Self Concept and Personality

Personality - A person’s unique make up, which consistently influences the way the person responds to his or her environment.

Self-concept - The beliefs a person holds about his or her own attributes & how he or she evaluates those qualities.

Self Concept

The self concept is both a complete evaluation of oneself and an evaluation of many parts of oneself. For example you can feel good about yourself as a whole but dislike the fact you are bald. Self concept has many attributes which span a large and confusing area. They can be seperated by their content, positivity or negativity (self esteem), intensity, stability over time, accuracy.

Self-esteem is the positivity or negativity of a persons self concept.

">

People with high Self Esteem tend to be more confident, expect success from themselves and enjoy being the centre of attention. Those with low self esteem tend to expect failure and will try to avoid situations in which they may become embarressed or in which they may fail.

A persons self concept and self esteem is heavily influenced by social comparison. Social comparison is simply benchmarking yourself against those around you. If an individual is surrounded by the elite and they themselves are mediocre then they are likely to see themselves as inferior, likely causing low self esteem. If the exact same individual however is surrounded by those who are below average he is likely to see himself as superior, likely causing high self esteem. Therefore without social comparison, self-concept and self esteem becomes almost irrelevant. If you lived your entire life in isolation, never even seeing another image of a human being, would you care if you had a 6 pack or big boobs? I highly doubt it. Everything is only relevant when compared to something else, otherwise it is just meaningless words and numbers drifting through space. 9.48 seconds, the time it took Usain Bolt to run the 100 metres, gaining the world record. Completly irrelevant and utterly pointless without a social comparison.























































































We have 2 main images of ourselves. Our actual self and our ideal self. The former being a realistic evaluation of our characteristics and the latter being what we aspire to be.




The gap between our actual selves and our ideal selves differs from indiviudal to individual. For some people this gap is small, for others it is a gaping chasm.

We all have more than one self. Almost everyone adapts and changes themselves to better suit different siutations or to appear differently to different people. These changes are dependent on role identities. Certain roles e.g. a student or a boyfriend may be central to ones character where as other roles such as "the joker" amoungst a particular social group may be less prevalent and only shine through in specific situations.

The looking glass self is essentially looking at ourselves as other see us. This involves projecting the image that we feel people have of us. If someone thinks you are a "funny guy" then you may try and adhere to this image.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQId8tN0X8M

Does Russel Brand always act like this or has he adapted his behaviour because he is on a talk show? Furthermore is he only playing the role of the comedian because it is what everyone expects? What stopped him from answering Johnathen's question sincerely and made him go for a comedic approach? Would he answer the question in the same way if he was speaking to his mum? I doubt it.

It is incredibly important for companies to understand how these processes work in order to tailor their marketing promotions and products to manipulate certain tendencies.

For example advertising a product using a beautiful female model may cause consumers to make a social comparison, decide they want to look like the model does and therefore purchase the product in order to try to achieve their ideal self image.



Marketeers may also target certain products at people with certain roles in the attempt to make them buy the product with fulfilling that role in mind.