This article is for use only of students enrolled in GPS 520: Advanced Social Psychology for purposes associated with this course and may not be retained or further disseminated.
Excerpts taken from Brown, J. D. (1998). The self. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill
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I have a friend who thinks he's creative, sensitive, shy, and warm. Another friend of mine thinks she's independent, self-motivated, competitive, and ambitious. Where do these ideas come from? Why do people think of themselves as they do, and to what extent do these views represent what people are really like?
Chapter 3 will explore questions of this nature. In investigating these issues, we will focus on people's ideas about their personality traits and abilities. We will be particularly concerned with traits and abilities that are socially valued and desirable, such as people's ideas about how intelligent, kind, loyal, and attractive they think they are. These are all aspects of what James (1890) called the spiritual self.
We will begin by considering -when and why people search for self-knowledge. We will pay particular attention here to understanding what people want to think about themselves. This issue is important because a desire to think of ourselves in a particular way influences the way we seek self-knowledge.
In the second section of the chapter, we will examine important sources of self-knowledge. These sources include (1) the physical world, (2) the social world, and (3) the inner (psychological) world of thoughts and feelings. We will see that each of these sources of self-knowledge yields important information about what we are like, but none is unambiguous or free of distortion.
The third section of this chapter examines how people evaluate themselves. Here we will see that most people appraise themselves in very positive terms, and that these self-views are not always accurate or realistic. Finally, we note how biases in the way people seek self-knowledge promote these positive self-views.
Cultural factors provide the first signposts on the road to self-knowledge. To a great extent, who we are-and who we think we are-are determined by the time and place we are raised and live (Baumeister, 1986). If we are raised in a traditional agrarian society, we are unlikely to think of ourselves as a budding entrepreneur. It could happen, but it is unlikely.
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The role of culture is most clearly seen with respect to how it shapes our social identities. Countries that have caste systems, such as India, virtually dictate people's social identities. But cultural factors also influence our personal identities. To regard oneself as a competitive person, for example, requires that we live in a culture that supplies the term and gives us the opportunity to act competitively. One can conceive of a society that stresses cooperation and doesn't even have a concept of competitiveness. If the concept isn't part of the culture, it isn't apt to be part of the self.
Cultural expectations also influence people's self-views. This point was illustrated in a study by Rubin, Provenzano, and Luria (1974). These investigators interviewed the mothers and fathers of one-day-old infants. They found that the parents were more apt to use words like "beautiful," "cute," and "pretty" when describing their newborn daughters than when describing their newborn sons. Pervasive cultural expectations like these inevitably influence the way people think about themselves.
Cultural factors represent a passive form of self-knowledge acquisition, in that people gain self-knowledge without actively seeking it. This is not the only way people acquire self-knowledge, however. Sometimes, people deliberately set out to learn what they are like.
An active search for self-knowledge is particularly apt to occur when people make important changes in life. To illustrate, Deutsch, Ruble, Fleming, Brooks-Gunn and Stangor (1988) studied women who were planning to get pregnant or were expecting the birth of a first child. They found that these women actively sought information about motherhood and incorporated this information into their self-concept. Moreover, doing so provided important benefits: Women who had clearly established an identity as a mother during pregnancy showed better postpartum adjustment and were more satisfied with their lives than were women who had difficulty establishing this identity (Oakley, 1980). These findings suggest that an active search for self-knowledge is especially likely (and especially beneficial) when people confront important life changes.
When people actively seek knowledge of themselves, they do not do so in a dispassionate, disinterested way. Instead, people have particular goals in mind, and these goals lead them to selectively seek, notice, and interpret information about themselves. This selectivity occurs as a result of three forces.
The first of these forces is known as the self-enhancement motive. In Chapter 2, we noted that William James (1890) identified a class of self-relevant emotional states. Feeling proud or pleased with ourselves (on the positive side) and feeling humiliated or ashamed of ourselves (on the negative side) are examples of what James had in mind. The self-enhancement motive refers to the fact that people are motivated to experience these positive emotional states and to avoid experiencing these negative emotional states. People are motivated to feel good about themselves, to maximize their feelings of self-worth.
