PSGY1012:

SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
Lecture 1:
Introduction / Me,
Myself, and I

Dr Eun Hee Lee

Eunhee.lee@nottingham.edu.my
Introduction to the What is Social Psychology:
Module Social psychology is the scientific
investigation of how the thoughts,
feelings and behaviour of individuals are
influenced by the actual, imagined or
implied presence of others.
- Hogg & Vaughan, 2011

This means it overlaps with lots of other

disciplines!
Introduction to the Module
The lectures:
1. Me, Myself, and I: Who are you and why?
2. Social Cognition and Biases: Do we make social judgement
errors?
3. Attitudes and Attitude Change
4. Social Influence: Obedience and conformity
5. People in Groups: Performing in (front of) a group
Introduction to the Module
The lectures:
6. Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination
7. Intergroup Relations (and Conflict!)
8. Aggression
9. Prosocial Behaviour: Why do we help others?
10. All You Need is Love (and Friendship)
How is the Course Assessed?
100% = Examination
 ROGO exam
 60 multiple choice questions.
 4 possible answers to each question.
 The examination is not negatively marked and we do not correct for
chance (so answer every question even if you’re guessing).

 The exam questions cover the entire module.

 Probably short essay questions too within this exam.
Core textbook
Social Psychology
Hogg & Vaughan

7th edition (but it’s OK to

use earlier editions)
 Moodle
Where can you get
course resources?  https://moodle.nottingham.ac.uk/login/in
dex.php
PSGY1012:
SOCIAL
PSYCHOLOGY
Lecture 1: Me,
Myself, and I
Today we will…
Consider these questions about the self:
 What is self awareness?
 Public vs. private self-awareness
 How did you get a self? (your self concept, knowledge of yourself)
 How do we change the self?
 How accurate is your view of the self?
 Self-enhancement
 How does culture affect the self?
 Self Concept
• In order to introduce yourself you first need to
have a concept of yourself as an individual.
• This is called “self awareness”
• We can test self awareness with the mirror test
(Gallup, 1970)
 Children under 18 months usually don’t have self
awareness.

 Some nonhuman animals have passed the test (e.g.,

chimps, dolphins, elephants).
https://youtu.be/M2I0kwSua44
Public Self-Awareness...
Do you feel awkward/anxious introducing yourself?
 If
you are very aware of yourself in social situations you
can become self conscious.
 Public
Self-Awareness: the awareness of oneself from the
imagined perspective of others (awareness of how others
see you)
 It can make you aware of your shortcomings and cause a
temporary loss of self-esteem (e.g, hearing recorded voice yours..)
 You might respond by adhering to social standards of behaviour
(you’ll do what you think the group expects).
 Evaluation Apprehension: anxiety, uneasiness that you might be
evaluated negatively
Private Self-Awareness...
 Private self-awareness (introspection): your
awareness of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, etc.
Effects include:
 Your perceptions of yourself become more accurate
 Opposite to Public Self-Awareness: You’re more likely to
follow your own personal beliefs or standards than the
social norms (greater adherence to personal standards of
behaviour)
 Intensification of Affect: Emotions become more intense
 Too much self awareness is associated with anxiety and depression (the
causal relationship may not be so clear but could go both ways)
  Too little self-awareness can also be a

Low Self-Awareness...
problem:
 You stop monitoring your own behaviour.
 Which can lead to uninhibited, impulsive
behaviour that is risky or may upset others.
 In a group: you might experience
deindividuation  loss of self-awareness in
groups
 You may go against social standards of
behaviour.
 Do things that you wouldn’t normally do
 Because you just don’t see yourself as an
individual but just a part of a group
Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness
Self Knowledge
To introduce yourself you need to know
about you!
 Self-schemas are your store of thoughts, beliefs
and attitudes about yourself.

Traits can be..

 Self-schematic: things that are important to you.
You have a clear concept of yourself on these
issues.
 Aschematic: things that are not important to you.
How did you get a self?
Self-Perception Theory (Bem, 1967):
• Wegain knowledge of ourselves by inferring our
own attitudes from our own behaviour.
• Conventional Wisdom: “I don’t like cheese so I
didn’t eat cheese.”
• Bem’s View (sometimes the other way round): “I
didn’t eat cheese, so I guess I don’t like cheese!”
How did you get a self?
• Social Comparison Theory (Festinger,
1954)
 People have a fundamental drive to evaluate their
attitudes and opinions, and often do so by
comparing themselves with others.
How did you get a self?
Two main forms of social comparison:
 Downward social comparison (can make us feel
better about ourselves).
 Upwardsocial comparison (useful when trying to
improve ourselves, but can make us feel bad).
How did you get a self?
Why do we engage in social comparison?
 It’s
a good way of calibrating how well we should
be doing in life. Is 9 out of a 10 a good mark on a
test?
How did you get a self?
Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model (Tesser, 1988):
 Describes how we maintain or increase self-evaluation
 Consists of 3 variables:
 The psychological closeness of another
 The relative performance of other
 The relevance of the performance dimension to one’s self definition
 If
we have to compare ourselves with someone better than us
(upward comparison), it could damage our self-esteem. So,
people may avoid this by:
 claiming the other person isn’t really like them.
 stop seeing that person.
How did you get a self?
Self-Categorisation Theory (Turner
et al., 1987):
When we feel we belong to a group,
we may automatically internalise the
attributes that describe that group.

