Difficulty: Intermediate | Prerequisites: Part 1 (Social Cognition Foundations), especially schemas, accessibility and priming.
This unit applies the cognitive machinery from Part 1 to how we think about, evaluate and regulate ourselves. Self-concept, self-esteem and self-regulation are treated as social-cognitive processes rather than fixed traits: they are constructed, context-sensitive and open to priming. The unit also covers goal structures, the emotion-attribution link and attachment theory reframed through a social-cognitive lens. If the course has a centre of gravity, this is it.
Our sense of self is built from observation, social feedback and cultural framing, not from direct access to some inner entity. Self-evaluation (self-esteem) is heavily shaped by social comparison, contingent standards and relational schemas. Self-regulation depends on self-awareness, which directs behaviour toward internalised standards but can also produce negative affect and avoidance. Goals and attachment orientations operate through the same if-then and priming structures covered in Part 1.
Self-concept
The organised set of beliefs and ideas a person holds about who they are. Boils down to "Who am I?"
I versus Me (William James)
James split self-reflection into the I (the subject, the agent doing the thinking) and the Me (the object of thought, what I am). Most research focuses on the Me.
Subjective self-awareness
The most basic level: distinguishing self from environment. An animal that puts food in its own mouth, not into a hole in the ground, has this.
Objective self-awareness
The ability to form simple representations of oneself and recognise one's own body (e.g. passing the mirror/mark test). Great apes and human toddlers from about age two demonstrate this.
Symbolic self-awareness
The uniquely human capacity to develop abstract, declarative knowledge about oneself, including traits, roles, goals and narrative identity.
Material self
James's term for the physical body and, by extension, one's possessions.
Social self
One's position in the social world: public self (how others see us), roles (family, occupation), collective self (ethnicity, gender, political affiliation) and the relational/interdependent self.
Relational self
The aspect of self-concept that shifts depending on which significant other is mentally activated. Hinkley and Andersen showed that merely anticipating meeting someone resembling a negative significant other changed participants' momentary self-concept.
Spiritual/personal self
James's term for the inner self of personality, based on private thoughts, feelings and motives.
Possible selves
Mental representations of who we might become: desired selves (ideal, ought) and undesired selves. Hazel Markus's fear of homelessness is cited as a motivating undesired self.
Self-perception theory (Bem)
When internal cues are weak or ambiguous, we infer our own attitudes and traits by observing our own behaviour and the situation, much as an outside observer would.
Self-determination theory
The idea that humans have a fundamental need to feel they determine their own actions. Feeling pushed around is uncomfortable; we want to feel like a subjective self acting on the world.
Social comparison
Evaluating ourselves by comparing with similar, relevant others. Demonstrated by the "Mr Clean vs. Mr Dirty" study, where a well-dressed or sloppy confederate shifted participants' state self-esteem.
Contingencies of self-worth
The specific domains (academics, appearance, family love, virtue) on which a person's self-esteem depends. Crocker's scale showed that graduate-school rejection letters hurt self-esteem only for people whose worth was contingent on academics.
Overgeneralisation
The tendency to let a failure in one domain contaminate self-evaluation across unrelated domains. High overgeneralisers show much stronger emotional reactions to poor performance.
Sociometer theory (Leary)
Self-esteem functions as an internal gauge (sociometer) monitoring social inclusion and acceptance. Low self-esteem signals perceived risk of exclusion.
Relational schema
An organised knowledge structure linking a self-schema to an other-schema within an interpersonal script (e.g. "If I fail, then he will reject me"). Operates largely outside awareness.
Two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter and Singer)
Emotions arise from undifferentiated physiological arousal plus a cognitive label. The same arousal can be experienced as euphoria or anger depending on the available explanation.
Attachment styles
Patterns of relating to caregivers (and later romantic partners): secure (roughly 55%), avoidant (25%) and anxious-ambivalent (20%). In Baldwin's social-cognitive reframing, these are not fixed personality types but chronically accessible relational schemas.
Objective self-awareness (Duval and Wicklund)
The degree to which a person is attending to their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Increased by mirrors, cameras, social disruptions. Leads to comparison with standards and often produces negative affect.
TOTE unit (Test-Operate-Test-Exit)
A monitoring loop for goal pursuit: test the gap between current state and goal state; if a discrepancy exists, operate (act); test again; exit when the discrepancy is closed.
Implementation intention
A specific if-then plan linking a situation to an action ("If it is the morning of the 26th, then I will write the report"). Bridges the gap between a goal and actual behaviour.
Material self: the body and possessions. James argued possessions represent who we are.
Social self: public self, roles, collective identity (ethnicity, gender) and the relational/interdependent self. In western culture we treat the self as isolated, but we also experience ourselves in relation to others.