This emphasis on feelings differs a bit from how other theorists have defined self-enhancement needs. Other theorists have taken the term to mean that people are motivated to think of themselves in highly favorable terms (e.g., Rosenberg, 1979; Shrauger, 1975; Swann, 1990). It is certainly the case that in many situations and in many cultures, feelings of self-worth are promoted by thinking of oneself as highly capable or somehow better than one's peers. But this is not invariably so. In some situations and in some cultures, feelings of self-worth are promoted by thinking of oneself as ordinary or average, or even worse than others (parents, for example, may take pride in thinking their children are smarter and more talented than they themselves are). These sorts of differences mask an underlying similarity. In both cases, thoughts about the self serve to enhance feelings of self-worth. The universal need (which McDougall [1923] called the "master sentiment") is not a need to think of oneself in any specific way but a need to maximize feelings of self-worth. This is what we mean when we speak of a self-enhancement motive.
That being said, it is the case that in many cultures, particularly contemporary Western societies (e.g., United States, Canada, and Western Europe), feelings of self-worth are promoted by thinking of oneself in favorable terms-as exceptionally kind, likable, intelligent, and attractive, for example. In this case, self-enhancement needs lead people to seek information about themselves in such a way that they are apt to conclude that they possess these qualities.
Accuracy needs also influence the manner in which people seek knowledge of themselves. Sometimes people want to know the truth about themselves, without regard to whether they learn something good or bad (Trope, 1986). Three considerations are thought to underlie this need (Brown, 1991). First, sometimes people simply want to reduce uncertainty; they want to know what they are like for the sheer intrinsic pleasure of knowing what they are like.
People may also believe that they have a moral obligation to know what they are really like. This admonition is prominent in theological and philosophical thought. The existentialist philosophers, for example, held that people have an ethical obligation to uncover their true nature. People who evade self-understanding were considered to be weak, cowardly, and living a depraved or purposeless existence.
(p. 52)Finally, we seek accurate information about ourselves because knowing what we are really like can sometimes help us achieve other goals. One of these goals is survival. Let's imagine, just as an example, that I think of myself as incredibly fleet of foot when I am actually slower than a snail. If all I'm doing is running around a track by myself, my inaccurate beliefs about myself are probably doing me no harm. But if I intend to taunt a wild beast to see if I can outrun it when it gets mad and turns on me, it probably would be helpful for me to know how fast I really am; otherwise, I will die! The point here is that accurate self-knowledge is sometimes adaptive; sometimes, it is important for us to know what we are really like (Festinger, 1954).
Accurate self-knowledge can also be instrumental to maximizing feelings of self-worth (Sedikides & Strube, in press). Success is one of the things that makes people feel good about themselves. Knowing what you are really like can sometimes makes success more likely. For example, a person who is "all thumbs in the wood shop" is apt to experience repeated failure as a carpenter. It might be good for this person to know that his talents in this domain are somewhat limited, before he decides whether or not to pursue a career in woodworking. This is another reason why it is important to emphasize that self-enhancement refers to emotion-the desire to maximize feelings of self-worth, not the desire to think of oneself as good at everything. Self-enhancement needs can sometimes be met by knowing what we can't do well.
A final force to consider is known as the consistency motive. In Chapter 1 we saw that our ideas about ourselves serve several important functions: They influence the way we process information, they guide our behavior, and they serve as end-states toward which our future behavior is oriented. Many theorists believe these functions give rise to a motive to protect the self-concept against change (e.g., Epstein, 1980; Lecky, 1945; Rosenberg, 1979; Swann, 1990). This motive leads people to seek and embrace information that is consistent with what they think they are like, and to avoid and reject information that is inconsistent with what they think they are like. Prescott Lecky (1945) was an early proponent of this position.
According to self-consistency, the mind is a unit, an organized system of ideas. All of the ideas which belong to the system must seem to be consistent with one another. The center or nucleus of the mind is the individual's idea or conception of himself. If a new idea seems to be consistent with the ... individual's conception of himself, it is accepted and assimilated easily. If it seems to be inconsistent, however, it meets with resistance and is likely to be rejected. (p. 246)
Not everyone endorses a self-consistency motive (Steele & Spencer, 1992), but it has played an important role in several influential theories. For example, cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) maintains that the holding of two inconsistent cognitions produces an aversive state of arousal that people are motivated to avoid and reduce. Aronson (1968) subsequently amended
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this formulation, contending that one of the cognitions must involve people's beliefs about themselves. What produces dissonance, Aronson argued, is not the realization that "I did X when I believe Y," it is the recognition that "I'm not a hypocritical person but I just said or did something I don't believe in." We will have more to say about dissonance theory in Chapter 5.
