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 woman, married for 30 years and the mother of two grown children, who one day began to respond to her mirror image as if it were a different person (Feinberg, 2001). 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 a neurologist, who was gradually able to convince her that the image in the mirror was in fact herself.

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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). 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 personalities. In contrast to 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.

If asked to describe yourself, 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.

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Self-Concept Organization

Our knowledge of ourselves seems to be organized 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. 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).

Self-concept is also organized in terms of personality traits—whether you are considerate or smart or lazy or active. Each person finds certain unique personality traits particularly important for conceptualizing the self (Markus, 1977). One person might define herself as independent, for example, whereas another might not care much about her level of independence but instead emphasizes her sense of style.

Our self-narratives and trait self-concepts don’t always match up. You may think of yourself as an honest person, for example, but also may 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

How do self-concepts arise, and how do they affect us? 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. 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” (Mead, 1934). We typically adopt this general view of ourselves and hold on to it stubbornly. 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 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. For example, in one study, people who considered themselves submissive received feedback that they seemed very dominant and forceful (Swann, 1983). 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.

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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. Researchers who study self-esteem typically ask participants to fill out a self-esteem questionnaire, such as one shown in TABLE 11.4 (Rosenberg, 1965). People who strongly agree with the positive statements about themselves and strongly disagree with the negative statements are considered to have high self-esteem. 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 (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

An important factor in determining self-esteem 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 feel that way 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, 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).

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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? Three key theories on the benefits of self-esteem focus on status, belonging, and security.

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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. The self-serving bias refers to people’s tendency 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 too far. Narcissism is a trait that reflects a grandiose view of the self combined with a tendency to seek admiration from and exploit others. 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 reasons 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?

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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, even influencing how people choose their home cities, streets, and even occupations (Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002). For example, when researchers examined the rolls of people moving into several southern states, 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).

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.

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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 of 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.