I am an ‘Artist’ so I am
emotional and sensitive
How did you get
a self?
BIRGing (Caldini et al., 1976):
 Basking in Reflected Glory – linking
yourself to desirable groups to improve
your own/other people’s opinion of you.

CORFing
 Cutting Off Reflected Failure –
Refusing to believe that the failure was
deserved
Your team wins: ‘We won’

Your team loses: ‘They lost’

How do we change the self?
Control Theory (Carver &
Scheier, 1981):
 People test whether their
goals for their self have been
met.
 Iftheir goals are unmet, they
do something to change
themselves
 Then they test again.
How do we change the self?
Self-Discrepancy Theory (Higgins, 1987):
This theory suggests we have 3 types of self schema
 Actual-self: How we currently are
 Ideal-self: How we would like to be
 Ought-self: How we think we should be

A discrepancy between our actual-self and ideal-self

or ought-self causes negative feelings and this
motivates change.
How do we change the self?
Self-Discrepancy Theory (Higgins, 1987):
• Actual
vs. ideal discrepancies → dejection-related
emotions (e.g., dissatisfaction and sadness)
• Actual
vs. ought discrepancies → agitation-related
emotions (e.g., guilt and shame)
The bigger the discrepancy, the worse we feel!
This model is similar to the Control Theory of Self
Regulation but adds EMOTION
Self-Motives
We are motivated to get knowledge about
ourselves but not always in an unbiased
manner:
 Self-Assessment:We aim to find out the
truth about our self.
 Self-Verification:
We aim to verify what
we already know about our self.
 Self-Enhancement:We aim to find
favourable information about our self.
Self-Enhancement
We like to think highly of ourselves!
 We tend to overestimate our good points.
 We overestimate how much control we have over the
situation and how much influence we have on other people.
 We’re overly optimistic about the future.
This positive bias might be useful. People with mild
depression tend to be less biased: They engage in less self-
enhancement.
Self-Enhancement
• Myers (1998): “for nearly any subjective
and socially desirable dimension... most
people see themselves as better than
average” (p. 440).
• The usual finding is that around 60-70%
describe themselves as “above average”
and around 25% describe themselves as
“below average”.
• But of course it’s mathematically
impossible for more than 50% of people
to be in the top 50%...
Self-Enhancement
Examples:
• Most people see themselves as healthier, better looking, more
ethical, less prejudiced, and funnier than average.
• 1 million high school seniors: 89% rated themselves as above
average in ability to get along with people.
• 68% of lecturers think they’re in the top 25 percent of all
lecturers. At least 43 percent of them must be wrong!
• Prisoners view themselves as more moral, more dependable
and more trustworthy than non-prisoners, and as equally law
abiding. (!)
• What about intelligence…?
 Self-Enhancement

65% of people think

they’re more intelligent
than the average person;
only 23% disagree.

Original Article: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200103

Self-Enhancement
Dunning-Kruger Effect: A type
of cognitive bias in which
people believe that they are
smarter and more capable that
they really are
 Due to people’s inability to
recognise their lack of ability
 People in the lowest IQ
quartile overestimate their IQ;
people in the highest IQ
quartile underestimate theirs.
Self-Enhancement
Self-Serving Bias
• We often attribute our successes to personal factors but our
failures to external causes.
• Students in one study were given an IQ test. Some were told
they’d done really well; others were told they’d done really
badly. Later, they were asked about their impressions of the
test.
• Results: Those told they’d done badly minimized the
importance of good performance, and attributed their bad
scores to bad luck, unclear instructions, or the invalidity of the
test – apparently anything other than their own ability!
Self-Enhancement
Illusion of Control
• We overestimate how much control we have over events
and other people.
• People think that, if they chose their own lottery numbers,
they’re more likely to win.
• In rigged games, people attribute their own successes to
skill but their failures to luck.
• Similarly, when a group achieves success, most members of
that group overestimate how much influence they had on
achieving success. But if the group fails, people tend to
think they personally had little to do with the failure.
Self-Enhancement
 Self-Enhancement
Other Self-Enhancement Techniques
• People tend to see their virtues as uncommon but their
failings as normal.
• We assign greater importance to things we’re good at, and
may belittle things we are not good at.
• When we perceive others as physically attractive, we
perceive them as having a personality more like our own.
Meta-Analysis
On the other hand…
Cultural Differences
Individualist Cultures
= > Independent Self
• Autonomous individual, separate from
context
• Focus on internal traits feelings,
thoughts, abilities
• Unitary and stable across situations
• Acting true to internal beliefs and
feelings, promoting own goals and
differences from others
Collectivist Cultures
= > Interdependent Self
• Connected with others and embedded in
social context
• Represented in terms of roles and
relationships
• Fluid and variable self, changing across
situations
• Belonging, fitting in and acting
appropriately, promoting group goals
and harmony
Next Week:
Social Cognition and Bias