Topic 1: Who Am I?

Activity 1: Reading – Who Am I?

Please read the following text that helps you question who you are.

^{This activity contains text from Chapter 3: Self and Identity and Identity in Intercultural Communication for the Community College (2nd ed.) by Karen Krumrey licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Minor changes made for readability.}

Introduction

Most of us have already wondered who we are — what we like, how we describe ourselves, or what we really feel strongly about. Many people reflect on their own identities regularly! But how do we become who we are, and how do we decide what we like, how we describe ourselves, or what we feel strongly about?

Our parents, friends, teachers, community, and media help shape our identities. While developing a sense of self happens from birth, most people in Western societies reach a stage in adolescence when they begin to reflect on who they are, and who they will become. As our experiences grow, we continue to reflect on who we are.

To more fully understand communication, we need to look back at the communication process to understand what constitutes a sender/receiver or “self.” Along the way, we will also consider the formation of identities, differences, culture shock, and communication competence.

Although each of us experiences ourselves as a singular individual, our sense of self is actually made up of three separate, yet integrated components: self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem.

Self-awareness can be defined in many ways, including “conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires” (Encyclopedia.com, n.d.). In other words, noticing your feelings, your reactions, your thoughts, your behaviours, and more. As you are watching and observing your own actions, you are also engaging in social comparison, which is observing and assigning meaning to others’ behaviour and then comparing it with your own.

Self-concept is your overall perception of who you think you are. Self-concept answers the question of who am I? Your self-concept is based on the beliefs, attitudes, and values that you have about yourself. Identity and self-concept are strongly intertwined.

Self-esteem is how we value and perceive ourselves. Whether you feel positively or negatively about yourself, your self-esteem influences your communication.

In addition to self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem, our culture is a powerful source of self (Vallacher et al., 2002). As we have previously learned, culture is an established, coherent set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices shared by a large group of people (Keesing, 1974). In other words, culture is like a collective sense of self that is shared by a large group of people.

Self-Concept

^{This activity contains text from Chapter 2: Communication and the Self by Terri Johnson licensed under CC BY 4.0. Minor changes made for readability.}
Our self-concept is also formed through our interactions with others and their reactions to us. The concept of the looking glass self explains that we see ourselves reflected in other people’s reactions to us and then form our self-concept based on how we believe other people see us. This reflective process of building our self-concept is based on what other people have actually said, such as “You’re a good listener,” and other people’s actions, such as coming to you for advice. These thoughts evoke emotional responses that feed into our self-concept. For example, you may think, “I’m glad that people can count on me to listen to their problems.” We also develop our self-concept through comparisons to other people. Social comparison theory states that we describe and evaluate ourselves in terms of how we compare to other people. Social comparisons are based on two dimensions: superiority/ inferiority and similarity /difference. In terms of superiority and inferiority, we evaluate characteristics like attractiveness, intelligence, athletic ability, and so on. For example, you may judge yourself to be more intelligent than your brother or less athletic than your best friend, and these judgments are incorporated into your self-concept.

This process of comparison and evaluation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can have negative consequences if our reference group isn’t appropriate. Reference groups are the groups we use for social comparison, and they typically change based on what we are evaluating. In terms of athletic ability, many people choose unreasonable reference groups with which to engage in social comparison. If a person wants to get into better shape and starts an exercise routine, they may be discouraged by the difficulty of keeping up with an aerobics instructor or running partner and judge themselves as inferior. This kind of comparison could negatively affect a person’s self-concept. If instead, this person used a reference group made up of people who have only recently started a fitness program but have shown progress, that could help them maintain a more accurate and hopefully positive self-concept.

We also engage in social comparison based on similarity and difference. Since self-concept is context-specific, similarity may be desirable in some situations and difference more desirable in others. Factors like age and personality may influence whether or not we want to fit in or stand out. Although we compare ourselves to others throughout our lives, adolescent and teen years usually bring new pressure to be similar to or different from particular reference groups. Think of all the cliques in high school and how people voluntarily and involuntarily broke off into groups based on popularity, interest, culture, or grade level. Some kids in your high school probably wanted to fit in with and be similar to other people in the marching band but be different from the football players. Conversely, athletes were probably more apt to compare themselves, in terms of similar athletic ability, to other athletes rather than kids in show choir. But social comparison can be complicated by perceptual influences. As we learned earlier, we organize information based on similarity and difference, but these patterns don’t always hold true. Even though students involved in athletics and students involved in arts may seem very different, a dancer or singer may also be very athletic, perhaps even more so than a member of the football team. There are positive and negative consequences of social comparison.