Spiritual/personal self: the inner world of personality, thoughts, feelings and motives.
Hinkley and Andersen: participants described how they saw themselves when with a positive versus negative significant other. Later, merely being told they would meet someone resembling the negative significant other was enough to shift their current self-concept toward insecurity.
Aron's studies on "including the other in the self": people rate themselves and their romantic partner on traits, then do me/not-me reaction-time tasks. When self and partner differ on a trait but the relationship is close, response times slow down, suggesting the partner's traits have been partially incorporated into the self-concept.
We carry mental representations of who we might become. Desired selves split into the ideal self (who I want to be) and the ought self (who I should be). Undesired selves (who I fear becoming) also motivate behaviour.
Markus cited her own fear of homelessness as a powerful motivator. The gap between a desired and an undesired self can drive sustained effort.
Some self-knowledge may operate outside awareness. We may hold images of who we are that influence behaviour without our recognising them.
How do we build a sense of self from scratch? Six sources contribute:
Observation of objective reality – the body has boundaries; "my body ends here."
Observation of contingency – stubbing your toe produces pain only for you, building the basis for agency.
Introspection – optic flow gives a sense of location; children close their eyes and say "you can't see me" because their sense of self is rooted in visual experience. We feel emotions and realise only "I" feel them.
Distinctiveness – we notice what makes us different. Whites rarely mention race on the "Who am I?" task; only people who are overweight or underweight mention weight; gender is mentioned mainly by those in a gender minority in their family.
Autobiographical memory – episodic memories link together to create a sense of continuity. Many researchers think we do this by building a self-narrative, selecting notable events to tell a coherent story. There is flexibility in how we construct this narrative, and some therapists try to help people rewrite theirs.
Self-perception theory (Bem) – when internal cues are weak, we infer our attitudes from our behaviour. "Do I like brown bread? Let me think about how often I order it." A study manipulated whether a questionnaire used "I sometimes" versus "I frequently" as a stem; the framing changed which memories came to mind and shifted self-rated environmentalism.
Social roles also feed self-concept through a self-perception pathway: playing a role (e.g. guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment) leads to observing one's own role-consistent actions, which leads to internalising the role as part of identity.
Someone who gets a B may feel better than someone who gets an A-minus, because self-esteem is a function of performance compared to a standard (James's formula: self-esteem = success / pretensions).
We compare ourselves to similar, relevant others. The "Mr Clean vs. Mr Dirty" study: a well-dressed confederate lowered participants' state self-esteem, while a sloppy confederate raised it.
This shows how trivially self-evaluation can fluctuate based on the immediate social environment.
Self-esteem is not equally affected by all domains. Crocker created a scale measuring which domains (academics, appearance, virtue, family love) are important to a given person's self-worth.
In a study of undergraduates applying to graduate school, acceptance and rejection letters produced large self-esteem swings only for those whose self-worth was highly contingent on academic ability.
Whether success or failure affects self-esteem depends on the attribution. In one study, participants received false feedback on a social accuracy task. When told the test reflected empathy (internal attribution), success boosted and failure lowered self-esteem. When told the test was unreliable (external attribution), feedback had no effect.
Some people poke a hole in the submarine and let water flood every compartment. High overgeneralisers showed much stronger negative affect after a poor midterm than low overgeneralisers, even though both groups felt some negative emotion.
Baldwin's guided visualisation study: after failing a difficult memory task, participants who imagined an evaluative other (someone commenting on their intelligence) blamed themselves more and overgeneralised more than those who imagined an unconditionally accepting friend. Merely triggering thoughts of social context influenced self-evaluation processes.
Self-esteem evolved as an internal gauge of social inclusion. We care about self-esteem because in ancestral environments, exclusion meant death.
Contingent acceptance: the things we evaluate ourselves on tend to be the things we believe others judge us on. Leary found a strong correlation between "how would I feel about myself if X were true" and "how much would others include or exclude me if X were true."
Relational schemas capture this as if-then contingencies: "If I fail, then others will reject me." Baldwin's lexical decision study showed that failure primes sped up recognition of rejection words, but only for people with low self-esteem, confirming the associative link.
All emotions share undifferentiated physiological arousal; we then label that arousal cognitively based on context.
Study: participants injected with epinephrine (or placebo) waited with a confederate acting euphoric or angry. Uninformed epinephrine participants felt the most euphoric or angry, because they attributed their arousal to the social context. Informed participants felt less emotion, having already attributed their arousal to the drug.
Capilano Bridge study: men who crossed a high, swaying bridge and then met a female experimenter called her back significantly more often than men who crossed a low bridge, suggesting they misattributed bridge-induced arousal as attraction.
