presentation on self respect

The Foundation of Leadership

Self Respect

Employers today are facing a crisis of confidence amongst their employees. According to Gallup, approximately 80% of employees are currently either disengaged or strongly disengaged at work with 44% experiencing ‘a lot’ of stress and 25% feeling worried, angry, or sad.

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Prioritize ‘Who To Be’ vs. ‘What To Do’

In this presentation, Drew offers audiences several simple yet transformative leadership strategies for cultivating resilience and psychological safety into their daily routines.

Through powerful stories that recognize the difficult parts of life and work with humour and compassion, audiences will discover how to close the gap between the person they are and the person they want to be without compromising their happiness, fulfillment, or work-life balance.

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Ways to Increase Self-Confidence

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Respect for self and others

Dec 6, 2019

Description

What exactly is respect? It’s the sense of worth or personal value that you attach to someone. Respect is an overall evaluation you give someone based on many factors – what that person is doing with their life, how they treat you and others, whether they are honest or not and if they seem to consistently do good things, large or small, for other people. In short, respect is a positive view that you form of how someone is living their life. On the other hand, self-respect is your view of how you’re living your life. In this two-part series, we will explore three areas of respect – self-respect, respect for others and other people’s respect for you. All three of these areas of respect are very important.It Starts with Self-Respect

What exactly is respect? It is the sense over it or personal value that you touch to someone. Respect isn't overall evaluation. You give someone based on many factors. But the operation is doing with their left how they treat you and others, whether they're honest or not. In these two parts your hearts, we will explore three areas of respect, self respect, respect for others, the other people respect for you. All three of these areas of respect are very important, and it starts with the love. Respecting yourself means giving and defining your own words by looking at your physical in value as a human being. Think about these. If you do not respect yourself, it will be more difficult for you to respect anyone else. So it all begins with self respect. Being an honest person, you must be with a fully hard and with yourself and with others valuing academics and other force of education. A vital get self respect is knowledge understanding the in back off proper. In addition, exercising or other to be your best understanding financial responsibility, financial responsibilities, a cornerstone 10 dependence, learning to listen. Part of learning self respect involves learning to listen. Part of learning self respect involves respecting the beliefs of others, understanding the value of good morals and proper conduct. Knowing an exercise in good manners and proper conduct will make you feel good about yourself and in return. Others will respect you for your good manners and proper conduct. Learning talks of personal responsibility you're part of being respected person involves taking responsibility off their own actions. There anyone howto apologize, accepting responsibility involves formally apologizing for a wrongdoing and striving to make amends, Learning to understand which of your friends just like with yourself. When you demonstrate this back for others, you give value to there being an ideas. In addition, you'll make someone feel good by granting them respect provided, of course, that is something that they deserve. One of the best ways to show one of the hunters that allows me to respect myself is keeping my worried the others. If I say I'm going to do something or be somewhere bearing an emergency, I feel it best when I do what I say I'm going to do. Doing work in the world I care about also master up a lot of self respect be honest about who you are and who aren't. Once you know what makes you feel good putting you to be clear, not only read yourself, but with the others leading with honesty. Is that on Lee Last work from your enjoyable work. If you're working others, then you have no business working 9 to 5 at local marketing company for the next decade. I know that I am morning myself when I make social plans three nights in a row after work before doing so lives feeling the planted. I do my best to be clear about with this myself. Respect yourself by taking action our own things that excite you. Yes, Taking action off the unknown can be scary stuff. We can never guarantee our ideal outcome and that can cost us three treat big time. But the most obsessed people I know aren't afraid to try something new Live and you know the place off all the standard yourself respect out the window. Yep, You guessed it dating and being alone. And I'm convinced there should be a firm rule when it comes to dating. If it's not, I speak to Congress. People who have so much to it. Master of this office, back to start over. Those scary starting over will be less painful than being with a partner who doesn't want or isn't incapable of giving you what you need if you're used to bending over backwards for people building self respect, if you're acclimatized, obsessing over others feelings thoughts about you gaining self respect. We'll also be hard for their more if you have been conditioned, if a family or culture to put your needs last self respect will feel extremely exclusive. Spent time passionately affirming you raised inner dialogue. The voice constantly chattering within your brain has trended most power. In order to be more self respect, you will need to override the negative self thought that cost issue to devalue yourself when you write with the heart passionately off from your words. What I mean is that you need to sincerely believe that you are worthy at freeze. This may take some time and effort, but the more frequently your firm you're worth, the more you're thinking patterns will change. How compassionate from your work practice meter work meter work is the practice of standing in front of a mirror and looking to other people directly into their eyes and saying something loving or empowering yourself in front of other people. We can see all fears in securities and desire. That's precisely what makes this type Savina stand in front of a mirror for 10 minutes each day in repeat passionately that you're reading of respect. You may also live to adjust your body poster as he do this into confident planted to the ground, changing your body poster. We also have positive they find your non negotiable values, what they value in yourself and others. What are you absolutely not willing to drop, abandoned or comprised? Deep down Nordic valves have respect. You will not didn't identify your values. Examples are reliability, honesty, compassion, acceptance, discipline and playfulness, work, balance and uniqueness and sense of humor. Ethical living in respect and going forward, search, engine and type the least of values for more ideas. And the piece

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IResearchNet

Self-Presentation

Self-presentation definition.

Self-presentation refers to how people attempt to present themselves to control or shape how others (called the audience) view them. It involves expressing oneself and behaving in ways that create a desired impression. Self-presentation is part of a broader set of behaviors called impression management. Impression management refers to the controlled presentation of information about all sorts of things, including information about other people or events. Self-presentation refers specifically to information about the self.

Self-Presentation History and Modern Usage

Early work on impression management focused on its manipulative, inauthentic uses that might typify a used car salesperson who lies to sell a car, or someone at a job interview who embellishes accomplishments to get a job. However, researchers now think of self-presentation more broadly as a pervasive aspect of life. Although some aspects of self-presentation are deliberate and effortful (and at times deceitful), other aspects are automatic and done with little or no conscious thought. For example, a woman may interact with many people during the day and may make different impressions on each person. When she starts her day at her apartment, she chats with her roommates and cleans up after breakfast, thereby presenting the image of being a good friend and responsible roommate. During classes, she responds to her professor’s questions and carefully takes notes, presenting the image of being a good student. Later that day, she calls her parents and tells them about her classes and other activities (although likely leaving out information about some activities), presenting the image of being a loving and responsible daughter. That night, she might go to a party or dancing with friends, presenting the image of being fun and easygoing. Although some aspects of these self-presentations may be deliberate and conscious, other aspects are not. For example, chatting with her roommates and cleaning up after breakfast may be habitual behaviors that are done with little conscious thought. Likewise, she may automatically hold the door open for an acquaintance or buy a cup of coffee for a friend. These behaviors, although perhaps not done consciously or with self-presentation in mind, nevertheless convey an image of the self to others.

Although people have the ability to present images that are false, self-presentations are often genuine; they reflect an attempt by the person to have others perceive him or her accurately, or at least consistent with how the person perceives himself or herself. Self-presentations can vary as a function of the audience; people present different aspects of themselves to different audiences or under different conditions. A man likely presents different aspects of himself to his close friends than he does to his elderly grandmother, and a woman may present a different image to her spouse than she does to her employer. This is not to say that these different images are false. Rather, they represent different aspects of the self. The self is much like a gem with multiple facets. The gem likely appears differently depending on the angle at which it is viewed. However, the various appearances are all genuine. Even if people present a self-image that they know to be false, they may begin to internalize the self-image and thereby eventually come to believe the self-pres

entation. For example, a man may initially present an image of being a good student without believing it to be genuine, but after attending all his classes for several weeks, visiting the professor during office hours, and asking questions during class, he may come to see himself as truly being a good student. This internalization process is most likely to occur when people make a public commitment to the self-image, when the behavior is at least somewhat consistent with their self-image, and when they receive positive feedback or other rewards for presenting the self-image.

Self-presentation is often directed to external audiences such as friends, lovers, employers, teachers, children, and even strangers. Self-presentation is more likely to be conscious when the presenter depends on the audience for some reward, expects to interact with the audience in the future, wants something from the audience, or values the audience’s approval. Yet self-presentation extends beyond audiences that are physically present to imagined audiences, and these imagined audiences can have distinct effects on behavior. A young man at a party might suddenly think about his parents and change his behavior from rambunctious to reserved. People sometimes even make self-presentations only for themselves. For instance, people want to claim certain identities, such as being fun, intelligent, kind, moral, and they may behave in line with these identities even in private.

