12.6 The Self: Personality in the Mirror

Imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning, drag yourself into the bathroom, look into the mirror, and don’t recognize the face looking back at you. This was the plight of a patient studied by neurologist Todd Feinberg (2001). The woman, married for 30 years and the mother of two grown children, one day began to respond to her mirror image as if it were a different person. She talked to and challenged the person in the mirror. When there was no response, she tried to attack it as if it were an intruder. Her husband, shaken by this bizarre behavior, brought her to the neurologist, who was gradually able to convince her that the image in the mirror was in fact herself.

Most of us are pretty familiar with the face that looks back at us from every mirror. We develop the ability to recognize ourselves in mirrors by 18 months of age (as discussed in the Consciousness chapter), and we share this skill with chimpanzees and other apes that have been raised in the presence of mirrors. Self-recognition in mirrors signals our amazing capacity for reflexive thinking, for directing attention to our own thoughts, feelings, and actions—an ability that enables us to construct ideas about our own personality. Unlike a cow, which will never know that it has a poor sense of humor, or a cat, which will never know that it is awfully friendly, humans have rich and detailed self-knowledge.

What do these self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Wanda Wulz, and Jean-Michel Basquiat reveal about each artist’s self-concept?

KAHLOC • © ALBRIGHT-KNOXART GALLERY/CORBIS
VAN GOGH • © CDEAGOSTINI/SUPERSTOCK
PICASSO • PAINTING/ALAMY
DALI • BY PERMISSION OF THE SALVADOR DALIE STATE. © PHILIPPEHALSMAN/MAGNUM
WULZ • ALINARI/ARTRESOURCE, NY
BASQUIAT • BANQUE D’IMAGES, ADAGP/ART RESOURCE, NY

Admittedly, none of us know all there is to know about our own personality. In fact, sometimes others may know us better than we know ourselves (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). But we do have enough self-knowledge to respond reliably to personality inventories and report on our traits and behaviors. These observations draw on what we think about ourselves (our self-concept) and on how we feel about ourselves (our self-esteem). Self-concept and self-esteem are critically important facets of personality, not just because they reveal how people see their own personalities, but because they also guide how people think others will see them.

Self-Concept

In his renowned psychology textbook, William James (1890) included a theory of self in which he pointed to the self’s two facets, the I and the Me. The I is the self that thinks, experiences, and acts in the world; it is the self as a knower. The Me is the self that is an object in the world; it is the self that is known. The I is much like consciousness, then, a perspective on all of experience (see the Consciousness chapter), but the Me is less mysterious: It is just a concept of a person.

If asked to describe your Me, you might mention your physical characteristics (male or female, tall or short, dark-skinned or light), your activities (listening to hip-hop, alternative rock, jazz, or classical music), your personality traits (extraverted or introverted, agreeable or independent), or your social roles (student, son or daughter, member of a hiking club, krumper). These features make up the self-concept, a person’s explicit knowledge of his or her own behaviors, traits, and other personal characteristics. A person’s self-concept is an organized body of knowledge that develops from social experiences and has a profound effect on a person’s behavior throughout life.

Self-Concept Organization

A key aspect of our personality involves our self-narrative, or the story we tell about ourselves. In the award winning movie Forrest Gump, the title character shared his self-narrative with others. What would you include in the self-narrative of your life?

PARAMOUNT/THE KOBAL COLLECTION/ART RESOURCE

Almost everyone has a place for memorabilia, a drawer or box somewhere that holds all those sentimental keepsakes—photos, yearbooks, cards and letters, maybe that scrap of the old security blanket—all memories of “life as Me.” Perhaps you’ve wanted to organize these things sometime but have never gotten around to it. Fortunately, the knowledge of ourselves that we store in our autobiographical memory seems to be organized naturally in two ways: as narratives about episodes in our lives and in terms of traits (as would be suggested by the distinction between episodic and semantic memory discussed in the Memory chapter).

