Self-Awareness and Self-Knowledge

Author(s):  
Mark Alicke ◽  
Yiyue Zhang ◽  
Nicole Stephenson

Research has explored the relationship between self-knowledge and self-awareness. Specifically, psychologists see self-awareness as a step on the path toward self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not a monolithic concept. For instance, the working self-concept is the self that is most relevant and accessible at a given time, while the global self-concept is an enduring, stored version of oneself. Implicit self-views are normally unconscious, whereas explicit self-views are generally conscious. The discrepancy between implicit and explicit self-knowledge sometimes results in inaccurate evaluations of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. Other types of self-knowledge are context-dependent. Established theories such as social identity theory state that people have distinct self-views in different situations. For example, self-complexity refers to the number of self-aspects a person possesses. Finally, there are also distinctions between accurate (i.e., self-assessment theory) and positive self-knowledge (i.e., self-enhancement theory). Self-assessment theory posits that people are information seekers who desire accurate self-views. On the contrary, self-enhancement theory says that people seek to maintain positive self-views and are averse to negative self-information. Depending on the context and the concerns for self-presentation, individuals have preferences to pursue accurate or enhancing self-information. Increased self-knowledge can manifest in three major ways: via biological, interpersonal, and intrapsychic origins. Biological explanations of the origins of self-knowledge are mostly concerned with genetic expressions and brain activities. Interpersonal paths also help individuals develop self-knowledge. For instance, social comparison facilitates people’s formation of self-views by comparing themselves with similar others. Reflected appraisals increase people’s awareness of their own abilities, qualities, and identities through others’ lens. Intrapsychic self-knowledge can be obtained through self-perception, in which people learn about themselves by observing and analyzing their behaviors in relevant situations. Introspection—focusing on the self—helps people ascertain the reasons behind their feelings and behaviors, which contributes to self-views. However, introspection can sometimes lead to flawed self-knowledge, or result in negative feelings induced by the feelings of inadequacy. Building on introspection, self-awareness provides another avenue for self-knowledge. The capacity to be aware of one’s existence, or reflexive self-consciousness, is a fundamental component of human cognition. Experimentally induced self-awareness has been shown to have positive effects (e.g., greater compliance with internal standards). Sometimes, however, awareness can have aversive consequences (e.g., suicide) because it reveals that one has fallen short of one’s goals. One way to reduce this discomfort is to avoid self-awareness, such as by cognitive deconstruction—an induction of a cognitive state that lacks emotion, a sense of the future, or concentration on the present. Another way to avoid self-awareness is through deindividuation, which is characterized by a temporary loss of personal identity, especially in a large group. Because self-awareness is associated with both life- and death-related thoughts, researchers argue the nature of this awareness is existential.

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 309-328
Author(s):  
Tomasz Jankowski ◽  
Wacław Bąk

The main aim of this article is to present a descriptive social-cognitive model of the adaptive self-concept (ASC) which integrates knowledge concerning the relationship between two aspects of the self—self-awareness and self-knowledge—and optimal functioning. We propose that adaptive self-awareness is moderately frequent, non-ruminative, focused on inner states, and motivated by curiosity. Adaptive self-knowledge is defined as accurate, complex, integrated and consisting of easily accessible self-beliefs, both abstract and concrete. The broader context for the ASC model is discussed, including its regulatory and interpersonal functions and factors which influence ASC development. The limitations of the model are discussed and suggestions are made for future investigations.