We generally want to know where we fall in terms of ability and performance as compared to others, but what people do with this information and how it affects self-concept varies. Not all people feel they need to be at the top of the list, but some won’t stop until they break a record score or set a new school record in a track-and-field event. Some people strive to be first chair in the clarinet section of the orchestra, while another person may be content to be second chair. The education system promotes social comparison through grades and rewards such as honor rolls and dean’s lists.

Although education and privacy laws prevent a teacher from displaying each student’s grade on a test or paper for the whole class to see, teachers do typically report the aggregate grades, meaning the total number of As, Bs, Cs, and so on. This doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy rights, but it allows students to see where they fell in the distribution. This type of social comparison can be used as motivation. The student who was one of only three out of twenty-three to get a D on the exam knows that most of her classmates are performing better than she is, which may lead her to think, “If they can do it, I can do it.” But social comparison that isn’t reasoned can have negative effects and result in negative thoughts like “Look at how bad I did. I’m not as smart as my classmates.” These negative thoughts can lead to negative behaviours, because we try to maintain internal consistency, meaning we act in ways that match up with our self-concept.

So if the student begins to question her academic abilities and then incorporates an assessment of herself as a “bad student” into her self-concept, she may then behave in ways consistent with that, which is only going to worsen her academic performance. Additionally, a student might be comforted to learn that he isn’t the only person who got a D and then not feel the need to try to improve, since he has company. You can see in this example that evaluations we place on our self-concept can lead to cycles of thinking and acting. These cycles relate to self-esteem and self-efficacy, which are components of our self-concept.

Self-Esteem

Self-esteem refers to the judgments and evaluations we make about our self-concept. While self-concept is a broad description of the self, self-esteem is more specifically an evaluation of the self. If I again prompted you to “Tell me who you are,” and then asked you to evaluate (label as good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable) each of the things you listed about yourself, I would get clues about your self-esteem. Like self-concept, self-esteem has general and specific elements. Generally, some people are more likely to evaluate themselves positively while others are more likely to evaluate themselves negatively. More specifically, our self-esteem varies across our life span and across contexts.

How we judge ourselves affects our communication and our behaviours, but not every negative or positive judgment carries the same weight. The negative evaluation of a trait that isn’t very important for our self-concept will likely not result in a loss of self-esteem. For example, I am not very good at drawing. While I appreciate drawing as an art form, I don’t consider drawing ability to be a very big part of my self-concept. If someone critiqued my drawing ability, my self-esteem wouldn’t take a big hit. I do consider myself a good teacher, however, and I have spent and continue to spend considerable time and effort on improving my knowledge of teaching and my teaching skills. If someone critiqued my teaching knowledge and/or abilities, my self-esteem would definitely be hurt. This doesn’t mean that we can’t be evaluated on something we find important. Even though teaching is very important to my self-concept, I am regularly evaluated on it. Periodically I am evaluated by my students, my dean, and my colleagues. Most of that feedback is in the form of praise and constructive criticism (which can still be difficult to receive), but when taken in the spirit of self-improvement, it is valuable and may even enhance our self-concept and self-esteem. In fact, in professional contexts, people with higher self-esteem are more likely to work harder based on negative feedback, are less negatively affected by work stress, are able to handle workplace conflict better, and are better able to work independently and solve problems. Self-esteem isn’t the only factor that contributes to our self-concept; perceptions about our competence also play a role in developing our sense of self.

Self-efficacy refers to the judgments people make about their ability to perform a task within a specific context.

Let’s look at an example:

Toni did a good job on her first college speech. During a meeting with her professor, Toni indicates that she is confident going into the next speech and thinks she will do well. This skill-based assessment is an indication that Toni has a high level of self-efficacy related to public speaking. If she does well on the speech, the praise from her classmates and professor will reinforce her self-efficacy and lead her to positively evaluate her speaking skills, which will contribute to her high self-esteem.