Self-Presentation Goals

Self-presentation is inherently goal-directed; people present certain images because they benefit from the images in some way. The most obvious benefits are interpersonal, arising from getting others to do what one wants. A job candidate may convey an image of being hardworking and dependable to get a job; a salesperson may convey an image of being trustworthy and honest to achieve a sale. People may also benefit from their self-presentations by gaining respect, power, liking, or other desirable social rewards. Finally, people make certain impressions on others to maintain a sense of who they are, or their self-concept. For example, a man who wants to think of himself as a voracious reader might join a book club or volunteer at a library, or a woman who wishes to perceive herself as generous may contribute lavishly to a charitable cause. Even when there are few or no obvious benefits of a particular self-presentation, people may simply present an image that is consistent with the way they like to think about themselves, or at least the way they are accustomed to thinking about themselves.

Much of self-presentation is directed toward achieving one of two desirable images. First, people want to appear likeable. People like others who are attractive, interesting, and fun to be with. Thus, a sizable proportion of self-presentation revolves around developing, maintaining, and enhancing appearance and conveying and emphasizing characteristics that others desire, admire, and enjoy. Second, people want to appear competent. People like others who are skilled and able, and thus another sizable proportion of self-presentation revolves around conveying an image of competence. Yet, self-presentation is not so much about presenting desirable images as it is about presenting desired images, and some desired images are not necessarily desirable. For example, schoolyard bullies may present an image of being dangerous or intimidating to gain or maintain power over others. Some people present themselves as weak or infirmed (or exaggerate their weaknesses) to gain help from others. For instance, a member of a group project may display incompetence in the hope that other members will do more of the work, or a child may exaggerate illness to avoid going to school.

Self-Presentation Avenues

People self-present in a variety of ways. Perhaps most obviously, people self-present in what they say. These verbalizations can be direct claims of a particular image, such as when a person claims to be altruistic. They also can be indirect, such as when a person discloses personal behaviors or standards (e.g., “I volunteer at a hospital”). Other verbal presentations emerge when people express attitudes or beliefs. Divulging that one enjoys backpacking through Europe conveys the image that one is a world-traveler. Second, people self-present nonverbally in their physical appearance, body language, and other behavior. Smiling, eye contact, and nods of agreement can convey a wealth of information. Third, people self-present through the props they surround themselves with and through their associations. Driving an expensive car or flying first class conveys an image of having wealth, whereas an array of diplomas and certificates on one’s office walls conveys an image of education and expertise. Likewise, people judge others based on their associations. For example, being in the company of politicians or movie stars conveys an image of importance, and not surprisingly, many people display photographs of themselves with famous people. In a similar vein, high school students concerned with their status are often careful about which classmates they are seen and not seen with publicly. Being seen by others in the company of someone from a member of a disreputable group can raise questions about one’s own social standing.

Self-Presentation Pitfalls

Self-presentation is most successful when the image presented is consistent with what the audience thinks or knows to be true. The more the image presented differs from the image believed or anticipated by the audience, the less willing the audience will be to accept the image. For example, the lower a student’s grade is on the first exam, the more difficulty he or she will have in convincing a professor that he or she will earn an A on the next exam. Self-presentations are constrained by audience knowledge. The more the audience knows about a person, the less freedom the person has in claiming a particular identity. An audience that knows very little about a person will be more accepting of whatever identity the person conveys, whereas an audience that knows a great deal about a person will be less accepting.

People engaging in self-presentation sometimes encounter difficulties that undermine their ability to convey a desired image. First, people occasionally encounter the multiple audience problem, in which they must simultaneously present two conflicting images. For example, a student while walking with friends who know only her rebellious, impetuous side may run into her professor who knows only her serious, conscientious side. The student faces the dilemma of conveying the conflicting images of rebellious friend and serious student. When both audiences are present, the student must try to behave in a way that is consistent with how her friends view her, but also in a way that is consistent with how her professor views her. Second, people occasionally encounter challenges to their self-presentations. The audience may not believe the image the person presents. Challenges are most likely to arise when people are managing impressions through self-descriptions and the self-descriptions are inconsistent with other evidence. For example, a man who claims to be good driver faces a self-presentational dilemma if he is ticketed or gets in an automobile accident. Third, self-presentations can fail when people lack the cognitive resources to present effectively because, for example, they are tired, anxious, or distracted. For instance, a woman may yawn uncontrollably or reflexively check her watch while talking to a boring classmate, unintentionally conveying an image of disinterest.

Some of the most important images for people to convey are also the hardest. As noted earlier, among the most important images people want to communicate are likeability and competence. Perhaps because these images are so important and are often rewarded, audiences may be skeptical of accepting direct claims of likeability and competence from presenters, thinking that the person is seeking personal gain. Thus, people must resort to indirect routes to create these images, and the indirect routes can be misinterpreted. For example, the student who sits in the front row of the class and asks a lot of questions may be trying to project an image of being a competent student but may be perceived negatively as a teacher’s pet by fellow students.

Finally, there is a dark side to self-presentation. In some instances, the priority people place on their appearances or images can threaten their health. People who excessively tan are putting a higher priority on their appearance (e.g., being tan) than on their health (e.g., taking precautions to avoid skin cancer). Similarly, although condoms help protect against sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy, self-presentational concerns may dissuade partners or potential partners from discussing, carrying, or using condoms. Women may fear that carrying condoms makes them seem promiscuous or easy, whereas men may fear that carrying condoms makes them seem presumptuous, as if they are expecting to have sex. Self-presentational concerns may also influence interactions with health care providers and may lead people to delay or avoid embarrassing medical tests and procedures or treatments for conditions that are embarrassing. For example, people may be reluctant to seek tests or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, loss of bladder control, mental disorders, mental decline, or other conditions associated with weakness or incompetence. Finally, concerns with social acceptance may prompt young people to engage in risky behaviors such as excessive alcohol consumption, sexual promiscuity, or juvenile delinquency.

References:

• Jones, E. E., Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. In J. Suls (Ed.), Psychological perspectives on the self (Vol. 1, pp. 231-260). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Leary, M. R. (1996). Self-presentation: Impression management and interpersonal behavior. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• Leary, M. R., Tchividjian, L. R., & Kraxberger, B. E. (1994). Self-presentation can be hazardous to your health: Impression management and health risk. Health Psychology, 13, 461-470.
• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management: The self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

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2.3 Perceiving and Presenting Self

Learning objectives.

• Define self-concept and discuss how we develop our self-concept.
• Define self-esteem and discuss how we develop self-esteem.
• Explain how social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory influence self-perception.
• Discuss how social norms, family, culture, and media influence self-perception.
• Define self-presentation and discuss common self-presentation strategies.

Just as our perception of others affects how we communicate, so does our perception of ourselves. But what influences our self-perception? How much of our self is a product of our own making and how much of it is constructed based on how others react to us? How do we present ourselves to others in ways that maintain our sense of self or challenge how others see us? We will begin to answer these questions in this section as we explore self-concept, self-esteem, and self-presentation.

Self-Concept

Self-concept refers to the overall idea of who a person thinks he or she is. If I said, “Tell me who you are,” your answers would be clues as to how you see yourself, your self-concept. Each person has an overall self-concept that might be encapsulated in a short list of overarching characteristics that he or she finds important. But each person’s self-concept is also influenced by context, meaning we think differently about ourselves depending on the situation we are in. In some situations, personal characteristics, such as our abilities, personality, and other distinguishing features, will best describe who we are. You might consider yourself laid back, traditional, funny, open minded, or driven, or you might label yourself a leader or a thrill seeker. In other situations, our self-concept may be tied to group or cultural membership. For example, you might consider yourself a member of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, a Southerner, or a member of the track team.

Men are more likely than women to include group memberships in their self-concept descriptions.

Stefano Ravalli – In control – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

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 (Cooley, 1902). 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 (Hargie, 2011). 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 man wants to get into better shape and starts an exercise routine, he may be discouraged by his difficulty keeping up with the aerobics instructor or running partner and judge himself as inferior, which could negatively affect his self-concept. Using as a reference group people who have only recently started a fitness program but have shown progress could help 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. As with other aspects of perception, 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 get the high score on the video game 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 me from displaying each student’s grade on a test or paper for the whole class to see, I 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. Man, I’m stupid!” These negative thoughts can lead to negative behaviors, 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 a more specifically an evaluation of the self (Byrne, 1996). 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 (Brockner, 1988). More specifically, our self-esteem varies across our life span and across contexts.

Self-esteem varies throughout our lives, but some people generally think more positively of themselves and some people think more negatively.

