscious and uneasy in the company of someone who is not easy to read.
All in all, high and low self-monitors have quite different ideas about what constitutes a self, and their views are quite well suited to how they live. High self-monitoring people see themselves as flexible and adaptive and capable of presenting a social self designed to fit the situation at hand. They believe that a person is whomever he or she appears to be at any particular moment. In effect, they say, "The me I am is the me I am right now." This view of self fits well with how high self-monitoring people present themselves to the world, a view that allows them to behave in ways that are consistent with how they believe they should act.
Low self-monitors, in contrast, have a firmer, more focused idea of what a self should be. They are more likely to view the self as a single identity that should not be compromised for the sake of situational demands. Thus, they value and strive for congruence between how they see themselves and how they behave, and thev see their actions as honest reflections of how they fee and think. It is this particular view of the self that accounts for the low self monitoring individual's relatively consistent and stable self-presentation.
High self-monitoring individuals tend to be flexible and adaptive-bhav ior on the plus side-but their efforts to become what they feel situation and people want them to be may make them emotionally and psychologicallA elusive and evasive- behavior on the negative side. Low sel f-monito ring indi viduals tend to be relatively stable and consistent-behavior on the positive side-but their firm and unchanging demeanor may cause them to be unre sponsive and insensitive-behavior on the more negative side. There are strengths and weaknesses associated with both high and low self-monitoring behaviors. The more extreme either behavior, the more likely it is that the person reflecting it will suffer its shortcomings. In life itself, it is not likely that very many of us qualify for always being high or low self-monitors, as the case may be; rather we lean by degrees in one direction or the other. Still chances are that each of us tends to lean one way or the other more often than not, and having an awareness of our own emotional tilting is the first step toward creating a self that is consciously chosen, as opposed to being molded largely by unconscious determinants.
What is important in understanding oneself and others, then, is not the elusive question of whether there is necessarily one self or many but rather how different people express those components of their experience and behavior that they privately regard as "me." It is to this more private sense of self to which we now turn.
SELF-CONCEPT: THE PRIVATE ME THAT ONLY I CAN SEE
The aspect of self that we have focused on to this point has been what is properly called the "public self," which, as mentioned earlier, is how we want others to see us. We are talking now about the more private aspects of the self, known as our self-concept, which involves how we see ourselves. In this sense, self-concept refers to that particular cluster of ideas and attitudes we have about ourselves at any given moment. Another way of understanding it is to view self-concept as the organized cognitive structure of ourselves as individuals derived from the sum of all our experiences. From these experiences grow the ideas (concepts) of the kind of person we see ourselves as being. Self-concept, then, is our own private mental image of ourselves, a collection of beliefs about the kind of person we are.
ASPECTS OF SELF CONCEPT
One person sees himself as too short; another sees himself as very friendly; still another views herself as a feeling person; yet another describes herself as above average intelligence. You can quickly see that self'-concept involves at least four separate but interrelated aspects, a physical self-concept, a social self-concept, an emotional self-concept, and an intellectual self-concept. They are separate because each has a uniqueness of its own, but they are interrelated insofar as our self-concept in one area may influence our selfconcept in other areas. For example, if, for whatever reason, my physical selfconcept is somewhat shaky, it may inhibit the risks I am willing to take with my social self, and it may stand in the way of expressing my emotional self more fully. On the other hand, if I have a positive physical self-concept, it may help me to feel more confident about my social self, and it may enable me to express my emotional self more frequently. The various aspects of the self that contribute to our overall feelings about ourselves as individuals do not exist as watertight compartments, each protected from the other. What is felt in one area spills over to some extent to other areas. If, for example, you receive a warm, affirming note from a loved one (positive input to your emotional self-concept), your social self may feel more expressive, your physical self may feel more buoyant, and your intellectual self may even feel a bit sharper. I do not have to remind you of how you have felt following a "Dear John" letter from a loved one or after a serious argument with that person. Whether it is elation or depression we feel, it is not just our emotional self that is involved but a feeling that cuts across all aspects of our being.
The interconnectedness of our emotional circuitry is important to understand and appreciate if for no other reason than to help us see that, whether in ourselves or others, a short circuit in one part of the system can affect all other parts. Sometimes the short-circuited part of the self can be fixed directly. For example, a student in one of my graduate courses, painfully shy, mustered up the courage to take several classes in public speaking and even attended a weekend assertiveness training workshop. It almost frightened her to death, but she did it. As a consequence, she emerged with a new image of herself as a social person (this didn't happen overnight; about 20 weeks were involved here), which not only enabled her to interact in social situations with greater confidence but also made it possible for her to try out for a women's intramural basketball team (she made it) and to take a tough statistics course she had been avoiding. As her social self-concept grew stronger from a direct focus on ways to strengthen it, so too did her willingness to risk her physical and intellectual self, positive steps in the right direction because without risk there is little chance for gain.