By the end of the class, Toni likely thinks of herself as a good public speaker, which may then become an important part of her self-concept. Throughout these points of connection, it’s important to remember that self-perception affects how we communicate, behave, and perceive other things. Toni’s increased feeling of self-efficacy may give her more confidence in her delivery, which will likely result in positive feedback that reinforces her self-perception. She may start to perceive her professor more positively since they share an interest in public speaking, and she may begin to notice other people’s speaking skills more during class presentations and public lectures.

Over time, she may even start to think about changing her major to communication or pursuing career options that incorporate public speaking, which would further integrate being “a good public speaker” into her self-concept. You can hopefully see that these interconnections can create powerful positive or negative cycles.

While some of this process is under our control, much of it is also shaped by the people in our lives. The verbal and nonverbal feedback we get from people affect our feelings of self-efficacy and our self-esteem. As we saw in Toni’s example, being given positive feedback can increase our self-efficacy, which may make us more likely to engage in a similar task in the future. Obviously, negative feedback can lead to decreased self-efficacy and a declining interest in engaging with the activity again. In general, people adjust their expectations about their abilities based on feedback they get from others. Positive feedback tends to make people raise their expectations for themselves and negative feedback does the opposite, which ultimately affects behaviours and creates the cycle. When feedback from others is different from how we view ourselves, additional cycles may develop that impact self-esteem and self-concept.

Self-Discrepency Theory

Self-discrepancy theory states that people have beliefs about and expectations for their actual and potential selves that do not always match up with what they actually experience. To understand this theory, we have to understand the different “selves” that make up our self-concept, which are the actual, ideal, and ought selves. The actual self consists of the attributes that you or someone else believes you actually possess. The ideal self consists of the attributes that you or someone else would like you to possess. The ought self consists of the attributes you or someone else believes you should possess. These different selves can conflict with each other in various combinations. Discrepancies between the actual and ideal/ought selves can be motivating in some ways and prompt people to act for self improvement. For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so.

Discrepancies between the ideal and ought selves can be especially stressful. For example, many professional women who are also mothers have an ideal view of self that includes professional success and advancement. They may also have an ought self that includes a sense of duty and obligation to be a full-time mother. The actual self may be someone who does okay at both but doesn’t quite live up to the expectations of either. These discrepancies do not just create cognitive unease—they also lead to emotional, behavioural, and communicative changes. When we compare the actual self to the expectations of ourselves and others, we can see particular patterns of emotional and behavioural effects. When our actual self doesn’t match up with our own ideals of self, we are not obtaining our own desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration. For example, if your ideal self has no credit card debt and your actual self does, you may be frustrated with your lack of financial discipline and be motivated to stick to your budget and pay off your credit card bills.

When our actual self doesn’t match up with other people’s ideals for us, we may not be obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes, which can lead to feelings of dejection including shame, embarrassment, and concern for losing the affection or approval of others. For example, if a significant other sees you as an “A” student and you get a 2.8 GPA your first year of college, then you may be embarrassed to share your grades with that person. When our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think other people think we should obtain, we are not living up to the ought self that we think others have constructed for us, which can lead to feelings of agitation, feeling threatened, and fearing potential punishment. For example, if your parents think you should follow in their footsteps and take over the family business, but your actual self wants to go into the military, then you may be unsure of what to do and fear being isolated from the family.

Finally, when our actual self doesn’t match up with what we think we should obtain, we are not meeting what we see as our duties or obligations, which can lead to feelings of agitation including guilt, weakness, and a feeling that we have fallen short of our moral standard. For example, if your ought self should volunteer more for the local animal shelter, then your actual self may be more inclined to do so due to the guilt of reading about the increasing number of animals being housed at the facility. The following is a review of the four potential discrepancies between selves:

• Actual vs. own ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining our desires and hopes, which leads to feelings of disappointment, dissatisfaction, and frustration.
• Actual vs. others’ ideals. We have an overall feeling that we are not obtaining significant others’ desires and hopes for us, which leads to feelings of shame and embarrassment.
• Actual vs. others’ ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting what others see as our duties and obligations, which leads to feelings of agitation including fear of potential punishment.
• Actual vs. own ought. We have an overall feeling that we are not meeting our duties and obligations, which can lead to a feeling that we have fallen short of our own moral standards.

Influences on the Self

We have already learned that other people influence our self-concept and self-esteem. While interactions we have with individuals and groups are definitely important to consider, we must also note the influence that larger, more systemic forces have on our self-perception. Social and family influences, culture, and the media all play a role in shaping who we think we are and how we feel about ourselves. Although these are powerful socializing forces, there are ways to maintain some control over our self-perception, our view of ourselves.