RHiNO NEAL – [trophy] – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

How we judge ourselves affects our communication and our behaviors, 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. Every semester, I am evaluated by my students, and every year, I am evaluated by my dean, department chair, and colleagues. Most of that feedback is in the form of 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 (Brockner, 1988). 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 (Bandura, 1997). As you can see in Figure 2.2 “Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept” , judgments about our self-efficacy influence our self-esteem, which influences our self-concept. The following example also illustrates these interconnections.

Figure 2.2 Relationship between Self-Efficacy, Self-Esteem, and Self-Concept

Pedro did a good job on his first college speech. During a meeting with his professor, Pedro indicates that he is confident going into the next speech and thinks he will do well. This skill-based assessment is an indication that Pedro has a high level of self-efficacy related to public speaking. If he does well on the speech, the praise from his classmates and professor will reinforce his self-efficacy and lead him to positively evaluate his speaking skills, which will contribute to his self-esteem. By the end of the class, Pedro likely thinks of himself as a good public speaker, which may then become an important part of his self-concept. Throughout these points of connection, it’s important to remember that self-perception affects how we communicate, behave, and perceive other things. Pedro’s increased feeling of self-efficacy may give him more confidence in his delivery, which will likely result in positive feedback that reinforces his self-perception. He may start to perceive his professor more positively since they share an interest in public speaking, and he may begin to notice other people’s speaking skills more during class presentations and public lectures. Over time, he may even start to think about changing his major to communication or pursuing career options that incorporate public speaking, which would further integrate being “a good public speaker” into his 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 Pedro’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 (Hargie, 2011). 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 behaviors 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-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 (Higgins, 1987). 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 OK 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, behavioral, and communicative changes.

People who feel that it’s their duty to recycle but do not actually do it will likely experience a discrepancy between their actual and ought selves.

Matt Martin – Recycle – CC BY-NC 2.0.

When we compare the actual self to the expectations of ourselves and others, we can see particular patterns of emotional and behavioral 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 (Higgins, 1987). 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 Self-Perception

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.

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. Feedback that we get from significant others, which includes close family, can lead to positive views of self (Hargie, 2011). In the past few years, however, there has been a public discussion and debate about how much positive reinforcement people should give to others, especially children. The following questions have been raised: Do we have current and upcoming generations that have been overpraised? Is the praise given warranted? What are the positive and negative effects of praise? What is the end goal of the praise? Let’s briefly look at this discussion and its connection to self-perception.

Some experts have warned that overpraising children can lead to distorted self-concepts.

Rain0975 – participation award – CC BY-ND 2.0.

Whether praise is warranted or not is very subjective and specific to each person and context, but in general there have been questions raised about the potential negative effects of too much praise. 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 filmmaking 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 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 (Hargie, 2011).

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 (Wierzbicka, 2004). 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 (Morgan & Wilson, 2007). As you’ll recall from our earlier discussion, attributions are links we make to identify the cause of a behavior. In the case of aggressive or abusive parents, they are not as able to distinguish between mistakes and intentional behaviors, 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 behaviors, abusive parents are more likely to use external attributions 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 behavior, which creates an uncertain and often scary climate for a child that can lead to lower self-esteem and erratic or aggressive behavior. The cycles of praise and blame are just two examples of how the family as a socializing force can influence our self-perceptions. Culture also influences how we see ourselves.

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 (Loughnan et al., 2011). 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 (Loughnan, 2011).

Race also plays a role in self-perception. For example, positive self-esteem and self-efficacy tend to be higher in African American adolescent girls than Caucasian girls (Stockton et al., 2009). In fact, more recent studies have discounted much of the early research on race and self-esteem that purported that African Americans of all ages have lower self-esteem than whites. Self-perception becomes more complex when we consider biracial individuals—more specifically those born to couples comprising an African American and a white parent (Bowles, 1993). In such cases, it is challenging for biracial individuals to embrace both of their heritages, and social comparison becomes more difficult due to diverse and sometimes conflicting reference groups. Since many biracial individuals identify as and are considered African American by society, living and working within a black community can help foster more positive self-perceptions in these biracial individuals. Such a community offers a more nurturing environment and a buffer zone from racist attitudes but simultaneously distances biracial individuals from their white identity. Conversely, immersion into a predominantly white community and separation from a black community can lead biracial individuals to internalize negative views of people of color and perhaps develop a sense of inferiority. Gender intersects with culture and biracial identity to create different experiences and challenges for biracial men and women. Biracial men have more difficulty accepting their potential occupational limits, especially if they have white fathers, and biracial women have difficulty accepting their black features, such as hair and facial features. All these challenges lead to a sense of being marginalized from both ethnic groups and interfere in the development of positive self-esteem and a stable self-concept.

Biracial individuals may have challenges with self-perception as they try to integrate both racial identities into their self-concept.

Javcon117* – End of Summer Innocence – CC BY-SA 2.0.

There are some general differences in terms of gender and self-perception that relate to self-concept, self-efficacy, and envisioning ideal selves. As with any cultural differences, these are generalizations that have been supported by research, but they do not represent all individuals within a group. Regarding self-concept, men are more likely to describe themselves in terms of their group membership, and women are more likely to include references to relationships in their self-descriptions. For example, a man may note that he is a Tarheel fan, a boat enthusiast, or a member of the Rotary Club, and a woman may note that she is a mother of two or a loyal friend.

Regarding self-efficacy, men tend to have higher perceptions of self-efficacy than women (Hargie, 2011). In terms of actual and ideal selves, men and women in a variety of countries both described their ideal self as more masculine (Best & Thomas, 2004). As was noted earlier, gender differences are interesting to study but are very often exaggerated beyond the actual variations. Socialization and internalization of societal norms for gender differences accounts 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.

The representations we see in the media affect our self-perception. 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, and television shows are filled with beautiful people, and less attractive actors, when they are present in the media, are typically portrayed as the butt of jokes, villains, or only as background extras (Patzer, 2008). Aside from overall attractiveness, the media also offers narrow representations of acceptable body weight.

Researchers have found that only 12 percent of prime-time characters are overweight, which is dramatically less than the national statistics for obesity among the actual US population (Patzer, 2008). Further, an analysis of how weight is discussed on prime-time sitcoms found that heavier 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 heavier 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 life to keep up with and be similar to others. For example, for many years advertising targeted to 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 neighbors. 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 very beautiful people. When you look around you in your daily life, there are likely not as many glamorous and gorgeous 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” (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009). 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.

• How do you think the media influences your self-perception and body image?
• Describe the typical man that is portrayed in the media. Describe the typical woman that is portrayed in the media. What impressions do these typical bodies make on others? What are the potential positive and negative effects of the way the media portrays the human body?
• Find an example of an “atypical” body represented in the media (a magazine, TV show, or movie). Is this person presented in a positive, negative, or neutral way? Why do you think this person was chosen?

Self-Presentation

How we perceive ourselves manifests in how we present ourselves to others. Self-presentation is the process of strategically concealing or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions (Human et al., 2012). We engage in this process daily and for different reasons. Although people occasionally intentionally deceive others in the process of self-presentation, in general we try to make a good impression while still remaining authentic. Since self-presentation helps meet our instrumental, relational, and identity needs, we stand to lose quite a bit if we are caught intentionally misrepresenting ourselves. In May of 2012, Yahoo!’s CEO resigned after it became known that he stated on official documents that he had two college degrees when he actually only had one. In a similar incident, a woman who had long served as the dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dismissed from her position after it was learned that she had only attended one year of college and had falsely indicated she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree (Webber & Korn, 2012). Such incidents clearly show that although people can get away with such false self-presentation for a while, the eventual consequences of being found out are dire. As communicators, we sometimes engage in more subtle forms of inauthentic self-presentation. For example, a person may state or imply that they know more about a subject or situation than they actually do in order to seem smart or “in the loop.” During a speech, a speaker works on a polished and competent delivery to distract from a lack of substantive content. These cases of strategic self-presentation may not ever be found out, but communicators should still avoid them as they do not live up to the standards of ethical communication.

Consciously and competently engaging in self-presentation can have benefits because we can provide others with a more positive and accurate picture of who we are. People who are skilled at impression management are typically more engaging and confident, which allows others to pick up on more cues from which to form impressions (Human et al., 2012). Being a skilled self-presenter draws on many of the practices used by competent communicators, including becoming a higher self-monitor. When self-presentation skills and self-monitoring skills combine, communicators can simultaneously monitor their own expressions, the reaction of others, and the situational and social context (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Sometimes people get help with their self-presentation. Although most people can’t afford or wouldn’t think of hiring an image consultant, some people have started generously donating their self-presentation expertise to help others. Many people who have been riding the tough job market for a year or more get discouraged and may consider giving up on their job search.

