4

The Self
CHAPTER

Answering the Question

“Who Am I?”
 CHAPTER
OUTLINE

Self-Presentation: Managing the Self

in Different Social Contexts
Self–Other Accuracy in Predicting
Our Behavior
SOCIAL LIFE IN A CONNECTED WORLD

I n the movie To Die For, Nicole Kidman, who plays the generally clueless main
character, comments somewhat insightfully about the impact of television on the
perception of ourselves: “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV. On
TV is where we learn about who we really are.” Being on the Internet today, like being
Does Facebook Use Change Our Offline
Behavior?
Self-Presentation Tactics

Self-Knowledge: Determining Who

We Are
on TV then, may be thought of, in a philosophical sense, as providing a similar public Introspection: Looking Inward to Discover
the Causes of Our Own Behavior
forum for validating the personal self. So, in a sense, a person might “come alive”
The Self from the Other’s Standpoint
because they exist in a profile on Facebook; indeed, for some, not being on Facebook
Who Am I?: Personal versus Social
could be like being excluded from an important social group—and represent a kind Identity
of social death. Who I Think I Am Depends on the Social
Context
Is the converse also true? Does being on Facebook provide a way for people
Who I Am Depends on Others’ Treatment
to extend their personal existence and that of their loved ones? Perhaps it is worth
The Self Across Time: Past and Future
considering whether, when a person dies, if their self continues to be represented on Selves

Facebook—if you can still find their profile there—is something crucial about that Self-Control: Why It Can Be Difficult to Do

person still here with us? Jack Brehm, a great social psychologist who spent most of Self-Esteem: Attitudes Toward
Ourselves
his career at the University of Kansas, died in 2009 at the age of 81. After his death, a
The Measurement of Self-Esteem
memorial page was set up for him on Facebook. Since then, it has been rather amazing
EMOTIONS AND THE SELF
to see over 150 people become “friends” of his online, and several hundred people Does Talking Positively to Ourselves
Really Work?
visit Jack’s Facebook page every month. Perhaps people “check in” at his Facebook
Is High Self-Esteem Always Beneficial?
page to enhance their memories of him by seeing photos from his life; it is possible
Do Women and Men Differ in Their Levels
too that writing comments about their experiences with him is a means of “keeping of Self-Esteem?

him alive.” Do you think it is possible to claim that Jack and others live on in any real Social Comparison: How We Evaluate
Ourselves
sense by their continued existence on Facebook? According to Newsweek’s (Miller,
Self-Serving Biases and Unrealistic
2010) coverage of this growing trend of people creating tributes for friends using Optimism
Facebook, and the high number of requests to maintain the Facebook pages of people The Self as Target of Prejudice
who are deceased (“R.I.P. on Facebook”), this year Facebook changed its policy to allow Emotional Consequences: How Well-
Being Can Suffer
people’s pages to remain active in perpetuity.
Behavioral Consequences: Stereotype
By providing this sort of cradle-to-grave social existence of the self, Facebook Threat Effects on Performance
may be regarded as a new and important social environment. Although Facebook is
a constructed environment, we argue that it is one in which many interesting aspects
of self and identity can be readily observed. Like the social environment of your family,
your school, work, or ‘other’ social life, the Facebook environment is one where you
can expect to have friends, carry on conversations with others, and express yourself
and your preferences (e.g., indicate your favorite books and movies). You may even
use Facebook as a place where you document your personal growth—many people
post photos of themselves at different stages throughout their lifespan.

103
104 CHAPTER 4 The Self: Answering the Question “Who Am I?”