The self-consistency motive also plays an important role in Swann's (1990, 1996) self-verification theory. Self-verification theory contends that once people develop ideas about what they are like, they strive to verify these self-views. Consider, for example, a person who thinks of herself as highly intelligent. According to Swann, this person is motivated to verify this view of herself. To do so, she can (1) engage in activities that demonstrate her acumen; (2) selectively seek, accept, and retain information that confirms her sagacity; and (3) attempt to convince others that she possesses a brilliant mind.
Two considerations are thought to drive the search for self-verifying feedback (Swann, Stein-Seroussi, & Giesler, 1992). First, we feel more comfortable and secure when we believe that other people see us as we see ourselves. Imagine how unsettling it would be if you suddenly learned you were not the person you thought you were. Seeking self-verifying feedback helps people avoid this anxiety and epistemic confusion. The search for self-verifying feedback is also fueled by more pragmatic, interpersonal concerns. Self-verification theory assumes that our social interactions proceed more smoothly and profitably when other people view us as we view ourselves. This consideration gives people a second reason to selectively seek self-verifying feedback.
An especially controversial aspect of self-verification theory is the predictions it makes when people hold negative views of themselves. The theory asserts that people are just as interested in confirming their negative self-views as they are in corroborating their positive self-views. We will examine the support for this prediction later in this chapter.
Suppose one day you read about a characteristic you have never heard of. How would you go about finding out whether you have this characteristic or not? Generally speaking, you have three sources of information at your disposal: the physical world, the social world, and the inner (psychological) world of thoughts and feelings.
Physical reality provides one means by which you can learn about yourself. If you want to know how tall you are, you can measure your height; if you want to know how many pounds you can lift, you can go to a health club and take note of how many pounds you can lift. In these cases, you are using the physical world to gain knowledge of yourself.
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Though useful as a source of self-knowledge, the physical world is limited in two important respects. First, many attributes are not anchored in physical reality (Festinger, 1954). Suppose you want to know how kind you are. You can't simply get out a yardstick and measure your kindness. The same is true if you want to know how clever or sincere you are. A physical basis for gaining knowledge in these domains (and many others) is lacking.
A second, and related point, is that even when attributes can be assessed with reference to the physical world, the knowledge we gain from the physical world isn't necessarily the knowledge we are after. Knowing your height doesn't really tell you whether or not you are tall. You need to know how tall other people are, and whether you are taller or shorter than they are. The same is true when it comes to knowing how many pounds you can lift. Before you can know whether you're strong or not, you need to know how many pounds other people can lift.
The larger point here is that attributes like tall and strong acquire meaning only with respect to the attributes of others. This is true of many of the ways people think about themselves. Most of our personal identities are couched in comparative terms. When we say we are independent, we are implicitly saying that we think we are more independent than are other people; when we say we are talented, we are implicitly saying that we think we are more talented than are most others.
Social World
The comparative nature of self-views means that people must rely heavily on the social world when seeking to understand who they are and what they are like. Two social processes are particularly important.
Social Comparison
First, as just indicated, people engage in a process of social comparison. They compare their attributes with others and draw inferences about what they are like. Research on social comparison processes was initiated by Leon Festinger (1954). Festinger postulated that people have a drive to know what they are really like, and that often they can satisfy this desire only by comparing themselves with others. To illustrate, suppose you find out that you can run a mile in seven minutes. In order to know whether you're fast or slow, you need to know how long it takes other people to run a mile.
Of course, any conclusions you draw about yourself greatly depend on those with whom you compare yourself. The need for accurate self-knowledge was originally thought to guide the social comparison process (Festinger, 1954), and researchers assumed that comparing with others who are similar to us in important ways is most informative. From this perspective, you would best be able to tell how fast you really are by comparing with other people of your sex and age group. To the extent that you run a mile faster than these similar others, you would think of yourself as fast. Comparing your time with people of the opposite sex, or with those who are much older or younger than you, is less informative. These people are too different from you in areas relevant to running to serve as suitable targets of comparison.
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There is considerable evidence that people do compare themselves with others who are similar to them in important ways (Wood, 1989). But this is not always true (Collins, 1996; Goethals & Darley, 1977; Taylor & Lobel, 1989; Wills, 1981; Wood, 1989). People also compare themselves with those who are slightly better off than they are (a process called upward comparison) and with those who are slightly worse off or somehow disadvantaged on the dimension under consideration (a process called downward comparison). There is also substantial evidence that the need for accurate self-knowledge is not the only, or even the most important, factor that guides the social comparison process (Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995). Under many circumstances, the need to feel good about ourselves affects the social comparison process (Wood, 1989).