Social disruptions (embarrassing moments), salience of self, personality variables (trait self-consciousness) and self-focusing stimuli (mirrors, cameras, hearing one's own voice).
Duval and Wicklund argued that sustained self-focus leads to discovering discrepancies between the real self and the desired self. In the carpet-rating study, participants whose own face was shown on a TV monitor gave themselves lower self-evaluations than those watching static or a cowboy film.
When self-aware, people regulate behaviour more closely toward internalised standards.
Cheating study: with a mirror, only 7% cheated on an intelligence test; without, 71% cheated.
Sex guilt study: the correlation between women's sex guilt and their enjoyment of pornographic literature was .20 without a mirror and .74 with a mirror, showing that self-awareness dramatically tightened the link between private values and behaviour.
Which standard gets activated matters. When an attribution frame emphasised ability ("this tests intelligence"), self-aware participants cheated more (to protect the self-image of being intelligent). When the frame emphasised luck, self-aware participants did not cheat.
Baldwin's relationship priming study: women who visualised their parents before reading a sexually explicit passage (with a mirror present) rated their enjoyment lower than those who visualised campus friends. The mirror activated self-regulation, and the relationship prime determined which standard was applied.
After failure, self-aware participants left the room sooner (5 minutes vs. 8 minutes), suggesting a desire to escape self-focused thought.
Hull's alcohol studies: highly self-conscious people drank more after failure feedback. Alcohol reduces self-focus (measured by decreased use of first-person pronouns). People do not drink to "forget" so much as to feel less self-focused.
Self-focusing cue → increased self-awareness → comparison with standards → if no discrepancy: positive affect → if discrepancy: negative affect → either escape self-awareness (leave, drink) or increase self-regulation (work harder). This model also explains the positive side: the entire capacity for goal-directed self-improvement rests on this loop.
Goals are represented in the mind like any other knowledge structure and can be activated through priming.
Impression-formation study: subliminal primes related to "forming an impression" led participants to form more extreme impressions of a mostly-dishonest target.
Politeness study: scrambled-sentence primes related to rudeness led 60% to interrupt within 10 minutes, versus 20% for politeness primes and 40% for neutral.
Achievement study: priming with achievement words led 55% to keep working after a stop bell, versus 22% in the control.
An implementation intention is a specific if-then plan: "If it is the morning of the 26th, then I will write the report." In a study, participants given this structure were far more likely to complete a holiday assignment.
Implementation intentions bridge the gap between wanting a goal and acting on it by allowing the situation itself to trigger the behaviour.
The TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) unit is a feedback loop: test discrepancy between current and goal state; operate if discrepancy exists; test again; exit when discrepancy closes.
Emotional reactions track this loop: a large discrepancy produces distress, and closing it produces satisfaction.
We constantly juggle competing goals (fitness vs. chips). The Sims analogy: in the game, a character with "free will" simply responds to whichever need is most pressing, following engineered if-then rules. This raises the question of how much human behaviour differs from that robotic model.
Implicit versus explicit motivation: implicit achievement motivation (measured by story-telling tasks) predicted performance regardless of instructions; explicit achievement motivation (self-report) predicted performance only when the task was framed as an achievement situation. This suggests we have both an automatic motivational system and a conscious one.
Bowlby's attachment system: the infant seeks proximity to the caregiver; closeness produces felt security; each individual develops working models based on experience.
Hazan and Shaver identified three adult attachment styles: secure (55%), avoidant (25%) and anxious-ambivalent (20%). Each correlates with distinct patterns of relationship behaviour, parental descriptions and coping strategies.
Baldwin reframed attachment styles as chronically accessible relational schemas with specific outcome expectancies ("If I trust my partner, will I get hurt?"). Secure people endorsed positive expectancies; both insecure types endorsed negative ones, with trust as the most differentiating domain.
Lexical decision studies showed that different attachment styles activated different goals when thinking about trust: secure people were fastest for intimacy words, anxious people for security words and avoidant people for control words.
Most people have multiple working models available (secure, avoidant, anxious) with different levels of accessibility. The one most easily brought to mind shapes the general orientation, but subliminal priming of a specific relationship partner can shift which model is active.
Repeated security priming (writing about secure relationships or subliminal priming with "secure," "embrace," "love" three times per week) produced lasting reductions in anxious attachment, higher self-esteem and better mood, suggesting chronic accessibility of attachment schemas can be modified.
"Self-esteem is directly proportional to objective success." James showed it is success relative to pretensions (standards). A silver medallist can feel worse than a bronze medallist because the silver was expected to win gold.