In other instances, a short-circuited aspect of the self has to be repaired more indirectly. We see illustrations of this in various compensatory behaviors. For example, Donna may not be as attractive as she would like to be (low physical self- concept), but she works very hard at her studies (enhances her intellectual self-concept) and makes an effort to be a friendly, pleasant person, ready and willing to help others (develops a positive social concept). David may feel that he is not as smart as he would like to be (low intellectual self-concept), but he puts extra time into his studiesand works on pro ' jects for extra credit whenever possible (does what he can to enhance the intelicctual image), and he exercises every day so he can look good, feel good, and keep his weight down (maintains a high physical self-image). Both Donna and David compensate for what they see as shortcomings in themselves by strengthening other aspects of the self they present to others and/or by working extra hard on the perceived shortcoming.
FACETS OF SELF-ESTEEM
The self we perceive ourselves as being may or may not be similar to the self we ideally would like to be, and it may or may not be similar to the self we really are. Our perception of who we are, how we look, how well we do, and so forth is only one facet of our overall concept of self. It is necessary to consider our "ideal" self-the self we would like to be-and our "real" self- the self that can be assessed and measured by more objective appraisals than our own subjective estimates.
For example, let's assume that Jim rates himself rather low on a physical attractiveness scale. Let us further assume that ideally he would like to be a handsome man. Go one step further and assume that by objective measures-e.g., impartial judgments by many people- ' Jim's "real" physical self' is considered at least average in attractiveness and even nice looking. If we could sketch this idea diagramatically, the three aspects related to Jim's attractiveness might look like Figure I.I. There is a fair amount of discrepancy between the three facets of Jim's concept of himself. Actually, Jim's ideal self and his real self greatly overlap, but his perceived self, the way he sees himself (and the one that really counts), is more unconnected to the other two.
Consider another example. Imagine that Jane perceives herself as having above average social skills, but ideally she would like to have exceptional social skills. Imagine, further, that her "real" social skills as determined by her actual interactions are perceived by others as above average. As Jane's situation is depicted in Figure 1. 1, you can see that there is considerably more overlapping, or congruency, among her three facets of self. When considered in light of Rogers' clinical and empirical research findings which suggest that high levels of self-congruency are related to a greater likelihood of phychological health, Jane's overlapping selves bode well for her emotional well-being. Jim, on the other hand, may have more trouble feeling like an integrated person precisely because his perceived self has so little in common with either his ideal self or his real self. Generally speaking, the greater the gap between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we really want to be, the more likely it is that we will be victims in varying degrees and of variousforms of worry, depression, and low self-esteem.
Our concept of self is, indeed, a collection of beliefs about the kind of person we are, but it is a belief system that may differ in relation to different facets of the self. We may have more global concepts of ourselves-A am a good person" or "I am an intelligent person--and we can have more specific concepts of ourselves-"I am a good person when it comes to getting work done on time" or "I am an intelligent person in math." In each case, whether you see yourself specifically or globally as "good" or "intelligent" or whatever, this perception of self as you experience it is measured against th( ideal self you want to be. You can usually tell that a discrepancy exist,, between your perceived self and your ideal self when you feel dissatisfied witY how you look, feel, behave, or perform. When the discrepancy is large, you will seldom think that what you've done or how you've performed or how you look is good enough.
When we have a chronic low self-concept in relation to any one of the foui major aspects of the self-physical, emotional, social, intellectual-it may N triggered and sustained by any one or more of the following three causes: (I we have established expectations that are unreachable and unreasonable, (2 we have chosen goals that are incompatible with our abilities or interests (ol both), or (3) we have not put as much effort and time into achieving our goal! as we could.
When one's self-concept in general or in any particular area is low, so, to is self-esteem, an idea we turn to now.
THE SELF-ESTEEM COMPONENT OF SELF-PERCEPTIONS
Whereas self-concept is the cognitive part of self-perception, a way to under stand self-esteem is to view it as the qffective dimension of self-perception That is, not only do we have certain ideas about who we are, but also we hav( certainfeelings about who we are. Self-concept is the purely descriptive aspec of our self-perceptions; for example, we might say, "I am a student" or " weigh 170 pounds" or "I have many friends." These are descriptive state ments that can be easily enough verified. Self-esteem, on the other hand, i the evaluative component of our self-perceptions and is reflected in state ments such as "I am an excellent (or average or poor) student" or "My weigh is ideal" or "I am a friendly person." The descriptive statement "I am a stu dent" is part of self-concept but is not necessarily relevant to self-esteem; th( statement "I am an excellent student," on the other hand, clearly is. Self esteem, then, is constructed out of our evaluations of the things we do, o who we are, and of what we achieve in terms of our private assessments o the goodness, worthiness, and/or significance of those things.