Reflected Appraisals
Another way people gain self-knowledge is by observing how others respond to them. Imagine, for example, that a person tells a joke and perceives that other people are laughing at it. The person might reasonably infer that she is witty. Formally, this process is known as the reflected appraisal process.
Charles Horton Cooley, a turn-of-the-century American sociologist, first articulated this perspective in his discussion of the looking-glass self. Cooley (1902) was particularly concerned with how people's feelings toward themselves develop. He argued that these feelings are socially determined. We imagine how we are regarded by another person, and this perception determines how we feel about ourselves. The term looking-glass self was used to call attention to the fact that other people serve as a mirror; that is, we see ourselves reflected in other people's eyes.
In a very large and interesting class of cases the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one's self ... appears in a particular mind, and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self. (Cooley, 1902, pp. 152-153)
Cooley went on to propose a three-step process. First, we imagine how we appear in the eyes of another person; second, we imagine how that person is evaluating us; third, we feel good or bad in accordance with this imagined judgment. Note the phenomenological nature of Cooley's model. It is our imagined judgment, not what the person actually thinks of us, that makes us feel proud or ashamed of ourselves.
A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification. The comparison with a looking-glass hardly suggests the second element, the imagined judgment, which is quite essential. The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind. (Cooley, 1902, p. 153)
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Although Cooley was concerned with how people's feelings toward themselves develop, Kinch (1963) adapted these ideas to explain how people's thoughts about themselves develop. Kinch's model, which is shown in Figure 3.1, also has three components: (1) what other people actually think of us (the actual appraisals of others); (2) our perception of these appraisals (our perceived appraisals); and (3) our own ideas about what we are like (our self-appraisals). The model assumes that actual appraisals determine perceived appraisals, and perceived appraisals, in turn, determine self-appraisals. As an example, the model assumes (1) that another person thinks you are attractive (actual appraisal), (2) that you are aware of this (perceived appraisal), and (3) that, because of this, you think you are attractive. Note again the phenomenological nature of the model. The lack of a direct arrow linking actual appraisals to self-appraisals means that it is our perception of what other people think of us, rather than what they actually think of us, that determines our self-appraisals.
In recent years, a great deal of research has tested the model shown in Figure 3.1 (for reviews, see Felson, 1993; Kenny & DePaulo, 1993). A typical investigation with college students involves a group of friends, roommates, or acquaintances. The students rate themselves and each other on a number of dimensions (e.g., how attractive, intelligent, and sociable do you think person X is?). The students are also asked to predict how they are being rated by others (e.g., how attractive do you think person Y thinks you are?). Finally, the relations among actual appraisals, perceived appraisals, and self-appraisals are examined.
In general, this research has turned up only limited support for the reflected appraisal model. First, contrary to the model, people are not very good at knowing what any particular individual thinks of them. Felson (1993) believes this is because communication barriers and social norms limit the information we receive from others. This is especially true when the feedback would be negative. People rarely give one another negative feedback ("if you don't have anything nice to say about someone, don't say anything at all"), so people rarely conclude that other people dislike them or evaluate them negatively.
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Despite being largely unaware of how any particular person evaluates them, people are better at knowing what people in general think of them. At the same time, the nature of this association may not conform to the one specified in Figure 3.1. The reflected appraisal model assumes that actual appraisals determine perceived appraisals (e.g., other people think you are smart, somehow communicate this information to you, and you correctly perceive that they think you are smart). Although this pattern may occur, the influence of a common third variable could also produce a spurious association between actual appraisals and perceived appraisals (Felson, 1993; Kenny & DePaulo, 1993).
Performance in the classroom provides a suitable example (see Figure 3.2). Some students get better grades in school than do others. Teachers think students who get good grades are smart, and students who get good grades assume their teachers think they are smart. In this case, actual appraisals and perceived appraisals will be correlated, but there is no causal relation between them. They are correlated simply because they are both associated with grades.
A related problem clouds the interpretation of the association between perceived appraisals and self-appraisals. As shown in Figure 3.1, these variables are highly correlated (Felson, 1993; Kenny & DePaulo, 1993; Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979), but the causal association between them is unclear. The reflected appraisal model assumes that perceived appraisals determine self-appraisals (e.g., if we think other people think we are clever, then we think we are clever), but the reverse causal sequence is also possible (e.g., if we think we are clever, we assume other people think so, too). Although correlational studies do not afford a definitive test of this issue, the tendency to assume that others see us as we see ourselves seems to account for most of the correlation between perceived appraisals and self-appraisals (Felson, 1993).