The aspect of the self-concept that is a self-narrative (a story that we tell about ourselves) can be brief or very lengthy. Your life story could start with your birth and upbringing, describe a series of defining moments, and end where you are today. You could select specific events and experiences, goals and life tasks, and memories of places and people that have influenced you. Self-narrative organizes the highlights (and low blows) of your life into a story in which you are the leading character and binds them together into your self-concept (McAdams, 1993; McLean, 2008). Psychodynamic and humanistic–existential psychologists suggest that people’s self-narratives reflect their fantasies and thoughts about core motives and approaches to existence.

Think about your own self-narrative (what you have done) and self-concept (how you view yourself). Are there areas that don’t match up? Are there things that you’ve done, good or bad, that are not part of your self-concept? How might you explain that?

DAVID BATHGATE/CORBIS

Self-concept is also organized in a more abstract way, in terms of personality traits. Just as you can judge an object on its attributes (Is this apple green?), you are able to judge yourself on any number of traits—whether you are considerate or smart or lazy or active or, for that matter, green—and do so quite reliably, making the same rating on multiple occasions. Hazel Markus (1977) observed that each person finds certain unique personality traits particularly important for conceptualizing the self. One person might define herself as independent, for example, whereas another might not care much about her level of independence but instead emphasize her sense of style. Markus called the traits people use to define themselves self-schemas, emphasizing that they draw information about the self into a coherent scheme. Markus asked people to indicate whether they had a trait by pressing response buttons labeled me or not me. She found that participants’ judgment reaction times were faster for self-schemas than for other traits. It’s as though some facets of the self-concept have almost a knee-jerk quality—letting us tell quickly who we are and who we are not.

Figure 12.5: Self-Concept in the Brain fMRI scans reveal that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is activated (shown here in red and yellow) when people make judgments of whether they possess certain personality traits compared to judging whether the traits apply to someone else. (From Kelley et al., 2002.)

COURTESY OF WILLIAM KELLEY (FROM KELLEY ET AL. 2000).

Research also shows that the traits people use to judge the self tend to stick in memory. When people make judgments of themselves on traits, they later recall the traits better than when they judge other people on the same traits (Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977). For example, answering a question such as “Are you generous?”—no matter what your answer—is likely to enhance your memory for the trait generous. In studies of this effect of self-relevance on memory, researchers using brain imaging technologies have found that the simple activity of making judgments about the trait self-concept is accompanied by activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a brain area involved in understanding people (Mitchell, Heatherton, & Macrae, 2002). This activation is stronger, however, when people are judging their own standing on traits (see FIGURE 12.5) than when they are judging the standing of someone else (Kelley et al., 2002). Such stronger activation, then, is linked with better memory for the traits being judged (Macrae et al., 2004). Studies have not been entirely conclusive about which brain areas are most involved in the processing of self-information (Morin, 2002), but they do show that memory for traits is strengthened when the MPFC is activated during self-judgments.

How do our behavior self-narratives and trait self-concepts compare? These two methods of self-conceptualization don’t always match up. You may think of yourself as an honest person, for example, but also recall that time you nabbed a handful of change from your parents’ dresser and conveniently forgot to replace it. The traits we use to describe ourselves are generalizations, and not every episode in our life stories may fit. In fact, research suggests that the stores of knowledge about our behaviors and traits are not very well integrated (Kihlstrom, Beer, & Klein, 2002). In people who develop amnesia, for example, memory for behaviors can be lost even though the trait self-concept remains stable (Klein, 2004). People can have a pretty strong sense of who they are even though they may not remember a single example of when they acted that way.

Causes and Effects of Self-Concept

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How do self-concepts arise, and how do they affect us? In some sense, you learn something about yourself every day. Although we can gain self-knowledge in private moments of insight, we more often arrive at our self-concepts through interacting with others. Young children in particular receive plenty of feedback from their parents, teachers, siblings, and friends about their characteristics, and this helps them to form an idea of who they are. Even adults would find it difficult to hold a view of the self as “kind” or “smart” if no one else ever shared this impression. The sense of self, then, is largely developed and maintained in relationships with others.

