Seminar notes to week 10 of the module Social Psychology 4PSYC001W taught at the University of Westminster for the BSc Psychology degree programme. These notes covers the topics of self-perception, memory, culture and other people.
Outline for today’s session
A bit of revision
A recap of last week’s session
Exam preparation – go through the layout and structure
Society exercise
For today’s activity, you will be split into 4 groups. Each group is to present a brief
summary of the area and outline how it impacts our concept of “self”.
Group 1 – Self-perception
Dem (1972) suggested that we learn about ourselves by stepping outside ourselves
and observe our own behaviour. People were put into a lab. They competed a
questionnaire. The questions had leading questions that either described them as
introverted or extroverted. Two days later when they had to define themselves, they
defined themselves as either introverted or extroverted, depending on what leading
question they had.
Festinger (1954): We have an intrinsic drive to compare ourselves with others in
order to evaluate our own selves, this can occur either upwards or downwards with
us either comparing others as better than ourselves or worse.
Cooley (1902) suggests that we monitor how we appear to others and include their
perception of us into our own self schemas.
Cherry (1953) infants that can’t walk or talk can respond to their own name – this can
demonstrate the cocktail party effect and shows we are selective in our attention.
Cook and Douglas (1998) suggest the looking glass affects how we perceive
ourselves.
Self-perception processes can be based on imagining ourselves behaving in a
certain way. Gyn et al (1990) divided a group of runners. Group 1 practised power
training on an exercise bicycle. Group 2 imagined they were training. Group 2 did
better. Imagining themselves exercising allowed them to perform better as it
positively affected their self-concept.
, Mead (1934) suggests that what matters is not how someone else may see us but
how we imagine they see us. This helps shape our self-concept.
Tutor: so when do we make comparisons with others and who do we choose to
compare? Maybe to our role models? People we look up to? Those similar to
ourselves.
We choose to compare ourselves to people similar to us. Upwards comparison:
comparing ourselves to someone who are wealthier than us – someone we aspire to
be. Downwards comparison: comparing ourselves to people different to us such as
people poorer than us. We may look for comparisons to gain a sense of security.
Group 2 – Memory
The self - encodes and constructs memory. Autobiographical memory is the
recollection of the sequences of events that have touched your life (personal history)
e.g. memories that occurred during childhood or learning how to drive a car for the
first time. If someone had no autobiographic memory, there would be no self-concept
(Bernstein, 2009).
This method helps people remember things and creates psychological links between
the past self’s experience and the current self’s memory. Memories link the present
to the past and provide an inner sense of continuity and stability. It is found that
those who do not have an autobiographic memory, do not have a consistent self-
concept (Sacks, 1985).
If you don’t know who you are or where you have come from, then how do you know
where you are going?
There are three different levels of autobiographical knowledge: lifetime periods (e.g.
going college) is contained at the highest level, general events, and then event-
specific knowledge. The middle level holds general events, which are composite
episodes that are experienced over days, weeks, or months.
Autobiographical memories are stitched together as and when they are needed from
information stored in many different neural systems. That makes them curiously
susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like them to be.
Our memories are often about putting the pieces of the jigsaw but it wouldn’t always
be an exact recollection of what happened. It would be a perception of what we think
happened. It is never going to be a mirror of what happened. Recollection will have a
degree of embellishment attached to it. We want it to fit into the narrative that we
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