Important questions need answering: how do people decide what is "good' or "worthwhile" or "significant?" What are the intrapersonal factors an( interpersonal experiences that seem most likely to influence, for better o worse, one s feelings of self-esteem? Let us turn our attention to thes4 questions.
Social Comparisons Influence Self-Esteem
James observed that how people feel about themselves depends largely oi how they compare themselves with others. In a famous passage illustratinj this idea, James wrote,
example, if we are outperformed by somebody we perceive as far inferior to ourselves, the performance can be dismissed as an isolated incident. Selfesteem is not apt to suffer much because of the tendency to consider the inferior person too far below us for comparison.
The comparisons we've looked at are comparisons of performance and ability. What happens when people compare themselves with others in appearance?
In a cleverly designed study by Morse and Gergen," male applicants were recruited for interesting summer work that paid well. As each applicant arrived for an interview, he was seated alone in a room with a long table and given a long battery of forms to fill out, among which was a self-esteem test. The applicant was told that his responses on this test had nothing to do with being hired but that his honest answers were needed to construct a good test. When the applicant had completed half the self-esteem test, an accomplice of the investigators was sent in-supposedly another applicant for thejob. In half of the cases, the accomplice was an impressive figure: nice-looking suit, polished shoes, and a smart attach~ case, from which he took a sharpened pencil, a sliderule, and a book by Plato. Morse and Gergen privately referred to him as Mr. Clean. The other half of the job applicants were exposed to the same collaborator, but this time he was dressed in a smelly sweatshirt, torn pants, and several days' worth of whiskers. He looked a bit dazed, had no pencils, and as he slumped into his chair, tossed a dog-eared copy of Harold Robbins' The Carpetbaggers on the table. He was, appropriately enough, labeled Mr. Dirty. There was no verbal exchange between the accomplice and the subject. After the accomplice was seated, the real applicant completed the second half of the self-esteem test.
When the self-esteem scores were analyzed, a striking difference was noted. In the presence of Mr. Clean, applicants showed a marked decline in good feelings about themselves. They suddenly felt sloppy, stupid, and generally inferior by comparison. Ratings were significantly more negative than they had been before Mr. Clean arrived. Mr. Dirty, on the other hand, gave everyone a psychological lift. After his entrance, applicants showed a marked increase in self-esteem; they felt more handsome, confident, and optimistic. It appears that we may feel terrific or awful about our physical self, depending, at least in part, on how those around us look. If you've ever gone to a party where everyone is dressed up and you're in a pair of jeans, you will understand.
All in all, the groups we compare ourselves with play an important part in helping us sort through how we feel and think about ourselves. Because high self-esteem usually comes from being able to do one or two things at least as well as, if not a trifle better than, most other people, it would be difficult to maintain, not to mention enhance, self-esteem if we compared ourselves with persons who were obviously either too superior or too inferior to ourselves in accomplishment. In the first case it's a losing battle, whereas in the second case it's a hollow victory.
I am not often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of mv empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a vear, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and lady-killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a "tone-poet" and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and lady-killer could not keep house in the same tenement of clay ... to make any of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed.... So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them.... 1, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know more psychology than 1. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all.
I think it is clear from this quotation that how james felt about himsel depended, in large measure, on how he saw himself in comparison to other psychologists. In other words, we might generalize that our feelings of selfworth and self-esteem grow in large part from our perceptions of where we see ourselves in relation to persons whose skills, abilities, and talents are similar to your own.
Mettee and Riskin" found some interesting experimental evidence for this statement by pitting pairs of college women against each other in written tests. After revealing the results of the tests, they asked each woman whether she liked her partner. To their surprise they found that the woman who was decisively beaten by her partner tended to like that partner. The probable reason for this outcome is that the woman who was defeated by a wide margin didn't really compare herself to her competitor because she saw the other person as too different from herself for comparison. But the woman who was defeated by only a slight margin perceived herself as worse than her competitor. This threatened her self-esteem, and in defense she developed a strong dislike for her competitor. Mettee and Riskin speculated that the most accurate and hence most potent comparison information is derived from people who are similar to us. When we perceive others as greatly dissimilar, they are perceived as incomparable. This comparable-incomparable distinction allows people to screen out much negative information about themselves because the only information that really "counts" comes from comparable people.