Over the course of a lifetime, however, we become less and less impressed with what others have to say about us. Social theorist George Herbert Mead (1934) observed that all the things people have said about us accumulate after a while into what we see as a kind of consensus held by the “generalized other.” We typically adopt this general view of ourselves and hold on to it stubbornly. As a result, the person who says you’re a jerk may upset you momentarily, but you bounce back, secure in the knowledge that you actually are not a jerk. And just as we might argue vehemently with someone who tried to tell us a refrigerator is a pair of underpants, we are likely to defend our self-concept against anyone whose view of us departs from our own.

Because it is so stable, a major effect of the self-concept is to promote consistency in behavior across situations (Lecky, 1945). As existential theorists emphasize, people derive a comforting sense of familiarity and stability from knowing who they are. We tend to engage in what William Swann (1983, 2012) called self-verification, the tendency to seek evidence to confirm the self-concept, and we find it disconcerting if someone sees us quite differently from the way we see ourselves. In one study, Swann (1983) gave people who considered themselves submissive feedback that they seemed very dominant and forceful. Rather than accepting this discrepant information, they went out of their way to act in an extremely submissive manner. Our tendency to project into the world our concept of the self contributes to personality coherence. This talent for self-reflection enables the personality to become self-sustaining.

Self-Esteem

When you think about yourself, do you feel good and worthy? Do you like yourself, or do you feel bad and have negative, self-critical thoughts? self-esteem is the extent to which an individual likes, values, and accepts the self. Thousands of studies have examined differences between people with high self-esteem (who generally like themselves) and those with relatively low self-esteem (who are less keen on, and may actively dislike, themselves). Researchers who study self-esteem typically ask participants to fill out a self-esteem questionnaire, such as one shown in TABLE 12.6 (Rosenberg, 1965). This widely used measure of self-esteem asks people to evaluate themselves in terms of each statement. People who strongly agree with the positive statements about themselves and strongly disagree with the negative statements are considered to have high self-esteem.

Although some personality psychologists have argued that self-esteem determines virtually everything about a person’s life (from the tendency to engage in criminal activity and violence to professional success), evidence has accumulated that the benefits of high self-esteem are less striking and all-encompassing but still significant. In general, compared with people with low self-esteem, those with high self-esteem tend to live happier and healthier lives, cope better with stress, and be more likely to persist at difficult tasks. In contrast, individuals with low self-esteem are more likely, for example, to perceive rejection in ambiguous feedback from others and develop eating disorders than those with high self-esteem (Baumeister et al., 2003). How does this aspect of personality develop, and why does everyone—whether high or low in self-esteem—seem to want high self-esteem?

Sources of Self-Esteem

Some psychologists contend that high self-esteem arises primarily from being accepted and valued by significant others (Brown, 1993). Other psychologists focus on the influence of specific self-evaluations: judgments about one’s value or competence in specific domains such as appearance, athletics, or scholastics.

An important factor is whom people choose for comparison. For example, James (1890) noted that an accomplished athlete who is the second best in the world should feel pretty proud, but this athlete might not if the standard of comparison involves being best in the world. In fact, athletes in the 1992 Olympics who had won silver medals looked less happy during the medal ceremony than those who had won bronze medals (Medvec, Madey, & Gilovich, 1995). If the actual self is seen as falling short of the ideal self (the person that they would like to be) people tend to feel sad or dejected; when they become aware that the actual self is inconsistent with the self they have a duty to be, they are likely to feel anxious or agitated (Higgins, 1987).

This is silver medalist Bo Qui of China, gold medalist David Boudia of the US, and bronze medalist Tom Daley of the UK following the 10m platform diving competition at the 2012 London Olympics. Notice the expression on Bo Qui’s face compared to those of the gold and bronze medal winders.

CLIVE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES

Unconscious perspectives we take on feedback also can affect our sense of self-worth. In one study, researchers looked at the effect of an authority figure’s disapproval on self-esteem. They examined the self-esteem of young, Catholic, female undergraduates who had read an article from Cosmopolitan, which described a woman’s sexual dream (in PG-13 language), and who had either seen a photo of a disapproving-looking pope or a photo of an unfamiliar disapproving person. The photos were shown subliminally, that is, in such brief flashes that the women could not consciously recognize whom they had seen. In self-ratings made afterward, the women in the disapproving-pope group showed a marked reduction in self-esteem compared with the other women: They rated themselves as less competent, more anxious, and less moral. In the words of the researchers, self-esteem can be influenced when an important authority figure is “watching you from the back of your mind” (Baldwin, Carrell, & Lopez, 1989, p. 435).