Social and Family Influences

Various forces help socialize us into our respective social and cultural groups and play a powerful role in presenting us with options about who we can be. While we may like to think that our self-perception starts with a blank canvas, our perceptions are limited by our experiences and various social and cultural contexts. Parents and peers shape our self-perceptions in positive and negative ways. The feedback that we get from significant others, which includes close family, can lead to positive views of self.

The theory of symbolic interactionism poses that the self is a product of the messages it has encountered over past interactions. Many of these interactions and messages come from our social influences (at school, work and beyond) as well as our family and friends.

There are cultural differences in the amount of praise and positive feedback that teachers and parents give their children. For example, teachers give less positive reinforcement in Japanese and Taiwanese classrooms than do teachers in US classrooms. Chinese and Kenyan parents do not regularly praise their children because they fear it may make them too individualistic, rude, or arrogant. So the phenomenon of overpraising isn’t universal, and the debate over its potential effects is not resolved. Research has also found that communication patterns develop between parents and children that are common to many verbally and physically abusive relationships. Such patterns have negative effects on a child’s self-efficacy and self-esteem. Attributions are links we make to identify the cause of a behaviour. In the case of aggressive or abusive parents, they are not as able to distinguish between mistakes and intentional behaviours, often seeing honest mistakes as intended and reacting negatively to the child. Such parents also communicate generally negative evaluations to their child by saying, for example, “You can’t do anything right!” or “You’re a bad girl.” When children do exhibit positive behaviours, abusive parents are more likely to use external attributions (causes outside of the child) that diminish the achievement of the child by saying, for example, “You only won because the other team was off their game.” In general, abusive parents have unpredictable reactions to their children’s positive and negative behaviour, which creates an uncertain and often scary climate for a child that can lead to lower self-esteem and erratic or aggressive behaviour. The cycles of praise and blame are just two examples of how the family as a socializing force can influence our self-perceptions.

Motivation is the underlying force that drives us to do things. Sometimes we are intrinsically motivated, meaning we want to do something for the love of doing it or the resulting internal satisfaction. Other times we are extrinsically motivated, meaning we do something to receive a reward or avoid punishment. If you put effort into completing a short documentary for a class because you love film-making and editing, you have been largely motivated by intrinsic forces. If you complete the documentary because you want an “A” and know that if you fail your parents will not give you money for your spring break trip, then you are motivated by extrinsic factors. Both can, of course, effectively motivate us. Praise is a form of extrinsic reward, and if there is an actual reward associated with the praise, like money or special recognition, some people speculate that intrinsic motivation will suffer. But what’s so good about intrinsic motivation? Intrinsic motivation is more substantial and long-lasting than extrinsic motivation and can lead to the development of a work ethic and a sense of pride in one’s abilities. Intrinsic motivation can move people to accomplish great things over long periods of time and be happy despite the effort and sacrifices made. Extrinsic motivation dies when the reward stops. Additionally, too much praise can lead people to have a misguided sense of their abilities. College professors who are reluctant to fail students who produce failing work may be setting those students up to be shocked when their supervisor critiques their abilities or output once they get into a professional context.

Culture

How people perceive themselves varies across cultures. For example, many cultures exhibit a phenomenon known as the self-enhancement bias, meaning that we tend to emphasize our desirable qualities relative to other people. But the degree to which people engage in self-enhancement varies. A review of many studies in this area found that people in Western countries such as the United States were significantly more likely to self-enhance than people in countries such as Japan.

Many scholars explain this variation using a common measure of cultural variation that claims people in individualistic cultures are more likely to engage in competition and openly praise accomplishments than people in collectivistic cultures. The difference in self-enhancement has also been tied to economics, with scholars arguing that people in countries with greater income inequality are more likely to view themselves as superior to others or want to be perceived as superior to others (even if they don’t have economic wealth) in order to conform to the country’s values and norms. This holds true because countries with high levels of economic inequality, like the United States, typically value competition and the right to boast about winning or succeeding, while countries with more economic equality, like Japan, have a cultural norm of modesty.