"Attachment style is a fixed personality trait set in childhood." Baldwin's social-cognitive reframing shows we carry multiple working models with different levels of accessibility. Priming can shift which model is active, and repeated security priming can change chronic accessibility.
"We have direct access to our emotions." The two-factor theory and the Capilano Bridge study show that emotional labelling involves inference and attribution, not just introspection.
"Self-awareness is always a good thing." Duval and Wicklund showed it often produces negative affect by highlighting discrepancies. The escape-from-self-awareness literature (alcohol, leaving the room early) shows people actively avoid it when the discrepancy is painful.
⚠️ Know the three levels of self-awareness (subjective, objective, symbolic) and be able to give an example of each, including the mark test for objective.
⚠️ Be ready to explain sociometer theory and how it differs from the simpler idea that "we are wired to want high self-esteem."
⚠️ The mirror studies (cheating, sex guilt, relationship priming) are frequently tested. Understand how self-awareness interacts with activated standards.
⚠️ Know the two-factor theory of emotion and be able to describe both the epinephrine study and the Capilano Bridge study.
⚠️ Understand Baldwin's reframing of attachment as relational schemas with outcome expectancies, and how this differs from the personality-trait view.
⚠️ Be able to explain the distinction between implementation intentions and outcome expectancies.
True or False: The mark test demonstrates symbolic self-awareness. (False – it demonstrates objective self-awareness. Symbolic self-awareness involves abstract concepts about the self.)
Fill in the blank: According to sociometer theory, self-esteem functions as an internal gauge of ______. (Social inclusion / acceptance.)
True or False: In the Mr Clean/Mr Dirty study, the confederate's appearance affected participants' trait self-esteem. (False – it affected state self-esteem; trait self-esteem is stable.)
Fill in the blank: In the two-factor theory, emotions arise from ______ plus a ______. (Undifferentiated physiological arousal; cognitive label.)
True or False: Baldwin argued that we each have only one attachment working model. (False – we carry multiple working models with different accessibility levels.)
Q: Explain how Baldwin's lexical decision study supports the sociometer account of self-esteem over a simple "self-esteem motive" account.
A: Baldwin primed participants with failure-related words and measured reaction times to rejection-related targets. Low self-esteem participants were faster to identify rejection words after failure primes, indicating an associative link between failure and rejection. This supports sociometer theory because it shows self-esteem feelings are tied to expectations of social acceptance or rejection, not to an abstract motive to "feel good." The associative link operated within a quarter of a second, suggesting it is automatic and deeply ingrained.
Q: Describe the self-regulation model and explain how the mirror cheating study and the alcohol escape study each illustrate different parts of it.
A: The model runs: self-focusing cue → self-awareness → comparison with standards → discrepancy check. If no discrepancy, positive affect. If discrepancy, negative affect, leading to either escape or increased self-regulation. The mirror cheating study illustrates the self-regulation path: with a mirror (self-focusing cue), participants compared their behaviour to the norm against cheating and regulated accordingly (only 7% cheated). The alcohol study illustrates the escape path: highly self-conscious people who received failure feedback (discrepancy detected) drank more, using alcohol to reduce self-focus rather than to address the discrepancy.
Q: How does the Capilano Bridge study challenge the idea that we have direct access to our emotions?
A: If we had direct access, men who crossed the high bridge would correctly identify their pounding heart as fear, not attraction. Instead, they misattributed bridge-induced arousal to the female experimenter and called her back at much higher rates. This supports the two-factor theory: arousal is ambiguous, and we label it based on available contextual cues, which can lead to systematic errors in emotional self-perception.
This material builds directly on Part 1 (schemas, priming, accessibility) and feeds into Part 3 (motivated cognition, implicit self-esteem, implicit cognition in relationships) and Part 4 (terror management theory, which uses self-esteem as a central variable). The sociometer model reappears in the existential approach, where self-esteem is reframed as a buffer against death anxiety.
Self-concept, self-evaluation, self-regulation, self-esteem, state self-esteem, trait self-esteem, William James, I and Me, material self, social self, spiritual self, relational self, possible selves, ideal self, ought self, self-perception theory, Bem, self-determination theory, social comparison, Mr Clean Mr Dirty, contingencies of self-worth, Crocker, overgeneralisation, sociometer theory, Leary, relational schema, Baldwin, two-factor theory of emotion, Schachter and Singer, Capilano Bridge, misattribution of arousal, objective self-awareness, Duval, Wicklund, mirror studies, behavioural self-regulation, escape from self-awareness, Hull, alcohol, goal priming, Bargh, implementation intention, TOTE unit, attachment theory, Bowlby, Hazan and Shaver, secure, avoidant, anxious-ambivalent, working model, security priming, PSY 320, social psychology