Self-esteem is also affected by what kinds of domains we consider most important in our self-concept. One person’s self-worth might be entirely contingent on, for example, how well she does in school, whereas another’s self-worth might be based on her physical attractiveness (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Pelham, 1985). The first person’s self-esteem might receive a big boost when she gets an A on an exam, but much less of a boost when she’s complimented on her new hairstyle, and this effect might be exactly reversed in the second person.

The Desire for Self-Esteem

What’s so great about self-esteem? Why do people want to see themselves in a positive light and avoid seeing themselves negatively? The key theories on the benefits of self-esteem focus on status, belonging, and security.

Does self-esteem feel good because it reflects our degree of social dominance or status? People with high self-esteem seem to carry themselves in a way that is similar to high-status animals of other social species. Dominant male gorillas, for example, appear confident and comfortable and not anxious or withdrawn. Perhaps high self-esteem in humans reflects high social status or suggests that the person is worthy of respect, and this perception triggers natural affective responses (Barkow, 1980; Maslow, 1937).

Could the desire for self-esteem come from a basic need to belong or be related to others? Evolutionary theory holds that early humans who managed to survive to pass on their genes were those able to maintain good relations with others rather than being cast out to fend for themselves. Clearly, belonging to groups is adaptive, as is knowing whether you are accepted. Thus, self-esteem could be a kind of “sociometer,” an inner gauge of how much a person feels included by others at any given moment (Leary & Baumeister, 2000). According to evolutionary theory, then, we seek higher self-esteem because we have evolved to seek out belongingness in our families, work groups, and culture, and higher self-esteem indicates that we are being accepted.

Survivor, The Bachelor, Big Brother. Why are shows in which everyone is fighting to remain a part of the group so popular today? Is it because they play on evolutionary desire to belong? (Or do people just like to see other people get kicked out of the club?)

MONTY BRINTON/CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

The idea that self-esteem is a matter of security is consistent with the existential and psychodynamic approaches to personality. The studies of mortality salience discussed in the Emotion and Motivation chapter suggest that the source of distress underlying negative self-esteem is ultimately the fear of death (Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1991). In this view, humans find it anxiety provoking, in fact terrifying, to contemplate their own mortality, and so they try to defend against this awareness by immersing themselves in activities (such as earning money or dressing up to appear attractive) that their culture defines as meaningful and valuable. The desire for self-esteem may stem from a need to find value in ourselves as a way of escaping the anxiety associated with recognizing our mortality. The higher our self-esteem, the less anxious we feel with the knowledge that someday we will no longer exist.

ARIEL MOLVIG/THE NEW YORKER COLLECTION/CARTOONBANK.COM

Whatever the reason that low self-esteem feels so bad and high self-esteem feels so good, people are generally motivated to see themselves positively. In fact, we often process information in a biased manner in order to feel good about the self. Research on the self-serving bias shows that people tend to take credit for their successes but downplay responsibility for their failures. You may have noticed this tendency in yourself, particularly in terms of the attributions you make about exams when you get a good grade (I studied really intensely, and I’m good at that subject) or a bad grade (The test was ridiculously tricky and the professor is unfair).

On the whole, most people satisfy the desire for high self-esteem and maintain a reasonably positive view of self by engaging in the self-serving bias (Miller & Ross, 1975; Shepperd, Malone, & Sweeny, 2008). In fact, if people are asked to rate themselves across a range of characteristics, they tend to see themselves as better than the average person in most domains (Alicke et al., 1995). For example, 90% of drivers describe their driving skills as better than average, and 86% of workers rate their performance on the job as above average. Even among university professors, 94% feel they are above average in teaching ability compared with other professors (Cross, 1977). These kinds of judgments simply cannot be accurate, statistically speaking, because the average of a group of people has to be the average, not better than average! This particular error may be adaptive, however. People who do not engage in this self-serving bias to boost their self-esteem tend to be more at risk for depression, anxiety, and related health problems (Taylor & Brown, 1988).