As the largest social networking

site, Facebook meets the criteria for
a genuine social environment. It is a
social network in that it makes your
friends available to connect with—
regardless of whether they are actu-
ally online at the time you post or not.
As suggested in Figure 4.1, Facebook
allows people to become friends
with others they may otherwise have
never met in real life. So the question
is, Is a “friend” on Facebook, whom
you’ve never met in real life, an actual
friend?
To answer that, let’s take a quick
FIGURE 4.1 Online Interaction or Live Interaction: The Same or Different? look backward. Once upon a time,
Perhaps the self-presentational aspects of Facebook differs in a number of respcets many people had “pen pals.” A pen pal
from self-presentation IRL (in real life)? IRL, friends for this fellow might be considerable
harder to come by than they are on Facebook. was a friend with whom one commu-
nicated by letter, without ever having
met that person. In some ways, you
may think of the pen-pal idea as being ahead of its time, a precursor to the Internet. No one
thought they had an obligation to meet a pen pal, but they were nevertheless a real social
connection.
On the other hand, no one would have thought that their privacy could be massively com-
promised with a pen-pal letter. Sharing of information is a significant way in which Facebook
(and other social networking sites) has created a different kind of social environment. On Face-
book, unlike in real life, your privacy may be compromised in ways that allow marketers to
target you. Whether you see this as a big problem or a minor inconvenience is determined by
how much you value your privacy. Older people seem to want to guard their privacy more than
younger ones, who don’t seem to care as much. But, when you put yourself out there in today’s
online world, you can expect to be directly marketed to, often with the ads being based on the
information you provided online about yourself!

The nature of the self and how we think and feel about ourselves have been central topics
of research in social psychology. While examining a number of important issues that have
been investigated concerning the nature of self, we’ll also consider the impact of Inter-
net technology on how we experience and present ourselves to others. As the cartoon in
Figure 4.2 suggests, we can choose to withhold some crucial information about ourselves
 CHAPTER 4 The Self: Answering the Question “Who Am I?” 105

when communicating over the Internet. So, how does our ability
to control what others learn about us via social networking sites
and other Internet venues affect how we see ourselves and, impor-
tantly, how others see us? Who is more accurate in predicting our
behavior—ourselves or others who know us well? In this chapter we
examine research that has examined these questions.
After we consider the issue of whether people present them-
selves online differently from how they present themselves to others
offline, and whether we ourselves change as a result of Internet use,
we turn to the larger question of the methods that people use to gain
self-knowledge. We also consider whether people have just one self
or many selves and, if each of us has many selves, then a critical issue
is whether one aspect of the self is more true or predictive of behavior
than another. Do people experience themselves the same way all the
time, or does their experience of themselves depend on the context
and the nature of the social comparison it evokes? What role does
social comparison play in how we evaluate ourselves?
After considering these questions, we turn to several important
issues related to self-esteem: What is it, how do we get it, and how
do we lose it? Is there a downside to having high self-esteem? Are
there group differences in average level of self-esteem? Specifically,
FIGURE 4.2 Not All Aspects of Ourselves Are
do men and women differ in their levels of self-esteem? Finally, Equally Available When We Communicate Over
we look in depth at how people manage when their self is a tar- the Internet
get of prejudice. What are the consequences of feeling excluded or As shown in this cartoon, it may be easier to conceal
devalued based on group membership for a number of self-related important information about ourselves on the internet
processes, including the emotional and performance consequences than in face-to-face encounters. (Source: Peter Steiner, The
of such potential rejection of the self by others. New Yorker, page 61 of July 5, 1993).

Self-Presentation: Managing the Self

in Different Social Contexts
William Shakespeare said long ago in his play As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage,
and all the men and women merely players.” In social psychological terms, this means
that all of us are faced with the task of presenting ourselves to a variety of audiences,
and we may play different roles (be different selves) in different contexts (act in different
plays). Nowhere is the choice of how to present ourselves more obvious than on social
networking sites such as Facebook. We can choose to reveal a lot about who we think
we are—including photographic evidence of our behavior on Facebook—or we can, to
some extent, limit who can have access to such information (e.g., by setting the privacy
controls so that only official “friends” can access our wall postings and photo albums).
But, how much can we really control what others learn about us and the inferences they
draw based on that information? In fact, is it possible that others might know more about
us—and be better at predicting our behavior—than we are ourselves?

Self–Other Accuracy in Predicting Our Behavior

There are many reasons to think people really do know themselves better than anyone
else does. After all, each of us has access to our internal mental states (e.g., feelings,
thoughts, aspirations, and intentions), which others do not (Pronin & Kruger, 2007;
Wilson & Dunn, 2004). For this reason alone, it seems intuitively obvious that it must
be the case that we must know ourselves best—but is it true? Indeed, research evidence