For decades, the self (e.g., ego, identity, self-concept) and related processes (e.g., self-esteem, self-reflection) have been a central concern of social and behavioral scientists as well as mental health professionals. As such, one might reasonably assume that there is a widely accepted definition or description of the self. Surprisingly, there is not. William James--the philosopher, theologian, and psychologist--termed the self, "the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal," and despite James' lucid writing about the self and a century of research and writing since, the human self remains a puzzle.
That isn't to say that social and behavioral scientists know nothing about the self or doubt its existence. Quite the contrary. The large volume of empirical research on the self has convinced most social and behavioral scientists that the self is real, and that no science of the human experience is complete without accounting for it. Here, at a general level, are some things we know about the self:
1. The self is reflexive--it can become the object of its own attention (from various perspectives)--and this reflexiveness underlies many of the activities of the self.
2. Most of our understanding of the world (e.g., other people, things we read or see) is filtered through our understanding of self.
3. Although, from late adolescence onward, the self is stable over time, in particular situations different aspects of the self move to the fore, creating the appearance of fluidity.
4. Due to a variety of personal and interpersonal motives, the self on public display often does not match the self of which we are privately aware.
Although these general, widely accepted properties of the self are important, and the principles and predictions that follow from them are many, there are some fundamental things we do not know about the human self:
1. We do not know where the self resides. Although the self is clearly a product of activity occurring in the nervous system, no one has yet identified areas of the brain that are associated with the capacity for self-relevant thought and emotion.
2. We do not know to what extent the self, at least the core of it, is in place at birth. The alternative, which, in its extreme form, is unsettling to many, is that the self is totally "written by" experience.
3. We don't know how profound is the effect of culture on the self. Is it possible that, in cultures that value the collective (e.g., family, religious group) over the individual, there is no clearly delineated self?
In the way of summarizing what we know, here is a description of the human self:
Skeptics might argue that the description fails to resolve, even address, the fundamental issues raised earlier, and they would be correct. Yet the description captures what we know about the activity of the self from decades of scientific inquiry and, in that sense, provides a credible, if not complete, account of it. And we must take care not to rule off-limits that which we cannot observe or fully describe. After all, before anyone had seen an atom, we knew it was there and had a good sense of its structure and functioning. Perhaps one day the technological equivalent of an electron microscope will allow us to bring into focus what we know is there but, for now, must be content simply to infer--the human self.
Further Reading
Baumeister, R. (1987). How the self became a problem: A psychological review of historical research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 163-176.
Hales, S. (1985). The inadvertent rediscovery of the self in social psychology. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 15, 237-282.
James, W. (1890). The consciousness of self. In The principles of psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 291-401). New York: Holt.
Viney, L. (1969). Self: The history of a concept. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 5, 349-359.
Are people better off having positive illusions about themselves? A few years ago, Taylor and Brown (1988) shook the psychological community by claiming it was true and providing a litany of evidence to back it up. Not surprisingly, other psychologists have rallied to the defense of insight: It can never be wrong, they argued, to know the truth about yourself. It can never be beneficial, they asserted, to be self-deceived. In our recent research, we found pros and cons to positive illusions. We examined a particular type of positive illusions, namely, the tendency to rate yourself more positively than others rate you. We compared individuals with a large positive discrep ancy ("self-enhancers") with those whose self- and other-ratings were very similar ("accurates").
In one study, we examined how others react to these two types of individuals during a series of discussion groups. We found that other group-members were intially impressed with self-enhancers: They were seen as confident, interesting, and entertaining. By the seventh meeting, however, they were seen as arrogant, irritating, hostile, and generally narcissistic. In another study, we followed the two groups over the course of two years year at college. Throughout the period, the self-enhancers always reported the highest self-esteem and well-being. Yet they were more likely to drop out of college!
As often happens in psychological research, it turns out that the two sides to a debate were both correct: After all, they had both based their conclusions on hard data as well as personal experience. As the tradeoffs between illusions and accuracy begin to emerge, we take particular delight in conducting research that demonstrates how and when opposing claims can hold true.