On the other hand, a few people take positive self-esteem to the extreme. Unfortunately, seeing yourself as way, way better than average (a trait called narcissism, a grandiose view of the self combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others) brings some costs. In fact, at its extreme, narcissism is considered a personality disorder (see the Psychological Disorders chapter). Research has documented disadvantages of an overinflated view of self, most of which arise from the need to defend that grandiose view at all costs. For example, when highly narcissistic adolescents were given reason to be ashamed of their performance on a task, their aggressiveness increased in the form of willingness to deliver loud blasts of noise to punish their opponent in a laboratory game (Thomaes et al., 2008).

Implicit Egotism

What’s your favorite letter of the alphabet? About 30% of people answer by picking what just happens to be the first letter of their first name. Could this choice indicate that some people think so highly of themselves that they base judgments of seemingly unrelated topics on how much it reminds them of themselves?

This name-letter effect was discovered some years ago (Nuttin, 1985), but more recently researchers have gone on to discover how broad the egotistic bias in preferences can be. Brett Pelham and his colleagues have found subtle yet systematic biases toward this effect when people choose their home cities, streets, and even occupations (Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002). When the researchers examined the rolls of people moving into several southern states, for example, they found people named George were more likely than those with other names to move to Georgia. The same was true for Florences (Florida), Kenneths (Kentucky), and Louises (Louisiana). You can guess where the Virginias tended to relocate. People whose last name is Street seem biased toward addresses ending in street, whereas Lanes like lanes. The name effect seems to work for occupations as well: Slightly more people named Dennis and Denise chose dentistry and Lauras and Lawrences chose law compared with other occupations. Although the biases are small, they are consistent across many tests of the hypothesis.

These biases have been called expressions of implicit egotism because people are not typically aware that they are influenced by the wonderful sound of their own names (Pelham, Carvallo, & Jones, 2005). When Buffy moves to Buffalo, she is not likely to volunteer that she did so because it matched her name. Yet people who show this egotistic bias in one way also tend to show it in others: People who strongly prefer their own name letter also are likely to pick their birth date as their favorite number (Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2001). And people who like their name letter were also found to evaluate themselves positively on self-ratings of personality traits. This was especially true when the self-ratings were made in response to instructions to work quickly. The people who preferred their name letter made snap judgments of themselves that leaned in a positive direction, suggesting that their special self-appreciation was an automatic response.

If you were trying to light up a room with a letter, would your first choice also be your initial?

©MAXSTOCK/ALAMY IMAGES

At some level, of course, a bit of egotism is probably good for us. It’s sad to meet someone who hates her own name or whose snap judgment of self is “I’m worthless.” Yet in another sense, implicit egotism is a curiously subtle error: a tendency to make biased judgments of what we will do and where we will go in life just because we happen to have a certain name. Yes, the bias is only a small one. But your authors wonder: Could we have found better people to work with had we not fallen prey to this bias in our choice of colleagues? The first three authors (Dan, Dan, and Dan) thought they were breaking this cycle by adding a non-Dan author, only to realize that Matt was being added shortly after he decided to move his family (including children Matthew and Maya) to Massachusetts.

The self is the part of personality that the person knows and can report about. Some of the personality measures we have seen in this chapter (such as personality inventories based on self-reports) are really no different from measures of self-concept. Both depend on the person’s perceptions and memories of the self’s behavior and traits. But personality runs deeper than this as well. The unconscious forces identified in psychodynamic approaches provide themes for behavior and sources of mental disorder that are not accessible for self-report. The humanistic and existential approaches remind us of the profound concerns we humans face and the difficulties we may have in understanding all the forces that shape our self-views. Finally, in emphasizing how personality shapes our perceptions of social life, the social-cognitive approach brings the self back to center stage. The self, after all, is the hub of each person’s social world.