People who have been out of work for a while may have difficulty finding the motivation to engage in the self-presentation behaviors needed to form favorable impressions.

Steve Petrucelli – Interview Time! – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

There are two main types of self-presentation: prosocial and self-serving (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002). Prosocial self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as a role model and make a person more likable and attractive. For example, a supervisor may call on her employees to uphold high standards for business ethics, model that behavior in her own actions, and compliment others when they exemplify those standards. Self-serving self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as highly skilled, willing to challenge others, and someone not to be messed with. For example, a supervisor may publicly take credit for the accomplishments of others or publicly critique an employee who failed to meet a particular standard. In summary, prosocial strategies are aimed at benefiting others, while self-serving strategies benefit the self at the expense of others.

In general, we strive to present a public image that matches up with our self-concept, but we can also use self-presentation strategies to enhance our self-concept (Hargie, 2011). When we present ourselves in order to evoke a positive evaluative response, we are engaging in self-enhancement. In the pursuit of self-enhancement, a person might try to be as appealing as possible in a particular area or with a particular person to gain feedback that will enhance one’s self-esteem. For example, a singer might train and practice for weeks before singing in front of a well-respected vocal coach but not invest as much effort in preparing to sing in front of friends. Although positive feedback from friends is beneficial, positive feedback from an experienced singer could enhance a person’s self-concept. Self-enhancement can be productive and achieved competently, or it can be used inappropriately. Using self-enhancement behaviors just to gain the approval of others or out of self-centeredness may lead people to communicate in ways that are perceived as phony or overbearing and end up making an unfavorable impression (Sosik, Avolio, & Jung, 2002).

“Getting Plugged In”

Self-Presentation Online: Social Media, Digital Trails, and Your Reputation

Although social networking has long been a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, the advent of social media has made the process of making connections and those all-important first impressions much more complex. Just looking at Facebook as an example, we can clearly see that the very acts of constructing a profile, posting status updates, “liking” certain things, and sharing various information via Facebook features and apps is self-presentation (Kim & Lee, 2011). People also form impressions based on the number of friends we have and the photos and posts that other people tag us in. All this information floating around can be difficult to manage. So how do we manage the impressions we make digitally given that there is a permanent record?

Research shows that people overall engage in positive and honest self-presentation on Facebook (Kim & Lee, 2011). Since people know how visible the information they post is, they may choose to only reveal things they think will form favorable impressions. But the mediated nature of Facebook also leads some people to disclose more personal information than they might otherwise in such a public or semipublic forum. These hyperpersonal disclosures run the risk of forming negative impressions based on who sees them. In general, the ease of digital communication, not just on Facebook, has presented new challenges for our self-control and information management. Sending someone a sexually provocative image used to take some effort before the age of digital cameras, but now “sexting” an explicit photo only takes a few seconds. So people who would have likely not engaged in such behavior before are more tempted to now, and it is the desire to present oneself as desirable or cool that leads people to send photos they may later regret (DiBlasio, 2012). In fact, new technology in the form of apps is trying to give people a little more control over the exchange of digital information. An iPhone app called “Snapchat” allows users to send photos that will only be visible for a few seconds. Although this isn’t a guaranteed safety net, the demand for such apps is increasing, which illustrates the point that we all now leave digital trails of information that can be useful in terms of our self-presentation but can also create new challenges in terms of managing the information floating around from which others may form impressions of us.

• What impressions do you want people to form of you based on the information they can see on your Facebook page?
• Have you ever used social media or the Internet to do “research” on a person? What things would you find favorable and unfavorable?
• Do you have any guidelines you follow regarding what information about yourself you will put online or not? If so, what are they? If not, why?

Key Takeaways

• Our self-concept is the overall idea of who we think we are. It is developed through our interactions with others and through social comparison that allows us to compare our beliefs and behaviors to others.
• Our self-esteem is based on the evaluations and judgments we make about various characteristics of our self-concept. It is developed through an assessment and evaluation of our various skills and abilities, known as self-efficacy, and through a comparison and evaluation of who we are, who we would like to be, and who we should be (self-discrepancy theory).
• Social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory affect our self-concept and self-esteem because through comparison with others and comparison of our actual, ideal, and ought selves we make judgments about who we are and our self-worth. These judgments then affect how we communicate and behave.
• Socializing forces like family, culture, and media affect our self-perception because they give us feedback on who we are. This feedback can be evaluated positively or negatively and can lead to positive or negative patterns that influence our self-perception and then our communication.
• Self-presentation refers to the process of strategically concealing and/or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions. Prosocial self-presentation is intended to benefit others and self-serving self-presentation is intended to benefit the self at the expense of others. People also engage in self-enhancement, which is a self-presentation strategy by which people intentionally seek out positive evaluations.
• Make a list of characteristics that describe who you are (your self-concept). After looking at the list, see if you can come up with a few words that summarize the list to narrow in on the key features of your self-concept. Go back over the first list and evaluate each characteristic, for example noting whether it is something you do well/poorly, something that is good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable. Is the overall list more positive or more negative? After doing these exercises, what have you learned about your self-concept and self-esteem?
• Discuss at least one time in which you had a discrepancy or tension between two of the three selves described by self-discrepancy theory (the actual, ideal, and ought selves). What effect did this discrepancy have on your self-concept and/or self-esteem?
• Take one of the socializing forces discussed (family, culture, or media) and identify at least one positive and one negative influence that it/they have had on your self-concept and/or self-esteem.
• Getting integrated: Discuss some ways that you might strategically engage in self-presentation to influence the impressions of others in an academic, a professional, a personal, and a civic context.

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Communication in the Real World Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

As humans, we all want self-respect – and keeping that in mind might be the missing ingredient when you try to change someone’s mind

Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Washington

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Colin Marshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Why is persuasion so hard, even when you have facts on your side?

As a philosopher , I’m especially interested in persuasion – not just how to convince someone, but how to do it ethically, without manipulation. I’ve found that one of the deepest insights comes from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, a focus of my research , who was born 300 years ago: April 22, 1724.

In his final book on ethics, “ The Doctrine of Virtue ,” Kant writes that each of us has a certain duty when we try to correct others’ beliefs. If we think they’re mistaken, we shouldn’t dismiss them as “absurdities” or “poor judgment,” he says, but must suppose that their views “contain some truth.”

What Kant is describing might sound like humility – just recognizing that other people often know things we don’t. But it goes beyond that.

This moral duty to find truth in others’ mistakes is based on helping the other person “ preserve his respect for his own understanding ,” Kant claims. In other words, even when we encounter obviously false points of view, morality calls on us to help the person we’re talking to maintain their self-respect – to find something reasonable in their views.

This advice can come across as patronizing, as though we were supposed to treat other adults like children with fragile egos. But I think Kant is onto something important here, and contemporary psychology can help us see it.

The need for respect

Imagine that you had to postpone lunch because of a meeting. With only 15 minutes to spare and a growling stomach, you leave to get a burrito.

On your way, however, you run into a colleague. “I’m glad to see you,” they say. “I’m hoping to change your mind about something from the meeting.”

In that scenario, your colleague has little chance of persuading you. Why? Well, you need food, and they’re getting in the way of you satisfying that need.

As psychologists of persuasion have long recognized, a key factor in persuasion is attention, and people don’t attend to persuasive arguments when they have more pressing needs – especially hunger, sleep and safety. But less obvious needs can also make people unpersuadable.

One that has received a lot of attention in recent decades is the need for social belonging .

The psychologist Dan Kahan gives the example of somebody who, like everyone in their community, incorrectly denies the existence of climate change. If that person publicly corrected their beliefs, they might be ostracized from friends and family. In that case, Kahan suggests , it can be “perfectly rational” for them to simply ignore the scientific evidence about an issue that they can’t directly affect, in order to satisfy their social need for connection.

This means that a respectful persuader needs to take into account others’ need for social dignity, such as by avoiding public settings when discussing topics that might be sensitive or taboo.

… and self-respect

Yet external needs, like hunger or social acceptance, aren’t the only ones that get in the way of persuasion. In a classic 1988 article on self-affirmation , the psychologist Claude Steele argued that our desire to maintain some “self-regard” as a good, competent person profoundly shapes psychology.

In more philosophical terms: People have a need for self-respect. This can explain why, for instance, students sometimes blame low grades on bad luck and difficult material, but explain high grades in terms of their own ability and effort .