Gender differences have been studied but are very often exaggerated beyond the actual variations. Socialization and internalization of societal norms for gender differences account for much more of our perceived differences than do innate or natural differences between genders. These gender norms may be explicitly stated— for example, a mother may say to her son, “Boys don’t play with dolls”—or they may be more implicit, with girls being encouraged to pursue historically feminine professions like teaching or nursing without others actually stating the expectation. Ultimately these norms, which are very common even across cultures, affect self-perception deeply and can make individuals feel dissatisfied with themselves if they don’t fit into the norms.

Media

The representations we see in the media affect our self-concept. The vast majority of media images include idealized representations of attractiveness. Despite the fact that the images of people we see in glossy magazines and on movie screens are not typically what we see when we look at the people around us in a classroom, at work, or at the grocery store, many of us continue to hold ourselves to an unrealistic standard of beauty and attractiveness. Movies, magazines, television shows, and social media sites are filled with what our society views as ideally beautiful people. Even people who possess society’s more ideal physical characteristics are further enhanced with digital manipulation (filters, photo-editing software). When “regular” people are present in the media, they are typically portrayed as the butt of jokes, villains, or only as background extras. Aside from overall attractiveness, the media also offers narrow representations of acceptable body weight and body types. Researchers have found that only 12% of prime-time characters are overweight, which is dramatically less than the national statistics for obesity among the actual US population. Further, an analysis of how weight is discussed on prime-time sitcoms found that larger female characters were often the targets of negative comments and jokes that audience members responded to with laughter. Conversely, positive comments about women’s bodies were related to their thinness. In short, the bigger the character, the more negative the comments, and the thinner the character, the more positive the comments. The same researchers analyzed sitcoms for content regarding male characters’ weight and found that although comments regarding their weight were made, they were fewer in number and not as negative, ultimately supporting the notion that overweight male characters are more accepted in media than overweight female characters. Much more attention has been paid in recent years to the potential negative effects of such narrow media representations. The following “Getting Critical” box explores the role of media in the construction of body image.

In terms of self-concept, media representations offer us guidance on what is acceptable or unacceptable and valued or not valued in our society. Mediated messages, in general, reinforce cultural stereotypes related to race, gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, and class. People from historically marginalized groups must look much harder than those in the dominant groups to find positive representations of their identities in media. As a critical thinker, it is important to question media messages and to examine who is included and who is excluded.

Advertising, in particular, encourages people to engage in social comparison, regularly communicating to us that we are inferior because we lack a certain product or that we need to change some aspect of our lives to keep up with and be similar to others. For example, for many years advertising targeted at women instilled in them a fear of having a dirty house, selling them products that promised to keep their house clean, make their family happy, and impress their friends and neighbours. Now messages tell us to fear becoming old or unattractive, selling products to keep our skin tight and clear, which will, in turn, make us happy and popular.

“Getting Critical” – Body Image and Self-Perception

Take a look at any magazine, television show, or movie and you will most likely see people society deems as beautiful. When you look around you in your daily life, there are likely not as many glamorous people. Scholars and media critics have critiqued this discrepancy for decades because it has contributed to many social issues and public health issues ranging from body dysmorphic disorder to eating disorders, to lowered self-esteem.

Much of the media is driven by advertising, and the business of media has been to perpetuate a “culture of lack.” This means that we are constantly told, via mediated images, that we lack something. In short, advertisements often tell us we don’t have enough money, enough beauty, or enough material possessions. Over the past few decades, women’s bodies in the media have gotten smaller and thinner, while men’s bodies have gotten bigger and more muscular. At the same time, the US population has become dramatically more obese. As research shows that men and women are becoming more and more dissatisfied with their bodies, which ultimately affects their self-concept and self-esteem, health and beauty product lines proliferate and cosmetic surgeries and other types of enhancements become more and more popular. From young children to older adults, people are becoming more aware of and oftentimes unhappy with their bodies, which results in a variety of self-perception problems.

Activity 2: Personal Reflection Journal – Reflection Question 1

Please answer the following reflection in any format you like (such as in writing, a video, note form, or a drawing). Save your reflection responses in one large file so you can refer to them later in the course if needed.

Media Attributions

Johnson, T. (n.d.). Chapter 2: Communication and the self. In Introduction to human communications. OER Commons. https://oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/102255/overview

Martin, E. (2020, November 18). Red fire extinguisher on red plastic container [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/red-fire-extinguisher-on-red-plastic-container-oRzlFtx3jrU

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