OTHER VOICES: Does the Study of Personality Lack…Personality?

David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times, a commentator on CNN, and the author of several popular books on behavioral science.

PHOTO: ©JOSH HANER/COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

As described in this chapter, some of the field’s older ideas about personality (such as those described in the sections on psychodynamic and humanistic–existential approaches) are very intriguing but lacking in evidence, and so are not widely studied these days. Instead, personality researchers today are aiming to understand what aspects of our personalities are passed through which genes, and how the Big Five might map onto brain structure and functioning. The old approaches lacked evidence, but is something lacking in the newer approaches to studying personality? David Brooks seems to think so.

….In the 20th century, psychoanalysts were a big deal. There were a number of best-selling authors spinning theories about the psyche, which had a large impact on how people saw the world and themselves. This includes not only Freud and Jung, but also people like Erick Erikson, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Viktor Frankl and Philip Rieff. Today we’re more into cognition and the brain. Over the years, attention has shifted from the soul to the personality to decision-making. Preoccupations have migrated from salvation to psychic security to success.

When it comes to treating mental illness, I guess I’m glad we’ve made this shift. I put more faith in medications and cognitive therapies than in Freudian or Jungian analysis. But something has been lost as well as gained. We’re less adept at talking about personalities and neuroses than we were when psychoanalysts held center stage.

For example, in the middle of the 20th century, a woman named Karen Horney (pronounced HOR-nigh) crafted a series of influential theories about personality. Like many authors of these intellectually ambitious theories, she was raised in Europe and migrated to the United States before World War II. More than most of her male counterparts, Horney felt that people were driven by anxiety and the desire for security. People who have been seriously damaged, she argued, tend to react in one of three ways.

Some people respond to their wounds by moving against others. These domineering types seek to establish security by conquering and outperforming other people. They deny their own weaknesses. They are rarely plagued by self-doubt. They fear dependence and helplessness. They use their children and spouses as tools to win prestige for themselves….

Other people respond to anxiety by moving toward others. These dependent types try to win people’s affections by being compliant. They avoid conflict. They become absorbed by their relationships, surrendering their individual opinions. They regard everyone else as essentially good, even people who have been cruel….

Other people move away from others. These detached types try to isolate themselves and adopt an onlooker’s attitude toward life. As Terry D. Cooper summarizes the category in his book, Sin, Pride and Self-Acceptance, “To guarantee peace, it is necessary to leave the battleground of interpersonal relationships, where there is constant threat of being captured.”…

The domineering person believes that, if he wins life’s battles, nothing can hurt him. The dependent person believes that, if he shuns private gain and conforms to the wishes of others, then the world will treat him nicely. The detached person believes that, if he asks nothing of the world, the world will ask nothing of him. These are ideal types, obviously, conceptual categories. They join a profusion of personality types that were churned out by various writers in the mid-20th century: the inner directed, the outer directed, the Organization Man, the anal retentive, the narcissist, the outsider.

The books that explained these theories were good bad books. The good bad book (I’m deriving the category from a phrase from Orwell) makes sweeping claims, and lumps people into big groups. Sometimes these claims are not really defensible intellectually. But they are thought-provoking and useful. They provide categories and handles the rest of us can use to understand the people around us, seeing where the category fits and thinking more precisely about where it doesn’t.

We’re probably poorer now that people like Horney have sunk to near oblivion—less adept at analyzing personality. We probably have less practice analyzing personalities….

Is David Brooks right? As the study of personality has moved away from big picture explanations like those of Freud, Maslow, and Frankl, which attempt to explain why we behave the way we do with one overarching theory, and toward efforts to break down personality into smaller constructs and understand how nature and nurture produce these core traits, have we actually gotten worse at understanding personality? On balance, should interesting theories that make intriguing assumptions about people’s personalities, but have no data to support their accuracy, be retained simply because they tell a more interesting story? If you are reading this book, you represent the future of psychology. How can we better understand and measure human personality? What are the most important future steps?

From the New York Times, October 12, 2012 © 2012 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/opinion/brooks-the-personality-problem.html