Chapter 1: The self from various perspective

CAN YOU LIVE ON YOUR OWN?

 identify the sociological perspectives about
the self;
 demonstrate critical and reflective thinking in
showing different aspects of the self; and
 examine yourself using Charles Horton
Cooley’s Looking-Glass Self Theory
 He argued that the self is not biological but social
 He proposed the idea that the self develops
through social interaction; that social interaction
involves the exchange of symbols (i.e. laguange);
and that understanding of symbols involves being
able to take the role of another.
 Role playing is the process in which one takes on
the role of another by putting oneself in the
position of the person with whom he or she
interacts
 For Mead, self is not inborn. Babies cannot
interpret the meaning of other people’s behavior.
Learned during childhood in these stages:
 Imitation or the Preparatory stage- a child imitates
the behavior of his or her parents (sweeping the floor)
 Play stage- involves the child playing the role of
others (act like teacher or parent)
 Game stage- To play the game, the child must be
aware of his or her relationship to other people and
place himself/herself in their roles in order to
appreciate his/her particular role in the game
 For Mead, all humans experience internal
conversation. This conversation involves the, I and
Me, which is called phase of self.
 For him, self is essentially a social process going on
between the I and Me.
 The I is the phase of the self that is unsocialized and
spontaneous. “Free and Unique”. It is also the
subjective part of the self.
 The Me, on the contrary, is the self that results from
the progressive stages of role playing or role-taking
and the perspective one assumes to view and
analyze one’s own behavior. It represents the
conventional and objective part of the self
 The Collective Self is the cognition
concerning a view of the self that is found in
memberships in social groups (i.e. family etc.)
 Example: A person identified as feminist. “Similar
attributes of being a feminist”
 Mead describes Generalized others as an
organized community or social group which
gives to the individual his or her unity of self.
 Example: A dance group as a team as long as it is an
organized process of social activity
 The looking glass self is a social psychological
concept. In this view, the self is developed as
a result of one’s perceptions of other
people’s opinions.
 Example: A parent or teacher praise the child for his
or her artistic skills, the child will infer that he or she
is artistic, thus boosting child’s confidence
 People are the way they are at least partly
because of other people’s reactions to them
and to what they do
 The self is built to social interaction which
involves three steps:
 People imagine how they must appear to others
 They imagine the judgment on that appearance
 They develop themselves through the judgment
of others
 Looking glass self is made up of feelings
about other people’s judgments of one’s
behavior.
 Private Self- or individual self is the cognition that
involves traits, states, and behaviors
 Example: I am generous- shows one’s knowledge of his or her
attributes that differentiate him or her from the others
 Public Self- is the cognition concerning the
generalized other’s view of the self.
 Example: People think I am religious- shows one’s relation
with others and the role one assumes in that relationship
 Collective Self- is the cognition concerning a view of
the self that is found in memberships in social
groups
 Example: When a person is activist – attributes of being an
activist (campaigns to bring about political or social change)
 Social identity theory has been defined as the person’s
sense of who he or she is according to his or her membership
to a certain group
 Group membership is an important source of pride and
self-esteem. It gives sense of identity and belongingness to
the social world
 Henri Tajfel pointed out that, the world is divided into “us”
and “them” through the process of social categorization
forming the social groups.
 William Graham Summer further divided these social
groups into two:
 In-group- is an esteemed social group commanding a member’s
loyalty “a person belongs”
 Out-group- one feels competition or opposition. “a person does
not belong”
 A person has an inherent feeling of enhancing the
status of the group.
 Example: in upholding the claim that Filipinos are the most
hospitable people in the world, Filipinos increase their self-
image by interacting with other Filipinos, the in-group (the
group one identifies with)
 Tajfel and Turner identified three mental processes in
evaluating “us and them”
 Social Categorization- how people categorize things
 Social Identification- people adapt the identity of the group
to which they have categorized themselves (ex. When we
categorize Christians, chances are they will adopt the identity of a Christian)
 Social Comparison- after categorizing and identifying a
group, they tend to compare that group with other groups.
 In the postmodernist view, self is not the creator of meaning,
nor the center of starting a point of sociological inquiry.
 There are four basic postmodernist ideas about the self
(Anderson):
 Multiphrenia- refers to the many different voices speaking about
“who were are and what we are” (You can be a student, a sibling, a
friend, GF/BF)
 Protean- a self is capable of changing constantly to fit the present
conditions. (You may not be at ease to talk with gays and lesbians
as a teenager, but now you are not bothered at all)
 De-centered- a belief that there is no self at all. The self is
constantly being redefined or constantly undergoing change.
 Self-in-relation- which means that humans do not live their lives
in isolation but in relation to people and to certain cultural
contexts
 Postmodern social condition is dominated by two
realities:
 The rise of new media technologies
 The dominance of consumerism
 Lyon argued that the predicament of the self in
postmodern societies is complicated by the
advent of electronic-mediated virtual interactions
of cyber selves and the spread of information
technology
 The self is digitalized in cyberspace
 For Goffman, social interaction may be compared to
a theater and people to actors on a stage where each
plays a variety of roles
 He posited the idea that people interact with one
another they are constantly engaged in impression
management. People regulate and control
information in social interaction
 He used imagery of theater in order to portray the
nuances and significance of face to face social
interaction (i.e. actor, audience, performance). For
him, the self is a product of the dramatic interaction
between actor and audience:
 In real life, everyday interactions happen in three
regions:
 The front stage- is a region where actors perform and
act in conformity with the expectations of the
audience
 The back stage- is the region where actors behave
differently. The place where actors act their natural
selves
 The off stage- where actors meet members of the
audience independently.
 Saturated self is characterized by constant
connection to others, a self that absorbs a multitude
of voices (sometimes contradictory) and takes
seemingly endless streams of information.
 This saturation contradicts the notion of a singular,
true, authentic self, and instead gives way to a self-
consisting of “multiple” selves
 This is due to the splitting of the self into multitude of
options which Gargen’s calls Multiphrenia. That is
people establish multiple selves through absorption of
the multiple voices of people in their lives, either real life
or through the media
 People then internalize these different selves, thus
creating a seemingly endless pool of selves that they
can choose to draw upon depending on the needs
of the current situation.
 People create and experiment with multiple selves
by utilizing our current technology (internet, video
games). These mediums help people to construct
idealized version of who they are by selectively
representing various aspects of their selves like self-
promotion on the internet.
