In any social situation, a positive or a negative situation, the most important factor that will influence and affect the situation is the self. Yourself, myself, ourselves or themselves plays a major part in any situation because it is we who make the decisions and influence what the result will be. Then again, if only everything is as simple as this..
Put yourself in a prison as a prisoner, given the situation that your civil rights is stripped of and being humiliated 7 times a day, will you fight back or will you conform to your role as a prisoner? Well for me, I don’t know but how about you? Will you be displaying what you are thinking right now if you are in that situation?
Thus to try to understand any given social situation, we’ll have to know more about ourselves. This is why today I’ll be talking about “The Self” and more about what we think about ourselves!
What actually defines self-concept?
The elements of our self-concepts (our beliefs of ourselves) are called self-schemas. Our self-schemas (how we perceive ourselves) will greatly affect and influence how we perceive, remember, evaluate others and even our processing of information! If ‘Good Looks’ is our central self-schema, we will tend to notice the way people dress or how they look. If ‘Athletics’ is our central self-schema we will tend to notice other’s athletic skills.
Not only that, our self-concept also includes our possible selves such as our ideal selves and the selves that we dread to become in the future. These selves motivate us with a vision of life we long for. For example, we wouldn’t want to become a beggar in the future right..?
In fact the self consist of
1. Self-concept
2. Self- Knowledge
3. Self-Esteem
4. Social Self. ( How this actually develops is dependent on the roles that we play, social comparison, success and failure and of course other’s judgment about ourselves)
I’m sure that in most situations, people will definitely predict another person’s behavior or their own behaviors. Well in fact, most people err in predicting behaviors. More often, those who are closer to us are able to predict more accurately than ourselves. One of the most common errors in predicting future is planning fallacy. It is the underestimation of how long it will take to complete a task. Thus, the best way to improve self prediction is to be more realistic about how these task took in the past. We’re not superman afterall, and it’s impossible to travel from Singapore to Malaysia in 15 minutes (This is including waiting time :D).
How about predicting feelings?
Sometimes we know how we will feel and what will make us happy or blablabla. Other times, we mispredict our responses. In fact, people have the greatest difficulty in predicting the intensity and duration of their future emotions. This is due to impact bias and our tendency to overestimate the enduring impact of an emotion causing event.
What is impact bias?
We tend to commit impact bias because we focus on the negative event and discount everything else that contributes to happiness. This is why we will say, “I think I’m gonna be sad for 10 years when my girlfriend breaks up with me and I’m going to commit suicide if she does that.”. We often forget that there are many other things that could contribute to our happiness at that period of time as well. For example, what if Megan Fox wants to be your girlfriend after that :D. Just an example..
Another reason we often mispredict our feelings is because we are neglecting or even ignorant of our psychological immune system. This tendency to underestimate the speed of our psychological immune system, which enables emotional recovery after negative events is called IMMUNE NEGLECT.
Could there be a cultural self?
Why not?!
In fact different cultural have differing selves, for more individualistic cultures such as America, their selves are more individualized. They give priority to one’s own goals over group goals and defines their identity to personal attribution rather than group identification. (Eg. I’m Smart hehehehe)
Collectivism based countries are countries that believes group belonging is important. The people in collectivism countries usually nurture their interdependent self, where they construct one’s identity in relation to others.
In fact, after knowing so much ‘SELF’, I’m beginning to doubt that I know myself more than anybody in the world. It seems that there are so much more to ourselves than what we think.
Thus to sum things up
Self-Concept
1. Sense of Self
· Self-schemas
· Possible Selves
2. Cultural Self
· Individualistic
· Collectivisation
3. Our flawed Self-Knowledge
· We often do not know why we behave in such a way
· The differing conscious that influence our decisions and perceptions
· Impact Bias and Immune Neglect has led us to overestimate the endurance of our emotional reactions to significant events.
I didn’t know myself could be made up of so many elements, do you?
For my next post I’ll be talking more about Self-esteem and the dark side to it.
Stay tune yeaH@~?
HeADING TO BED NAO!
Good Night !
Oh yeah, you guys should catch this 2010 movie called "The Experiment". It's..