Steele’s approach has yielded some surprising results. For example, one study invited female students to write down values that were important to them – an exercise in self-affirmation. Afterward, many students who had done this exercise earned higher grades in a physics course, particularly girls who had previously performed worse than male students.

That study and many others illustrate how bolstering someone’s self-esteem can equip them to tackle intellectual challenges, including challenges to their personal beliefs.

With that in mind, let’s turn back to Kant.

Politics are personal

Recall Kant’s claim: When we encounter somebody with false beliefs, even absurdly false ones, we must help them preserve their respect for their own understanding by acknowledging some element of truth in their judgments. That truth could be a fact we’d overlooked, or an important experience they’d had.

Kant isn’t just talking about being humble or polite. He directs attention to a real need that people have – a need that persuaders have to recognize if they want to get a fair hearing.

For example, say that you want to change your cousin’s mind about whom to support in the 2024 election. You come equipped with well-crafted evidence and carefully choose a good moment for a one-on-one talk.

Despite all that, your chances will be slim if you ignore your cousin’s need for self-respect. In a country as polarized as the U.S. is today, an argument about whom to vote for can feel like a direct attack on someone’s competence and moral decency.

So providing somebody with evidence that they should change their views can run headfirst into their need for self-respect – our human need to see ourselves as intelligent and good.

Moral maturity

Persuasion, in other words, takes a lot of juggling: In addition to making strong persuasive arguments, a persuader also has to avoid threatening the other person’s need for self-respect.

Actual juggling would be a lot easier if we could slow down the objects. That’s why juggling on the Moon would be about twice as easy as on Earth, thanks to the Moon’s lower gravity.

When it comes to persuasion, though, we can slow things down by pacing the conversation, opening up time to learn something from the other person in return. This signals that you take them seriously – and that can bolster their self-esteem.

To be ethical, this openness to learning must be sincere. But that’s not hard: On most topics, each of us have limited experience. For example, perhaps Donald Trump or Joe Biden validated some of your cousin’s frustrations about their local government, in ways you couldn’t have guessed.

This approach has an important benefit to you as well: helping you preserve your own self-respect. After all, approaching others with humility shows moral maturity. Recognizing others’ need for self-respect can not only help you persuade someone, but persuade in ways you can feel proud of.

• Immanuel Kant

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Impression Management: Erving Goffman Theory

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On This Page:

• Impression management refers to the goal-directed conscious or unconscious attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object, or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.
• Generally, people undertake impression management to achieve goals that require they have a desired public image. This activity is called self-presentation.
• In sociology and social psychology, self-presentation is the conscious or unconscious process through which people try to control the impressions other people form of them.
• The goal is for one to present themselves the way in which they would like to be thought of by the individual or group they are interacting with. This form of management generally applies to the first impression.
• Erving Goffman popularized the concept of perception management in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , where he argues that impression management not only influences how one is treated by other people but is an essential part of social interaction.

Impression Management in Sociology

Impression management, also known as self-presentation, refers to the ways that people attempt to control how they are perceived by others (Goffman, 1959).

By conveying particular impressions about their abilities, attitudes, motives, status, emotional reactions, and other characteristics, people can influence others to respond to them in desirable ways.

Impression management is a common way for people to influence one another in order to obtain various goals.

While earlier theorists (e.g., Burke, 1950; Hart & Burk, 1972) offered perspectives on the person as a performer, Goffman (1959) was the first to develop a specific theory concerning self-presentation.

In his well-known work, Goffman created the foundation and the defining principles of what is commonly referred to as impression management.

In explicitly laying out a purpose for his work, Goffman (1959) proposes to “consider the ways in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kind of things he may or may not do while sustaining his performance before them.” (p. xi)

Social Interaction

Goffman viewed impression management not only as a means of influencing how one is treated by other people but also as an essential part of social interaction.

He communicates this view through the conceit of theatre. Actors give different performances in front of different audiences, and the actors and the audience cooperate in negotiating and maintaining the definition of a situation.

To Goffman, the self was not a fixed thing that resides within individuals but a social process. For social interactions to go smoothly, every interactant needs to project a public identity that guides others’ behaviors (Goffman, 1959, 1963; Leary, 2001; Tseelon, 1992).

Goffman defines that when people enter the presence of others, they communicate information by verbal intentional methods and by non-verbal unintentional methods.

According to Goffman, individuals participate in social interactions through performing a “line” or “a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself” (1967, p. 5).

Such lines are created and maintained by both the performer and the audience. By enacting a line effectively, a person gains positive social value or “face.”

The verbal intentional methods allow us to establish who we are and what we wish to communicate directly. We must use these methods for the majority of the actual communication of data.

Goffman is mostly interested in the non-verbal clues given off which are less easily manipulated. When these clues are manipulated the receiver generally still has the upper hand in determining how realistic the clues that are given off are.

People use these clues to determine how to treat a person and if the intentional verbal responses given off are actually honest. It is also known that most people give off clues that help to represent them in a positive light, which tends to be compensated for by the receiver.

Impression Management Techniques

• Suppressing emotions : Maintaining self-control (which we will identify with such practices as speaking briefly and modestly).
• Conforming to Situational Norms : The performer follows agreed-upon rules for behavior in the organization.
• Flattering Others : The performer compliments the perceiver. This tactic works best when flattery is not extreme and when it involves a dimension important to the perceiver.
• Being Consistent : The performer’s beliefs and behaviors are consistent. There is agreement between the performer’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Self-Presentation Examples

Self-presentation can affect the emotional experience . For example, people can become socially anxious when they are motivated to make a desired impression on others but doubt that they can do so successfully (Leary, 2001).

In one paper on self-presentation and emotional experience, Schlenker and Leary (1982) argue that, in contrast to the drive models of anxiety, the cognitive state of the individual mediates both arousal and behavior.

The researchers examine the traditional inverted-U anxiety-performance curve (popularly known as the Yerkes-Dodson law) in this light.

The researchers propose that people are interpersonally secure when they do not have the goal of creating a particular impression on others.

They are not immediately concerned about others’ evaluative reactions in a social setting where they are attempting to create a particular impression and believe that they will be successful in doing so.

Meanwhile, people are anxious when they are uncertain about how to go about creating a certain impression (such as when they do not know what sort of attributes the other person is likely to be impressed with), think that they will not be able to project the types of images that will produce preferred reactions from others.

Such people think that they will not be able to project the desired image strongly enough or believe that some event will happen that will repudiate their self-presentations, causing reputational damage (Schlenker and Leary, 1982).

Psychologists have also studied impression management in the context of mental and physical health .

In one such study, Braginsky et al. (1969) showed that those hospitalized with schizophrenia modify the severity of their “disordered” behavior depending on whether making a more or less “disordered” impression would be most beneficial to them (Leary, 2001).

Additional research on university students shows that people may exaggerate or even fabricate reports of psychological distress when doing so for their social goals.

Hypochondria appears to have self-presentational features where people convey impressions of illness and injury, when doing so helps to drive desired outcomes such as eliciting support or avoiding responsibilities (Leary, 2001).

People can also engage in dangerous behaviors for self-presentation reasons such as suntanning, unsafe sex, and fast driving. People may also refuse needed medical treatment if seeking this medical treatment compromises public image (Leary et al., 1994).

Key Components

There are several determinants of impression management, and people have many reasons to monitor and regulate how others perceive them.

For example, social relationships such as friendship, group membership, romantic relationships, desirable jobs, status, and influence rely partly on other people perceiving the individual as being a particular kind of person or having certain traits.

Because people’s goals depend on them making desired impressions over undesired impressions, people are concerned with the impressions other people form of them.

Although people appear to monitor how they come across ongoingly, the degree to which they are motivated to impression manage and the types of impressions they try to foster varies by situation and individuals (Leary, 2001).

Leary and Kowalski (1990) say that there are two processes that constitute impression management, each of which operate according to different principles and are affected by different situations and dispositional aspects. The first of these processes is impression motivation, and the second is impression construction.

Impression Motivation

There are three main factors that affect how much people are motivated to impression-manage in a situation (Leary and Kowalski, 1990):

(1) How much people believe their public images are relevant to them attaining their desired goals.

When people believe that their public image is relevant to them achieving their goals, they are generally more motivated to control how others perceive them (Leary, 2001).

Conversely, when the impressions of other people have few implications on one’s outcomes, that person’s motivation to impression-manage will be lower.

This is why people are more likely to impression manage in their interactions with powerful, high-status people than those who are less powerful and have lower status (Leary, 2001).

(2) How valuable the goals are: people are also more likely to impress and manage the more valuable the goals for which their public impressions are relevant (Leary, 2001).

(3) how much of a discrepancy there is between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them..

