5 SELF AS COGNITIVE CONSTRUCT

What is the self?

◦ It is the sense of personal identity and of who we are as individuals.

William James
Founder of functionalism. 

He was one of the earliest psychologists to study the self and conceptualized the self as having
two aspects – the "I" and the "me". 

The "I" is the thinking, acting, and feeling self.

The "me" is the physical characteristics and psychological capabilities that makes who you are.

Carl Rogers
Founder of client-centered therapy. His therapy aimed to make the person achieve balance
between their self-concept (real-self) and ideal self.

The real self refers to the attributes that an individual is aware of. Meanwhile, the ideal
self refers to the self that we wish to be. A wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept
indicates incongruence and an unhealthy personality.

Sigmund Freud
The Father and Founder of Psychoanalysis.
The unconscious self serves as the repository of past experiences, repressed memories,
fantasies, and urges. The three levels of the mind: Id (pleasure principle), Ego (reality
principle) and the Superego (moral principle).

The motivation for behavior is sex (eros) and aggression (thanatos). The energy of eros is
called libido and such includes urges necessary for survival like thirst, hunger, and sex.
Meanwhile, thanatos is directed towards destruction in the form of aggression and violence.

George Mead
Theory of Symbolic Interactionism – the self is created and developed through human
interaction.

Society helped in creating the foundations of who we are. We need others to affirm and
reinforce who we think we are. 

Abraham Tesser
Self-evaluation Maintenance Theory – we can feel threatened when someone out-performs
us, especially when that person is close to us.

Leon Festinger
Social Comparison Theory – we learn about ourselves, the appropriateness of our behaviors
as well as our social status by comparing aspects of ourselves with other people. 

Social comparison affects our self-esteem (Downward vs. Upward Social Comparison).

Albert Bandura
Known for his theory of social learning by means of modeling. Famous for his proposed
concept of self-efficacy.

The Social Cognitive Theory asserts that a person is both proactive and agentic, which means
that we have the capacity to exercise control over our life. This theory emphasized that human
beings are proactive, self-regulating, self-reflective, and self-organizing.
 
He believes that through our agency we humans are perceived as proactive agents of
experiences. Through this agents or agency we humans play a big role in our self-
development, adaptation and self-renewal. We humans plan things intentionally or we do things
intentionally, with doing this we wait for possible outcomes. We make our plans, actions and
decision with the basis of our intention in life.

Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel, think, motivate themselves and behave. A

strong sense of efficacy enhances human accomplishment and personal well-being in many
ways.