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These findings suggest some important qualifications to the reflected appraisal model. As originally conceived, the model assumed that people see themselves as others see them. Person A forms an opinion about Person B, and Person B pliantly registers this opinion and incorporates it into her selfconcept. This sequence may accurately characterize matters in early childhood (parents give their children lots of personal feedback, and children incorporate this feedback into their ideas about themselves), but it appears to be less relevant later in life. This is because people are not as passive as the model assumes; they actively and selectively process information from the social world. Once people's ideas about themselves take shape, these ideas influence the manner in which new information is gathered and interpreted.
Inner (Psychological) World
Three processes of a more personal nature also influence the way people acquire knowledge of themselves.
Introspection
One of these processes, introspection, involves looking inward and directly consulting our attitudes, feelings, and motives. Suppose, for example, I want to know whether I'm a sentimental person. I can look inward and ask myself how I generally feel at weddings, funerals, and other occasions that are relevant to sentimentality. If I feel soft and warm inside on these occasions, I'm apt to conclude that I am a sentimental person.
Introspection would seem to be a very reliable way of knowing what we are like. After all, what better way to know ourselves than to examine our own thoughts and feelings? This perception appears to be widely shared. Andersen and Ross (1984) asked college students whether another person would know them better (1) if they knew their private thoughts and feelings for one day, or (2) if they were able to observe their behavior over a period of several months. By a wide margin, the students believed that other people would know them best if they were privy to their inner world of thoughts and feelings.
Andersen (1984) conducted a follow-up investigation to test this assumption. Andersen had participants describe themselves to people they did not know, emphasizing either their private thoughts and feelings, their behavior, or a mixture of the two. Later, the observers rated the participants on a number of dimensions, and Andersen calculated the correspondence between these ratings and the participants' own self-assessments.
The results from this investigation, which are displayed in Figure 3.3, show that observers produced ratings that most closely matched the participants' own ratings when the participants had described their thoughts and feelings. These findings indicate that your thoughts and feelings provide other people with valuable information about what you are like. By extension, these findings suggest that consulting your own thoughts and feelings can yield meaningful self-knowledge (see also, Hixon & Swann, 1993; Johnson & Boyd, 1995; Millar & Tesser, 1989).
FIGURE 3.3. Correspondence between self-ratings and observer ratings as a function of whether people revealed their thoughts and feelings, their behavior, or a combination. The data show that observers learn more about what a person is like when the person reveals his or her thoughts and feelings.
(Adapted from Andersen, 1984, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 294-307. Copyright 1984. Adapted by permission of The American Psychological Association.)
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Whether introspection always fosters self-insight is not entirely clear, however. Wilson and his colleagues have argued that thinking too much about why we feel the way we do about some person, object, or issue can confuse us and undermine accurate self-knowledge (for a review, see Wilson & Hodges, 1992). Wilson's research is built on the premise that people do not always know why they feel the way they do (Freud, 1957; Lyons, 1986; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Nevertheless, people have little difficulty generating plausible explanations for their feelings. The problem is that these reasons often reflect common cultural assumptions rather than private, accurate self-knowledge. For example, if you were asked why you like your boyfriend or girlfriend, you would probably say it has something to do with the person's personality (e.g., the person's warmth or kindness). In fact, these reasons are imperfectly related to why you feel the way you do. Other reasons, such as the person's physical attractiveness or even the way the person walks, laughs, or gestures, may be equally or more important.
Wilson and his associates have conducted numerous studies demonstrating that problems can arise when people introspect about reasons. In these studies, some participants (those in the introspection condition) are encouraged to carefully consider why they feel the way they do about some person, object, or issue before making a decision. Other participants (those in the control condition) make their decision without being asked to analyze the basis of their feelings. The results show that participants in the introspection condition are less accurate when predicting their future behavior (Wilson & LaFleur, 1995) and are less satisfied with their choices and decisions (Wilson et al., 1993) than are participants in the control condition. On the basis of these and other findings, Wilson concludes that thinking too much about why we feel the way we do can diminish, rather than promote, accurate self-knowledge.