People are more highly motivated to impression-manage when there is a difference between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them.

For example, public scandals and embarrassing events that convey undesirable impressions can cause people to make self-presentational efforts to repair what they see as their damaged reputations (Leary, 2001).

Impression Construction

Features of the social situations that people find themselves in, as well as their own personalities, determine the nature of the impressions that they try to convey.

In particular, Leary and Kowalski (1990) name five sets of factors that are especially important in impression construction (Leary, 2001).

Two of these factors include how people’s relationships with themselves (self-concept and desired identity), and three involve how people relate to others (role constraints, target value, and current or potential social image) (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Self-concept

The impressions that people try to create are influenced not only by social context but also by one’s own self-concept .

People usually want others to see them as “how they really are” (Leary, 2001), but this is in tension with the fact that people must deliberately manage their impressions in order to be viewed accurately by others (Goffman, 1959).

People’s self-concepts can also constrain the images they try to convey.

People often believe that it is unethical to present impressions of themselves different from how they really are and generally doubt that they would successfully be able to sustain a public image inconsistent with their actual characteristics (Leary, 2001).

This risk of failure in portraying a deceptive image and the accompanying social sanctions deter people from presenting impressions discrepant from how they see themselves (Gergen, 1968; Jones and Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 1980).

People can differ in how congruent their self-presentations are with their self-perceptions.

People who are high in public self-consciousness have less congruency between their private and public selves than those lower in public self-consciousness (Tunnell, 1984; Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Desired identity

People’s desired and undesired selves – how they wish to be and not be on an internal level – also influence the images that they try to project.

Schlenker (1985) defines a desirable identity image as what a person “would like to be and thinks he or she really can be, at least at his or her best.”

People have a tendency to manage their impressions so that their images coincide with their desired selves and stay away from images that coincide with their undesired selves (Ogilivie, 1987; Schlenker, 1985; Leary, 2001).

This happens when people publicly claim attributes consistent with their desired identity and openly reject identities that they do not want to be associated with.

For example, someone who abhors bigots may take every step possible to not appear bigoted, and Gergen and Taylor (1969) showed that high-status navel cadets did not conform to low-status navel cadets because they did not want to see themselves as conformists (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Target value

people tailor their self-presentations to the values of the individuals whose perceptions they are concerned with.

This may lead to people sometimes fabricating identities that they think others will value.

However, more commonly, people selectively present truthful aspects of themselves that they believe coincide with the values of the person they are targeting the impression to and withhold information that they think others will value negatively (Leary, 2001).

Role constraints

the content of people’s self-presentations is affected by the roles that they take on and the norms of their social context.

In general, people want to convey impressions consistent with their roles and norms .

Many roles even carry self-presentational requirements around the kinds of impressions that the people who hold the roles should and should not convey (Leary, 2001).

Current or potential social image

People’s public image choices are also influenced by how they think they are perceived by others. As in impression motivation, self-presentational behaviors can often be aimed at dispelling undesired impressions that others hold about an individual.

When people believe that others have or are likely to develop an undesirable impression of them, they will typically try to refute that negative impression by showing that they are different from how others believe them to be.

When they are not able to refute this negative impression, they may project desirable impressions in other aspects of their identity (Leary, 2001).

Implications

In the presence of others, few of the behaviors that people make are unaffected by their desire to maintain certain impressions. Even when not explicitly trying to create a particular impression of themselves, people are constrained by concerns about their public image.

Generally, this manifests with people trying not to create undesired impressions in virtually all areas of social life (Leary, 2001).

Tedeschi et al. (1971) argued that phenomena that psychologists previously attributed to peoples’ need to have cognitive consistency actually reflected efforts to maintain an impression of consistency in others’ eyes.

Studies have supported Tedeschi and their colleagues’ suggestion that phenomena previously attributed to cognitive dissonance were actually affected by self-presentational processes (Schlenker, 1980).

Psychologists have applied self-presentation to their study of phenomena as far-ranging as conformity, aggression, prosocial behavior, leadership, negotiation, social influence, gender, stigmatization, and close relationships (Baumeister, 1982; Leary, 1995; Schlenker, 1980; Tedeschi, 1981).

Each of these studies shows that people’s efforts to make impressions on others affect these phenomena, and, ultimately, that concerns self-presentation in private social life.

For example, research shows that people are more likely to be pro-socially helpful when their helpfulness is publicized and behave more prosocially when they desire to repair a damaged social image by being helpful (Leary, 2001).

In a similar vein, many instances of aggressive behavior can be explained as self-presentational efforts to show that someone is willing to hurt others in order to get their way.

This can go as far as gender roles, for which evidence shows that men and women behave differently due to the kind of impressions that are socially expected of men and women.

Baumeister, R. F. (1982). A self-presentational view of social phenomena. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 3-26.

Braginsky, B. M., Braginsky, D. D., & Ring, K. (1969). Methods of madness: The mental hospital as a last resort. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Buss, A. H., & Briggs, S. (1984). Drama and the self in social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1310-1324. Gergen, K. J. (1968). Personal consistency and the presentation of self. In C. Gordon & K. J. Gergen (Eds.), The self in social interaction (Vol. 1, pp. 299-308). New York: Wiley.

Gergen, K. J., & Taylor, M. G. (1969). Social expectancy and self-presentation in a status hierarchy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 5, 79-92.

Goffman, E. (1959). The moral career of the mental patient. Psychiatry, 22(2), 123-142.

• Goffman, E. (1963). Embarrassment and social organization.

Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life (Vol. 21). London: Harmondsworth.

Goffman, E. (2002). The presentation of self in everyday life. 1959. Garden City, NY, 259.

Martey, R. M., & Consalvo, M. (2011). Performing the looking-glass self: Avatar appearance and group identity in Second Life. Popular Communication, 9 (3), 165-180.

Jones E E (1964) Ingratiation. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York.

Jones, E. E., & Pittman, T. S. (1982). Toward a general theory of strategic self-presentation. Psychological perspectives on the self, 1(1), 231-262.

Leary M R (1995) Self-presentation: Impression Management and Interpersonal Behaior. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.

Leary, M. R.. Impression Management, Psychology of, in Smelser, N. J., & Baltes, P. B. (Eds.). (2001). International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (Vol. 11). Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Leary, M. R., & Kowalski, R. M. (1990). Impression management: A literature review and two-component model. Psychological bulletin, 107(1), 34.

Leary M R, Tchvidjian L R, Kraxberger B E 1994 Self-presentation may be hazardous to your health. Health Psychology 13: 461–70.

Ogilvie, D. M. (1987). The undesired self: A neglected variable in personality research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 379-385.

• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management (Vol. 222). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Schlenker, B. R. (1985). Identity and self-identification. In B. R. Schlenker (Ed.), The self and social life (pp. 65-99). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model. Psychological bulletin, 92(3), 641.

Tedeschi, J. T, Smith, R. B., Ill, & Brown, R. C., Jr. (1974). A reinterpretation of research on aggression. Psychological Bulletin, 81, 540- 563.

Tseëlon, E. (1992). Is the presented self sincere? Goffman, impression management and the postmodern self. Theory, culture & society, 9(2), 115-128.

Tunnell, G. (1984). The discrepancy between private and public selves: Public self-consciousness and its correlates. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48, 549-555.

Further Information

• Solomon, J. F., Solomon, A., Joseph, N. L., & Norton, S. D. (2013). Impression management, myth creation and fabrication in private social and environmental reporting: Insights from Erving Goffman. Accounting, organizations and society, 38(3), 195-213.
• Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J. (1988). Impression management in organizations. Journal of management, 14(2), 321-338.
• Scheff, T. J. (2005). Looking‐Glass self: Goffman as symbolic interactionist. Symbolic interaction, 28(2), 147-166.

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2.3: Self-Presentation

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• Victoria Leonard
• College of the Canyons

How we perceive ourselves manifests in how we present ourselves to others. Self-presentation is the process of strategically concealing or revealing personal information in order to influence others’ perceptions. 1 We engage in this process daily and for different reasons. Although people occasionally intentionally deceive others in the process of self-presentation, in general we try to make a good impression while still remaining authentic. Since self-presentation helps meet our instrumental, relational, and identity needs, we stand to lose quite a bit if we are caught intentionally misrepresenting ourselves. In May of 2012, Yahoo!’s CEO resigned after it became known that he stated on official documents that he had two college degrees when he actually only had one. In a similar incident, a woman who had long served as the dean of admissions for the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology was dismissed from her position after it was learned that she had only attended one year of college and had falsely indicated she had a bachelor’s and master’s degree. 2 Such incidents clearly show that although people can get away with such false self-presentation for a while, the eventual consequences of being found out are dire. As communicators, we sometimes engage in more subtle forms of inauthentic self-presentation. For example, a person may state or imply that they know more about a subject or situation than they actually do in order to seem smart or “in the loop.” During a speech, a speaker works on a polished and competent delivery to distract from a lack of substantive content. These cases of strategic self-presentation may not ever be found out, but communicators should still avoid them as they do not live up to the standards of ethical communication.

