Does your sense of self become less an intrinsic motivator for action as we age?
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Course
Psychology
Institution
AQA
This is a quality piece of work scoring 48 out of 50 marks (Grade A). This is an in depth and thorough research project for my EPQ around a psychological topic of the sense of self. This research project not only has an increasing amount of research and theory to explain my thinking around the rese...
EPQ
Does your sense of self
become less an intrinsic
motivator for action as we
age?
,Who am I? what are my favourite foods? What do I believe in?
These are just three of the millions of questions which travell through our
brains every day. But do our answers to these questions change each day,
or are they so deeply engrained that our answers never change? Do the
answers to these question differ between different age groups? These
simple questions have baffled both medical professionals and researchers
over the years, and which I hope to answer and find conclusions to in my
primary research.
What is the Self?
So, what is your sense of self and how can something so complex be
measured? It is interesting that you when you look up the typical meaning
of a ‘sense of self’ it is often refers to the collection of characteristics that
define you. Personality traits, abilities, likes and dislikes, your belief
system or moral code, and the things that motivate you all to contribute
to your sense of self. But where is the self-inside of you and is it even
something tangible? Research conducted by neuroscientists concluded
that the part of the brain is responsible for your personality and behaviour
is the prefrontal cortex [1] and without this you would primarily be an
empty shell. Within this, it is made up of synaptic transmissions and these
are what send messages between your body and your brain. You can think
of the self as a blank canvas that you are born with and as you grow up
the canvas slowly has different things that are constantly being added
onto it.
Everybody is unique to their sense of self as nobody will have the same
combinations of what makes your sense of self than to another person. In
other words, everybody’s synaptic transmissions are different along with
the different messages which are constantly firing away within the brain.
There are so many things which can make up a sense of self. For example,
many people are shaped by their life experiences, but also other people’s
experiences can shape a person to who they are today. If life experiences
shape your sense of self, then what about children. They haven’t had as
many life experiences as a fully grown adult, therfore what builds their
sense of self or are they basing it off of other people. Therfore it can be
explained that people can either have an internal or external sense of self
and this can also change between different people as they move through
their life stages. But when does it first start to develop as we all start to
experience the outside world from the zeptosecond in which we are born.
Ross et al (2016) came up with the idea that it first develops in children
when we are two. They said that this is the key age where self-awareness
develops, and they can reflect on themselves from the perspective of
somebody else. They tried an experiment which could show them that
self-awareness was present which is key in having a sense of self. It
, involved putting a small mark on a child’s forehead, such as by kissing
them while wearing lipstick. The child can’t feel the mark so their sense of
touch can’t alert them to its presence – but they can see it if they look in a
mirror. If the child has the capacity to see themselves as another person
would, they will reach up to touch the mark when shown a mirror,
indicating that they equate the mirror image with their own body. They
also explored the concept of the self and self-consciousness. They said
that ‘the appearance of self-conscious emotions such as embarrassment,
pride, guilt and shame also demonstrate that a child is developing self-
consciousness. Parents may notice that by the time they are three years
old, their child is motivated to make amends for wrongdoing, can be
proud of their own behaviour, or hides when unhappy about something
they have done.’
A well-known psychologist who also explored similarly the stages of
development in children and when certain characteristics develop was
Jean Piaget. He came up with the idea of there being four key stages of
development after noticing that some of the children he was working with
were making similar if not the same kind of mistakes around similar ages.
He thought that younger children might be following rather different
logical rules to older children and that their mistakes were quite
predictable [2]. In other words, the errors made at certain ages formed a
kind of stage of development, and these stages formed a sequence. The
four stages that he came up with was:
Stage 1: Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)
Stage 2: Pre-operational Stage (2-7 years)
Stage 3: Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)
Stage 4: Formal Operational Stage (11+ years)
In stage 2 Piaget identifies something called egocentrism (Flanagan et al
(2019) described it as seeing things from your own viewpoint and being
unaware of other possible viewpoints). This is what Ross et al (2016) also
explored. Piaget said that this was a key part within stage 2. He stated
that children at this stage is egocentric in their thinking and that they only
see the world from their perspective. This strongly contradicts Ross et al
(2016) because Ross et al explained that you cannot develop your sense
of self without self-consciousness and being able to see thing from
different perspectives and it was explained that this doesn’t develop until
a child is two years old whereas Piaget suggests that it doesn’t develop
until the Concrete Operation stage which is between the years of 7-11.
We know generally that the self can develop a lot sooner than 7-11
because we have seen children bellow the ages 7 who know what they do,
and what they don’t like and can have a sense of humour as well which
suggests that the self is developing. Therfore it would be reasonable to
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