Author(s):  
Anna Afonina ◽  
Aleksandr Kazyulin ◽  
Boris Volodin ◽  
Dmitry Petrov

This study presents the results of studying the features of self-consciousness of adolescents with socialized behavior disorder, such as self-attitude (affective component of the image of the Self), self-concept, self-esteem and the level of claims.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
Nurasyah Dewi Napitupulu

Many studies assume that the professionalism of teachers is influenced by his personality. Personality is a psychological characteristic that contributes to learning outcomes and academic achievement. However, research that proves this assumption is limited in the domain of Christian teachers as part of teachers inIndonesia. This study aims to analyze the correlation between teachers’ personality and professionalism obtained through questionnaires and interviews. The analysis was carried out on 16 Christian teachers participated who were attending the Postgraduate Program in "Educational Professional Development" instruction. The results of the correlation test using the SPSS Version 21 program showed that Sig. (2-tailed) = 0.042 <0.05. It concluded that there is a positive correlation between the personality and professionalism of Christian teachers. Qualitative analysis is discovered that the teachers' personality is in the criteria of good and very good, as well as their professionality. The lowest percentage of personality is on the positive self-concept indicator (62.9%) with good criteria, whereas professionality is on the self-confidence indicator (64.5%) with good criteria. The results of interviews as the self-assessment be discovered that Christian teachers with high performance are 18.75%; the adjusted teachers are 43.75%; the teachers hopeless are 43.75%, and not giving answering by 25%. It was concluded that assumptions about teachers’ personality and professionalism have a proven correlation for Christian teachers participated. Therefore, to improve professionalism as an Indonesian teachers’ competence, it has to develop the personality of Christian teachers sustainable. The personality of the Christian teachers is an entity of Christ's character and professionalism is the existence of ability, attitude, and skills based on common sense. The researcher argues that toward a superior Indonesia is marked by teachers who excel in professionalism and personality.


2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (6) ◽  
pp. 603-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Hergovich ◽  
Ulrike Sirsch ◽  
Martin Felinger

The relationship between children's self-perceptions, children's perceptions of others' appraisal (i.e., reflected appraisals) and others' actual appraisals reported by mothers, fathers and teachers were examined. The Self-Description Questionnaire 1 (Marsh, 1988) was presented to 428 children. Parents and teachers were given an adapted form. Additionally, children were asked for reflected appraisals of their mothers, fathers and teachers according to the scales of the SDQ1. Results suggest that the reflected appraisal process is in fact more complicated than originally assumed by the theorist of symbolic interactionism. Thus, besides direct effects from actual appraisal on reflected appraisal and reflected appraisal on selfappraisal, there are also indications of an effect by actual appraisals on self- and reflected appraisals, especially for academic self-concept. Furthermore, results indicate that different significant others have a different impact on the self-perceptions of preadolescent children.


2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-530
Author(s):  
Cara Weber

Victorian writers often focus questions of ethics through scenes of sympathetic encounters that have been conceptualized, both by Victorian thinkers and by their recent critics, as a theater of identification in which an onlooking spectator identifies with a sufferer. George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871–72) critiques this paradigm, revealing its negation of otherness and its corresponding fixation of the self as an identity, and offers an alternative conception of relationship that foregrounds the presence and distinctness of the other and the open-endedness of relationship. The novel develops its critique through an analysis of women's experience of courtship and marriage, insisting upon the appropriateness ofmarriage as a site for the investigation of contemporary ethical questions. In her depiction of Rosamond, Eliot explores the identity-based paradigm of the spectacle of others, and shows how its conception of selfhood leaves the other isolated, precluding relationship. Rosamond's trajectory in the novel enacts the identity paradigm's relation to skeptical anxieties about self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and reveals such anxieties to occur with particular insistence around images of femininity. By contrast, Dorothea's development in ethical self-awareness presents an alternative to Rosamond's participation in the identity paradigm. In Dorothea's experience the self emerges as a process, an ongoing practice of expression. The focus on expression in the sympathetic or conflictual encounter, rather than on identity, enables the overcoming of the identity paradigm's denial of otherness, and grounds a productive sympathy capable of informing ethical action.


