Six-year old Coy Mathis has long hair, loves to wear pink dresses, and tears up when anyone refers to her as a boy. She was born biologically male but identifies as female. Her parents and doctors agree that her gender identity is simply part of who Coy is as a human being (Frosch, 2013). So, who are you? You may describe yourself to others as a male, a female, a college student, a Latino, a Buddhist, a heterosexual, a biology major, an uncle, a mother, or a friend. But who you are involves much more.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, your awareness and understanding of who you are—as interpreted and influenced by your thoughts, actions, abilities, values, goals, and ideals—is your self-concept. You develop a self-concept by thinking about your strengths and weaknesses, observing your behavior in a wide variety of situations, witnessing your own reactions to situations, and watching others’ reactions to you (Snyder, 1979). You form beliefs about yourself as active and scattered, as conservative and funny, as plain and popular—and so on. You even form beliefs about how you tend to behave and how you expect to be treated in a variety of social situations. These are your cognitions. Remember from the model in Chapter 1 that both cognition and behavior make a communicator.

Your self-concept powerfully shapes your communication with others. It can affect what you think of other people, because your perception of others is related to how you think of yourself (Edwards, 1990). If attributes like honesty and wit are important to you, you will consider them important traits in other people. If you think that swearing makes you appear vulgar, you will likely think the same of others when they use foul language. When you interact with others, your self-concept comes into play as well. As we shall see when we discuss self-esteem and self-efficacy, it can affect how apprehensive you get in certain communication situations (McCroskey, 1997), whether you’re even willing to interact with others (Cegala, 1981), and how you approach someone with a request (timidly or with confidence).

So while your self-concept strongly influences how and when you communicate with others, the reverse is also true: when you interact with other people, you get impressions from them that reveal what they think about you as a person and as a communicator. This information gets reincorporated into your self-concept. Direct evidence comes in the form of compliments, insults, support, or negative remarks. Indirect evidence that influences your self-concept might be revealed through innuendo, gossip, subtle nonverbal cues, or a lack of communication. For instance, if you ask a friend to evaluate your promise as a contestant on America’s Got Talent and he changes the subject, you might get the impression that you’re not such a great singer after all.

Our interactions with others, and their responses to us, often cause us to compare ourselves to others as we develop our ideas about ourselves. Social comparison theory (Bishop, 2000; Festinger, 1954) explains that we are driven to gain an accurate sense of self by examining our qualities and abilities in comparison to others. For example, if you are the least financially well-off among your friends, you may consider yourself as poor; given the same income and resources but a circle of less fortunate friends, you might think of yourself as well-off. Images in the media can have a similar effect. For example, if you compare your body shape with models in fashion magazines, you might come to believe that you have flat hair, thin eyelashes, or short legs! The beliefs we develop about ourselves—our bodies, our personalities, our abilities—exert a powerful influence on our lives, our relationships, and our communication. Struggles with self-concept—the way we perceive ourselves—are closely related to the way we feel about ourselves, of course, so we next examine how these feelings relate to communication.