In this video I discuss how others influence the formation of our self–concept using the theories of social comparison theory and social identity theory. Social comparison theory, proposed by Leon Festinger, suggests that we necessarily look to the traits and abilities of others in order to understand ourselves. Social identity theory suggests that our sense of self-esteem is based in part on the successes and failures of the groups we are in, and can be seen in demonstrations of basking in “reflected glory“. The relative importance of our groups may also depend on whether we are living in a more individualist or collectivist culture.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider the relationship between the self and others and this means we’re going to return to an idea that I described in the unit on personality. This is the idea of self–concept; this refers to the complex and nuanced view that we have of ourselves. It’s the set of cognitions or schema that we’ve built up and refined over time in order to answer the question “who am I?”.

So how do we go about answering this question? How do we figure out who we are? Well, in part we do this through what’s called social comparison theory. This is the idea that we look to other people in order to understand ourselves and this was proposed by Leon Festinger, and here’s a picture of Festinger here. We’re going to learn more about Festinger in future videos, and the idea was when we want to understand ourselves, we necessarily have to look to other people. We want to understand our own traits and our own abilities, and this involves comparison with others. So who do we compare ourselves to?

Well, the idea is we compare ourselves to people who are relevant in some way. So if I want to understand my own athletic ability, I might take a particular area like basketball playing and figure out, “well how good am I at basketball or how terrible am I at basketball?”. And I probably looked at people who are relevant. So rather than comparing myself directly to Michael Jordan, I’d probably compare myself to the people that I play basketball with. “Ok, well compared to them, am I better or worse?” Or when I think about my own intellectual abilities, I might look to my classmates. They seem to be relevant in many ways and so that’s the appropriate level of comparison, rather than trying to compare myself to Descartes or da Vinci and always coming up short. Now this is also seen in our comparisons of something like physical attractiveness, and this is an area where we might be more likely to compare to people who actually aren’t that relevant because we’re bombarded by images of very beautiful people all the time in movies, TV shows, advertisements, magazines. We’re constantly seeing ideals of physical beauty and physical attractiveness and we might have a tendency to compare ourselves to these people and feel that we’re not particularly attractive, rather than comparing ourselves to the people that we see in everyday life. And if we think in evolutionary terms we can remember that in our past when we were living in small tribes; you simply didn’t see that many very physically attractive people on a regular basis. But now in modern society we are constantly seeing these idealized versions of beauty and we’ll think about what that might mean in future videos.

Now another way of thinking about ourselves is that our self is tied to the groups that were in. We’re social animals, we’re all members of many different groups and this means that our sense of who we are is going to be connected to the groups that we’re in and it’s gonna be connected to how well those groups are doing. This brings us to what’s called social identity theory. This is the idea that our self-esteem and our sense of pride is partially going to be derived from the success or the failure of the groups that we’re in. Now one study looking at this by Robert Cialdini and colleagues looked at Monday in class, whether students were wearing the school insignia or not. And they found a relationship between how many students in these large lecture classes on Mondays were wearing school insignia and whether or not the football team for that school had won or lost. Now the idea here is that when the football team has won students want to emphasize their connection to the school, whereas when the team has lost the students are less likely to want to advertise that relationship.

And so this is referred to as the idea of “reflected glory“. So reflected glory is where we emphasize the ties to the group, so when that team has done well we want to show “hey I’m a part of that group. I’m a fan”, or “I go to that school” And when the team has lost we engage in what’s called “cutting off reflected failure“; where we distance ourselves from that group. And I think this idea of reflected glory it’s best demonstrated in a joke by Jerry Seinfeld, where he says, you know, when sports fans, when the team that they support has won they say “we won, we won” and to which he would reply “no, they won. You watched.”

Now lastly we can consider the relationship between the self and others and culture. This brings us to a cultural dimension that I mentioned in the previous video; which is the distinction between individualist cultures and collectivist cultures. Now on the more extreme end of individualist cultures would be a country like the United States, which is considered to be highly individualistic. This is because there’s a great deal of emphasis on things like self-reliance, on the pursuit of personal goals, or personal needs, and this is in contrast to other countries that are considered to be more collectivist, like Japan, which is considered to be more group oriented. There’s a greater emphasis on the importance of social relationships and maintaining group harmony.

One way we might see this distinction between individualist and collectivist cultures is to think about things like MVP awards for sports. In the United States, we place great importance on these types of awards that single out an individual for their contributions. Or in the case of film awards like the Oscars we see that rather than saying “well, this great film was the result of the work of hundreds of people”, we pick out one individual and say “this person did an exceptional job and we want to reward that, just based on the individual contributions”. Or we can see this in the business world, in what we might call “CEO worship”, in some situations where people lavish praise on one individual from a corporation rather than recognizing that the product that the corporation has produced has been the result of the work of thousands and thousands of people.

Ok, so that’s the basic idea of social comparison theory and social identity theory and how these play a role in our self-concept and figuring out who we are. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!