Other, related research supports this idea., Thus, C students tend to compare themselves with other C students and A students compare themselves with other A students. The point is, most of us "back" ourselves to be at least as good as most others in one or two areas, and the reference group we use for comparison will tend to be more like us than unlike us. We might add, too, that this same comparable-incomparable defense system is used to protect us from the achievements of persons we may regard as inferior.
Feedback from Others Affects Self -Esteem
Have you ever begun a day feeling reasonably good about yourself and the either (1) someone said to you something like "Gee, what's wrong with you today? You don't look well at all" or (2) you received a lower grade than you expected on a test? If doing well on that test was important to you, your selfesteem probably took a dip because performance fell below expectations. 11 the feedback (appraisals, evaluations) about how bad you looked came frorr. a highly credible source- someone who knew you and was an emotionally important person in your life-your self-esteem would sink further than if il came from someone who didn't know you and wasn't important to you. Bergin," for example, found that we tend to dismiss or discount the feedback w( receive from those we dislike or consider incompetent. On the other hand Backman and his colleagues" noted that people give more weight to feedbacl received from individuals perceived as important, attractive, competent, ol powerful.
Generally speaking, research" has shown that how we feel about ourselve! in terms of self-worth and self-esteem is related to the sort of reflecte( appraisals we get from those in our social world.
As an example of how this process works, Gergen" described an experi ment in which a clinical psychology trainee interviewed 18 women under graduates. She asked each student a variety of questions, some related t( background information and many related to how each woman saw herself Every time the student said something positive about herself, the traine smiled, nodded approvingly, and occasionally spoke agreement. Conversely the trainer would disapprove of the student's negative self-evaluations: sh, might shake her head, frown, or say something in disagreement. By agreeinj with the positive and disagreeing with the negative, it became clear to th, student that she was viewed very positively. As a result of this sort of selectiv feedback, the students' self-evaluations grew progessively more positive. Thi increase was decidedly greater than the minimal change that was observed il a control group, where students received no feedback from the trainer.
The differential effect of feedback on self-esteem was nicely demonstrated in a study by Videbeck," who randomly chose half the students in a speech class to receive positive evaluative feedback from a "visiting expert" on the poems they read aloud in class, whereas the other half received negative evaluative feedback. Unbeknown to the students, of course, the feedback they received was actually predetermined and quite unrelated to their performance. After receiving the feedback, the students were asked to evaluate themselves. As you may have guessed, students who received the positive evaluations showed significantly more positive self-ratings on their assessment of speech skills than those who had received the more negative evaluations.
This research suggests that sometimes the feedback we receive from others, especially those who are credible and in some way significant to us, is so powerful and so related to our self-image that it may trigger either a heightened or reduced sense of self-esteem. However, as Shrauger and Schoeneman" pointed out in a critical review of self-appraisal literature, it would be erroneous to conclude that feedback is always responsible for causing corresponding changes in feelings of self- esteem. In some cases, people's actual abilities are most responsible for producing both their self-evaluations and the evaluations they receive from others, in which case reflected appraisals may have only minimal impact. For example, if you are already a fine student or a superb tennis player, your high self-esteem is likely to be nurtured more by your excellent performance than by others' feedback about it. In other cases, it may be that people form their own self-evaluations first and behave in such a way as to elicit the positive feedback. For example, assume that you are just an average student and just a so-so tennis player, but vou talk in a self-assured way about your studies and play your so-so tennis with confidence and no apologies. Although the excellent performance is missing, the positive "I'm OK" attitude is not, which may elicit positive feedback from others based more on your attitude than your scores. Of course it can work the other way, too. That is, you could be a fine student or an excellent tennis player but so successfully degrade your own abilities that others end up agreeing with you, and you with them in a self-perpetuating cycle.
To summarize, positive feedback tends to raise self-esteem and negative feedback tends to lower it. We are usually more vulnerable to feedback that comes from people who are important to us in some way and who are credible. If we begin by projecting positive self-esteem (e.g., confidence in our own abilities), this is more likely to elicit positive feedback in return (but not if we are perceived as self-centered braggarts, which may bring us scorn rather than praise). Even though it is not possible to specify exactly which comes first, positive self-esteem or positive feedback, it seems reasonable to suggest that each is mutually reinforcing to the other to the extent that a positive expression of one facilitates a positive expression in the other.
You may get a more personal glimpse of the power of positive feedback on self-esteem by making a deliberate effort to give liberal doses of it to a friend or loved one whose ego may need a boost. It has to be real-you have to mean it-and it works best when it is specific rather than general. For exam ple, to say to a somewhat timid friend who just asserted him- or herself, however waveringly, "I like it when you stand up for yourself" is much more potent than saying, "I like it when people stand up for themselves."
See for yourself how your positive feedback can make a difference to
the people in your life.