In this video I consider how we view ourselves and how biases, personal constructs, schema, and behavior interact in shaping personality. I provide an example of Albert Bandura’s reciprocal determinism for understanding the relationship between predisposition, the social environment, and behavior, which we will consider in more detail in the next video.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the previous video I talked about the humanistic approach of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and this idea that we have an intrinsic drive towards reaching our fullest potential becoming self actualized or fully functioning and you might wonder how it is we know about this self that we’re supposed to be actualizing.
How do we know our own potential? How do we know our limitations? How do we view ourselves? Now if we try to think about how we view ourselves, what we find is that we’re prone to a number of biases and I’ve talked about these in previous videos. So I’ve mentioned the idea of illusory superiority or the Wobegon effect and this is the idea that if you ask people to assess their own abilities in a number of areas, what you generally find is that most people view themselves as above average. And of course it’s statistically impossible for most people to be above average.
And I’ve also talked about the idea of self-serving bias and this relates to our recollections of our own abilities; we have a tendency to remember our successes and our achievements but to forget our failures and our mistakes. Now, we can also think about how we view ourselves in terms of our contributions towards group efforts. So you can ask people how much they’re contributing to something and if you ask a couple, let’s say, how much each of them is contributing to the housework, you might find that both people say that they’re contributing about 60% of the effort, which, again, is statistically impossible.
You probably already know this if you think about group projects that you’ve worked on in school. If I went to a group of students and asked them each to estimate how much they were contributing to the project I’d almost always get a number over 100%. I might even get three students each claiming that they’re doing 80% of the work. So one way that we can think about how people view themselves is actually to ask about other people.
So this brings us back to the idea of personal constructs from George Kelly that I talked about in a previous video. So these are the schema that we build up about how the world works and how we view the social world. One thing that we can do is, rather than asking people about themselves, we ask them about other people. So we ask them to describe others because their own biases might influence their reports about themselves. But let’s say I ask you to describe ten different people; that might tell me something about the traits that you focus on. Maybe it tells me more about you than about those ten other people. And I can see which traits you value, which ones you notice. So if in your reports of the personalities of ten people that you know, I notice that you always mention honesty then that might tell me something about your views on the importance of honesty in social relationships.
Now another way we can think about the self is what’s called “reciprocal determinism” and this refers to how it develops and this comes from Albert Bandura, who you might recall from his Bobo doll study on observational learning. And the idea is that we have three main influences and they interact. So we have a biological predisposition, and we’ve already seen in the previous video the idea of biological predispositions in personality traits. So we have the idea of temperament. We have the heritability of things like big 5 traits, and then we have the environments that people are in. We know that these also influence the expression of certain personality traits, and then we have the individual behaviors and their consequences. So people do things and they get rewarded or punished for these things and that’s going to influence their behavior in the future. Now we can think about all three of these things interacting and this can cause certain spiraling to occur, right? Where things can sort of snowball and grow from what was initially a small difference.
So what do I mean by this? Let’s imagine two boys: Charles and Sam. Let’s say that Charles is a little bit introverted, that’s his predisposition; he’s born that way. And let’s say that Sam is a little bit extroverted, right? Now what this is going to mean is that they’re going to have different preferences for the environments that they seek out. So Charles is a little bit introverted, he’s going to be more likely to seek out more solitary environments. So let’s say that he prefers to spend more time at the library; it’s quieter there, there’s not a lot of people around he has to interact with, and so he has a preference towards that. And Sam, on the other hand, gets energy from being around other people, right? He finds it arousing to him to be around others and so he’s going to be more likely to seek out social gatherings.
So now we have these different environments and then in these different environments, of course, there’s going to be different behaviors. the way that they act in you know a library versus social gathering is going to be different. And then there’s going to be different consequences of those behaviors, of those interactions that they’re having or not having with other people. So now let’s imagine that Charles, the introverted one, is invited to a party. Now he goes to the party, he’s not really comfortable in this environment but he decides that he should go anyway. But he doesn’t have much practice interacting with other people; he’s not really sure what to talk about, he’s not sure if he’s doing things right, and as a result he seems a little bit awkward. Other people find it difficult to talk to him and so maybe they’re are a little bit more avoidant of him and he’s not really having a good time. And so in the future he’s going to be even less likely to accept an invitation to a party.
Now Sam, on the other hand, has had more practice in these social settings because he’s been seeking them out because of his initially fairly small predisposition and as a result he’s going to be more comfortable at these parties. He’s going to talk to more people and they’re going to find it easier to talk to him. And what this means is he’s going to be better at meeting new people. And the more new people that he meets, the more likely is to be invited to more social gatherings. And that means he’s going to get even more practice at developing these skills in interacting with other people. So over a longer period of time what we’re going to find is Sam is invited to more parties, he has more experience, he’s more confident in these certain types of social interactions, and he’s going to seem quite different from Charles, who is now avoiding these situations, is spending more time in solitary situations, therefore has even less practice in those situations and feels even less comfortable.
You know, 10 years later when, you know, they’re in the same social setting, we’re going to find very big differences in their personality that may have arose from an initially fairly small difference. Alright, so that’s the idea of reciprocal determinism, and in the next video we’ll look at a few other factors related to the self. We’ll talk about self-efficacy and the idea of self-esteem. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