Consciously and competently engaging in self-presentation can have benefits because we can provide others with a more positive and accurate picture of who we are. People who are skilled at impression management are typically more engaging and confident, which allows others to pick up on more cues from which to form impressions. 3 Being a skilled self-presenter draws on many of the practices used by competent communicators, including becoming a higher self-monitor. When self-presentation skills and self-monitoring skills combine, communicators can simultaneously monitor their own expressions, the reaction of others, and the situational and social context. 4

Sometimes people get help with their self-presentation. Although most people can’t afford or wouldn’t think of hiring an image consultant, some people have started generously donating their self-presentation expertise to help others. Many people who have been riding the tough job market for a year or more get discouraged and may consider giving up on their job search. Now a project called “Style Me Hired” has started offering free makeovers to jobless people in order to offer them new motivation and help them make favorable impressions and hopefully get a job offer. 5

There are two main types of self-presentation: prosocial and self-serving. 6 Prosocial self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as a role model and make a person more likable and attractive. For example, a supervisor may call on her employees to uphold high standards for business ethics, model that behavior in her own actions, and compliment others when they exemplify those standards. Self-serving self-presentation entails behaviors that present a person as highly skilled, willing to challenge others, and someone not to be messed with. For example, a supervisor may publicly take credit for the accomplishments of others or publicly critique an employee who failed to meet a particular standard. In summary, prosocial strategies are aimed at benefiting others, while self-serving strategies benefit the self at the expense of others.

In general, we strive to present a public image that matches up with our self- concept, but we can also use self-presentation strategies to enhance our self-concept. 7 When we present ourselves in order to evoke a positive evaluative response, we are engaging in self-enhancement. In the pursuit of self-enhancement, a person might try to be as appealing as possible in a particular area or with a particular person to gain feedback that will enhance one’s self-esteem. For example, a singer might train and practice for weeks before singing in front of a well-respected vocal coach but not invest as much effort in preparing to sing in front of friends. Although positive feedback from friends is beneficial, positive feedback from an experienced singer could enhance a person’s self-concept. Self-enhancement can be productive and achieved competently, or it can be used inappropriately. Using self-enhancement behaviors just to gain the approval of others or out of self-centeredness may lead people to communicate in ways that are perceived as phony or overbearing and end up making an unfavorable impression. 8

“Getting Plugged In” - Self-Presentation Online: Social Media, Digital Trails, and Your Reputation 

Although social networking has long been a way to keep in touch with friends and colleagues, the advent of social media has made the process of making connections and those all-important first impressions much more complex. Just looking at Facebook as an example, we can clearly see that the very acts of constructing a profile, posting status updates, “liking” certain things, and sharing various information via Facebook features and apps is self- presentation.  People also form impressions based on the number of friends we have and the photos and posts that other people tag us in. All this information floating around can be difficult to manage. So how do we manage the impressions we make digitally given that there is a permanent record?

Research shows that people overall engage in positive and honest self- presentation on Facebook.  Since people know how visible the information they post is, they may choose to only reveal things they think will form favorable impressions. But the mediated nature of Facebook also leads some people to disclose more personal information than they might otherwise in  such a public or semipublic forum. These hyperpersonal disclosures run the risk of forming negative impressions based on who sees them. In general, the ease of digital communication, not just on Facebook, has presented new challenges for our self-control and information management. Sending someone a sexually provocative image used to take some effort before the age of digital cameras, but now “sexting” an explicit photo only takes a few seconds. So people who would have likely not engaged in such behavior before are more tempted to now, and it is the desire to present oneself as desirable or cool that leads people to send photos they may later regret. 

In fact, new technology in the form of apps is trying to give people a little more control over the exchange of digital information. An iPhone app called “Snapchat” allows users to send photos that will only be visible for a few seconds. Although this isn’t a guaranteed safety net, the demand for such apps is increasing, which illustrates the point that we all now leave digital trails of information that can be useful in terms of our self-presentation but can also create new challenges in terms of managing the information floating around from which others may form impressions of us.

• What impressions do you want people to form of you based on the information they can see on your Facebook page?
• Have you ever used social media or the Internet to do “research” on a person? What things would you find favorable and unfavorable?
• Do you have any guidelines you follow regarding what information about yourself you will put online or not? If so, what are they? If not, why?

Key Takeaways

• Our self-concept is the overall idea of who we think we are. It is developed through our interactions with others and through social comparison that allows us to compare our beliefs and behaviors to others.
• Our self-esteem is based on the evaluations and judgments we make about various characteristics of our self-concept. It is developed through an assessment and evaluation of our various skills and abilities, known as self-efficacy, and through a comparison and evaluation of who we are, who we would like to be, and who we should be (self-discrepancy theory).
• Social comparison theory and self-discrepancy theory affect our self- concept and self-esteem because through comparison with others and comparison of our actual, ideal, and ought selves we make judgments about who we are and our self-worth. These judgments then affect how we communicate and behave.
• Socializing forces like family, culture, and media affect our self- perception because they give us feedback on who we are. This feedback can be evaluated positively or negatively and can lead to positive or negative patterns that influence our self-perception and then our communication.
• Self-presentation refers to the process of strategically concealing and/or revealing personal information in order to influence others’  perceptions. Prosocial self-presentation is intended to benefit others  and self-serving self-presentation is intended to benefit the self at the expense of others. People also engage in self-enhancement, which is a self-presentation strategy by which people intentionally seek out positive evaluations.
• Make a list of characteristics that describe who you are (your self- concept). After looking at the list, see if you can come up with a few words that summarize the list to narrow in on the key features of your self-concept. Go back over the first list and evaluate each characteristic, for example noting whether it is something you do well/poorly, something that is good/bad, positive/negative, desirable/undesirable. Is the overall list more positive or more negative? After doing these exercises, what have you learned about your self-concept and self- esteem?
• Discuss at least one time in which you had a discrepancy or tension between two of the three selves described by self-discrepancy theory (the actual, ideal, and ought selves). What effect did this discrepancy have on your self-concept and/or self-esteem?
• Take one of the socializing forces discussed (family, culture, or media) and identify at least one positive and one negative influence that it/they have had on your self-concept and/or self-esteem.
• Getting integrated: Discuss some ways that you might strategically engage in self-presentation to influence the impressions of others in an academic, a professional, a personal, and a civic context.
• Lauren J. Human et al., “Your Best Self Helps Reveal Your True Self: Positive Self-Presentation Leads to More Accurate Personality Impressions,” Social Psychological and Personality Sciences 3, no. 1 (2012): 23.
• Lauren Webber and Melissa Korn, “Yahoo’s CEO among Many Notable Resume Flaps,” Wall Street Journal Blogs, May 7, 2012, accessed June 9, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/05/07/ yahoos-ceo-among-many-notableresume-flaps.
• Lauren J. Human et al., “Your Best Self Helps Reveal Your True Self: Positive Self-Presentation Leads to More Accurate Personality Impressions,” Social Psychological and Personality Sciences 3, no. 1 (2012): 27.
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and Dong I. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,”The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217.
• “Style Me Hired,” accessed June 6, 2012, http://www.stylemehired.com .
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and DongI. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 217.
• Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Interaction: Research, Theory, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2011), 99– 100.
• John J. Sosik, Bruce J. Avolio, and Dong I. Jung, “Beneath the Mask: Examining the Relationship of SelfPresentation Attributes and Impression Management to Charismatic Leadership,” The Leadership Quarterly 13 (2002): 236

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Self-Respect

Lesson 1 self-respect have pride and believe in yourself. do the best you can always. self-respect how do you feel when someone judges you without knowing you or ... – powerpoint ppt presentation.

• How do you feel when someone judges you without knowing you or giving you a chance?

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Social Emotional Lessons

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Respect Lesson and Activities

In some of the educator/counselor Facebook groups I’m a part of, there has been a lot of talk about R-E-S-P-E-C-T. People complaining their students are disrespectful, people wondering how they can teach respect to their students, and people worried that their faculty and students have differing ideas of what respect really means. As human beings, we all have an innate need to feel respected by others. Everyone is happier and more productive when people show respect to one another at school. So how can you teach students about respect in a meaningful way?