2008 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROBERT C. BARTLETT

No one can claim to have thought seriously about the question “How ought I to live?”, the guiding question of political philosophy, without having confronted the powerful answer to it supplied by hedonism. In thinking about hedonism today, we may begin from that thinker who was both very important to and early in its history: Plato. Of the dialogs that have come down to us as Plato's, only the Philebus takes as its direct aim the examination of pleasure's claim to be the human good. The Philebus culminates in the suggestions that the need for self-awareness or self-knowledge may finally be more fundamental to all human beings (and hence to hedonists) than is even the desire for pleasure, and that the experience of at least some pleasures constitutes a great obstacle to precisely the self-knowledge we seek. The Philebus is important today not only because it contains a searching analysis of hedonism but also because it compels us to raise the crucial question of the precise nature of “the good” with which we are justly most concerned—our own or that of others—a question whose centrality to self-knowledge we are in danger of forgetting.


2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca N. Mitchell

Abstract In both Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) an earnest and ambitious man falls in love with a superficial and beautiful woman named Rosamond. This essay explores the “Rosamond plots” to argue that Middlemarch stages a radical revision of the version of subjectivity vaunted in Jane Eyre. Via its invocation of Jane Eyre’s Rosamond plot, Middlemarch challenges the very nature of self-knowledge, questions the status of identification in intersubjective relationships, and insists upon the unknowability of the other. In Eliot’s retelling, the self-awareness promoted in Jane Eyre is not only insufficient, but also verges on self-absorption and even solipsism. One way in which Eliot enacts this revision is by shifting the focus of positive affective relationships away from models of identification. The change marks an evolution in our understanding of the way in which character and communal life is conceived by each author. More specifically, Eliot’s revisions situate empathic response as being dependent upon the recognition of the radical alterity of the other.


1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 389-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
David DeSteno ◽  
Peter Salovey

The self-concept is theorized to play an important role in many psychological processes. Numerous theories rest on assumptions concerning the differential accessibility of pieces of self-knowledge, but relatively little attention during the past decade has centered on examining the underlying structure of the self-concept that mediates such differences. In the present article, we suggest a new model of the self-concept that incorporates recent advances in knowledge regarding conceptual structure. We envision the self as a representation in working memory with inherently flexible content and organization. Initial empirical evidence supporting this view is reviewed and followed by a discussion of the implications of this model for many phenomena involving the self-concept.


1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pauline Chazan

Hume’s account of how the self enters the moral domain and comes to a consciousness of itself as a moral being is one which he superimposes upon his Treatise account of the constitution of the non-metaphysical self. This primordial self is for Hume constructed out of the passions of pride and humility which are themselves in tum constructed out of certain feelings of pain and pleasure, these feelings being worked on by memory and imagination, and converted back and forth into series of ideas and impressions. In presenting this account of the way in which we achieve a coherent self-awareness and self-knowledge such that we ‘know our own force’ (T 597), Hurne in fact employs a radical psychology which he must discard once the moral self comes into view. The use Hume makes of this psychology has gone unnoticed in the literature, but once we understand its implications we will be able to dispel the confusion that some have found in his story.


2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-314
Author(s):  
Lysia Rachel Moreira BASÍLIO ◽  
Antonio ROAZZI ◽  
Alexsandro Medeiros do NASCIMENTO ◽  
José Arturo Costa ESCOBAR

Abstract The present study investigated incarceration as a possible triggering factor of self-concept transformations. Self-concept consists of a set of multiple dimensions organized hierarchically functioning as cognitive schemas. It is a structural complex product of reflective activity, and it is susceptible to changes as the individual encounters new situations, life transitions, and social roles. To investigate the transformations in the self-concept structure, 150 incarcerated women responded to the Feminine Inventory of the Self-Concept's Gender Schemas, Self-Concept Clarity Scale and Situational Self-Awareness Scale. The results showed dynamic and multidimensional organization of self-concept in the women investigated, including various categories of the self. The elements analyzed indicate that prison, an undesirable life event in adulthood, is a driver of transformations in the dynamics of self-concept.


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