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Self-Perception Processes
Wilson's work is based on the assumption that people are not always aware of why they feel the way they do. Bern's (1972) self-perception theory makes a similar assumption. Self-perception theory is concerned with how people explain their behavior. The theory argues that people do not always know why they do what they do. When this occurs, they infer the causes of their behavior by analyzing their behavior in the context in which it occurs.
To illustrate, suppose you ask me whether I like country music, To answer this question, I might recall that every time I'm in my car I keep my radio tuned to a country music station. So I answer, "Yes, I like country music." After all, what other reason can there be? No one makes me listen to country music, so the only reasonable explanation for why I listen to it all the time is that I like it.
Note that an outside observer would have reached a similar conclusion. If you knew I always listened to country music, you would also infer that I like country music. This equivalence is a hallmark of Bern's theory. The theory assumes that people often gain self-knowledge simply by observing their own behavior, and drawing logical conclusions about why they behaved as they did.
Individuals come to "know" their own attitudes, emotions, and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behavior and/or the circumstances in which this behavior occurs. Thus, to the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, the individual is functionally in the same position as an outside observer, an observer who must necessarily rely upon those same external cues to infer the individual's inner states. (Bem, 1972, p. 2)
Self-perception theory has been applied to a wide range of phenomena. Under certain conditions, people have been shown to infer their attitudes (Olson & Hafer, 1990), emotions (Laird, 1974; Schachter & Singer, 1962), and motives (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973) in the manner specified by the theory. Some of the most intriguing demonstrations of the theory come from research on emotion. In one study (Laird, 1974), participants were induced to smile or frown while reading a series of cartoons to themselves. Those who read the cartoons while smiling thought the cartoons were funnier and liked them more than did those who read the cartoons while frowning. According to self-perception theory, the participants thought, "Well, I'm smiling a lot. I guess I think these cartoons are really amusing" (but see also, Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988 for a different interpretation).
Self-perception processes are akin to introspection, but there is an important difference. With introspection, we directly examine our attitudes, feelings, and motives; with self-perception, we indirectly infer our attitudes, feelings, and motives by analyzing our behavior. Another way of saying this is that only introspection involves directly consulting our internal states; the self-perception process is an indirect one that does not require direct access to our internal states.
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Causal Attributions
The explanations people give for their actions are the key elements in selfperception theory. Formally, these explanations are known as causal attributions. Causal attributions are answers to why questions (Weiner, 1985). Imagine that we see a person staggering as he walks across the street. We ask, "Why?" Is it because the person is injured, mentally unstable, physically challenged, drunk, or high on drugs? The explanation we settle on is a causal attribution; we attribute the person's behavior to a cause. People also make attributions for their own behavior. In our previous example, I decided that the reason I always listen to country music is that I like it. This is a causal attribution.
The attributions people make for events in their lives constitute an important source of self-knowledge. This is especially true when people make attributions for positive and negative events. Imagine, for example, that you take a math course and fail all of the tests. You might decide it's because you're not good at math. In this case, the attribution you made for your poor test performance led you to conclude that you have low ability in this area. If you had decided that you failed the exams for some other reason (e.g., you didn't study hard enough; you studied the wrong material; or the tests were unfair) you would not have concluded that your ability was low.
Finally, people can gain self-knowledge by making attributions for other people's behavior. Imagine, for example, that I ask several people to play bridge with me and they all say "no." If I decide the reason they won't play with me is because I'm not a good bridge player, the attribution I have made for other people's behavior has influenced what I think about myself.
Section Summary
In this section we have discussed a number of ways people learn about themselves. They can (1) consult the physical world; (2) compare themselves with others (social comparison); (3) incorporate the opinions of others toward them (reflected appraisals); (4) look inward (introspection); and (5) examine their behavior in the context in which it occurs and draw an appropriate inference (self-perception and attributions).
Not all of these sources of information are relevant for every attribute, but most are. Consider, for example, how these processes could lead a person to think of herself as shy and introverted. To begin, she might examine how she behaves at parties. If she's always standing off to the side, apart from others, she might come to regard herself as introverted through a self-perception process. She could also engage in introspection and examine her feelings in social situations. If she feels anxious and uncomfortable in the company of others, she might conclude that she is shy. People may also have told her she was shy. If she accurately perceived what they were saying, and she incorporated this information into her self-concept, she could come to believe that she was shy through the reflected appraisal process. Finally, she could also compare her level of social activity with others and conclude that she is less socially inclined than most other people. From that information, she might also infer that she is introverted.