Laying the Groundwork

The first step is getting students thinking about their own beliefs and ideas about respect. Four corners is a great movement-based way to do this. Ask your students questions about respect, or ask them to finish sentences about respect, by going to one of four designated corners. For example, “I feel respected at school…” A) All of the time, B) Usually, C) Sometimes, or D) Not very often. As you read the answer choices, move to different corners of the room so students know where to go to show their answers.

Next, come to some sort of an agreement with your students about the definition of respect . Here are the two I provide them:

Ask them what they think about the definitions. What would they want to change or take away or add?

Then work together to get a clear picture of what respect actually looks like, sounds like, and feels like within the school. I recommend tackling one section at a time, letting students chat with a partner about their ideas and then sharing out whole group. Or, have students work on their own mini-anchor chart  independently first.

And then comes the discussion that might make some folks a little uncomfortable. The discussion about WHO deserves our respect and HOW we decide to respect someone. In my experience, there’s more disagreement here than there is in defining respect. Often times, faculty feel disrespected by students when there’s a mismatch between how someone gets respect. Here’s a quick script for how you can facilitate some student reflection here:

“We know what respect is and what it looks and sounds and feels like. Now let’s talk about who we give our respect to, and how you decide whether or not to give someone your respect. I’ll read an idea about how someone might get your respect and you give me a thumbs up if it’s something that makes you choose to respect someone. (if students need more movement, consider asking them to stand to show their agreement, maybe even included a crouch/half stand for partial agreement)

• Does someone get your respect…because of their intelligence? Do you give someone respect because their smart?
• Is it about them being a certain age? Like you choose to respect someone because they’re older versus younger?
• Does someone need to earn your respect? (if students give a thumbs up for this one, ask them how someone would earn their respect)
• Does someone get your respect by showing respect to you first?
• Or does someone get your respect just for being human?”

You likely won’t come to a consensus about this with the group, but it’s important for students to reflect on their own beliefs about this and for faculty to see where the students are coming from.

Getting Specific While Teaching about Respect

Once the main ideas behind respect are clear in your students’ minds, you can work with them on some specific examples. One way to do this is by having students examine different actions or words to determine if they’re respectful or not AND why or why not. Use pre-made example cards  or come up with ones that fit your group best. You can do this whole class, or put students in groups to have them go through different examples. Cards can just be pulled one at a time from a pile, or they can do something more structured like a “pick a card!” where they take turns having different “jobs”: fanning the cards, selecting and reading a card, answering, and adding on or agreeing/disagreeing.

There are lots of different ways to show respect in different types of situations. Some students are champs at being able to generate ideas on their own. Some need some more scaffolding. I made a set of “types of respect” puzzles ; ten different things or places to show respect with two examples each. They were created to be put together and talked about in groups.

Reflecting and Moving Forward

Once students have a firm grasp of what respect is, what it looks like, and how it’s applied in schools, it’s helpful to include some more self-reflection pieces. You can do an activity where students mix, find a partner, then both respond to the same “finish the sentence” prompt, then mix, find a new partner, finish a different sentence about respect, etc. You can incorporate questions like:

• My teacher respects me when they…
• I respect my teacher by…
• My classmates respect me when…
• I show respect to my classmates by…

Students can also reflect with a simple exit ticket, sharing an example of how/where/when they feel respected and how/where/when they wish they were respected more at school. I also believe (and research has shown!) that peer reinforcement is really strong. Simply having students give “Kudos Cards”  when they notice their classmates showing respect can help keep these ideas on their minds.

Tell me about your school. What are some ways you or your faculty help students understand and demonstrate more respect? How do faculty and administration help  faculty show more respect? What other suggestions do you have for how to teach students about respect?

• Filed Under: MTSS/PBIS/Behavior , SEL and Guidance Lessons , Social Skills

11 Responses

This was really helpful the students had fun

Yay, thank you for sharing that!

Great ideas and very helpful. Thank you so much!

You’re welcome, Serenity, I’m glad it was helpful!

I’m an elementary SSW employed by a public school district and also a business owner. I tried this lesson with a class and it went over well! Thank you!

Yay, I am so glad to hear that, you are very welcome!

I appreciate how your post provides a variety of activities and lesson plans that cater to different age groups and learning styles. These resources are especially helpful for parents and educators who may be looking for new and engaging ways to teach respect to their children or students.

It was really helpful! Thank you

You are very welcome!

I am wondering what other questions did you use at the beginning of this lesson? A list of quetions would be wonderful. I am buying this lesson.

Hi Beverly! There are three “four corners” questions/prompts included in the lesson, and there is a slide for each of them. You’ll see them in both the PDF lesson plan as well as the slideshow included!

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Self-Presentation: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Audiences We Have

It is interesting to note that each of the social influences on our sense of self that we have discussed can be harnessed as a way of protecting our self-esteem. The final influence we will explore can also be used strategically to elevate not only our own esteem, but the esteem we have in the eyes of others. Positive self-esteem occurs not only when we do well in our own eyes but also when we feel that we are positively perceived by the other people we care about.

Because it is so important to be seen as competent and productive members of society, people naturally attempt to present themselves to others in a positive light. We attempt to convince others that we are good and worthy people by appearing attractive, strong, intelligent, and likable and by saying positive things to others (Jones & Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 2003). The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status , is known as self-presentation , and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life.

A big question in relation to self-presentation is the extent to which it is an honest versus more strategic, potentially dishonest enterprise. The sociologist Erving Goffman (1959) developed an influential theory of self-presentation and described it as a mainly honest process, where people need to present the parts of themselves required by the social role that they are playing in a given situation. If everyone plays their part according to accepted social scripts and conventions, then the social situation will run smoothly and the participants will avoid embarrassment. Seen in this way, self-presentation is a transparent process, where we are trying to play the part required of us, and we trust that others are doing the same. Other theorists, though, have viewed self-presentation as a more strategic endeavor, which may involve not always portraying ourselves in genuine ways (e.g., Jones & Pittman, 1982). As is often the case with two seemingly opposing perspectives, it is quite likely that both are true in certain situations, depending on the social goals of the actors.

Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people, and the use of these strategies may be evolutionarily selected because they are successful (Toma, Hancock, & Ellison, 2008). Edward Jones and Thane Pittman (1982) described five self-presentation strategies, each of which is expected to create a resulting emotion in the other person:

• The goal of ingratiation is to create liking by using flattery or charm.
• The goal of intimidation is to create fear by showing that you can be aggressive.
• The goal of exemplification is to create guilt by showing that you are a better person than the other.
• The goal of supplication is to create pity by indicating to others that you are helpless and needy.
• The goal of self-promotion is to create respect by persuading others that you are competent.

No matter who is using it, self-presentation can easily be overdone, and when it is, it backfires. People who overuse the ingratiation technique and who are seen as obviously and strategically trying to get others to like them are often disliked because of this. Have you ever had a slick salesperson obviously try to ingratiate him- or herself with you just so you will buy a particular product, and you end up not liking the person and making a hasty retreat from the premises? People who overuse the exemplification or self-promotion strategies by boasting or bragging, particularly if that boasting does not appear to reflect their true characteristics, may end up being perceived as arrogant and even self-deluded (Wosinska, Dabul, Whetstone-Dion, & Cialdini, 1996). Using intimidation can also often backfire; acting more modestly may be more effective. Again, the point is clear: we may want to self-promote with the goal of getting others to like us, but we must also be careful to consider the point of view of the other person. Being aware of these strategies is not only useful for better understanding how to use them responsibly ourselves, it can also help us to understand that other people’s behaviors may often reflect their self-presentational concerns. This can, in turn, facilitate better empathy for others, particularly when they are exhibiting challenging behaviors (Friedlander & Schwartz, 1985). For instance, perhaps someone’s verbally aggressive behavior toward you is more about that person being afraid rather than about his or her desire to do you harm.

Now that we have explored some of the commonly used self-presentation tactics, let’s look at how they manifest in specific social behaviors. One concrete way to self-promote is to display our positive physical characteristics. A reason that many of us spend money on improving our physical appearance is the desire to look good to others so that they will like us. We can also earn status by collecting expensive possessions such as fancy cars and big houses and by trying to associate with high-status others. Additionally, we may attempt to dominate or intimidate others in social interactions. People who talk more and louder and those who initiate more social interactions are afforded higher status. A businessman who greets others with a strong handshake and a smile, and people who speak out strongly for their opinions in group discussions may be attempting to do so as well. In some cases, people may even resort to aggressive behavior, such as bullying, in attempts to improve their status (Baumeister, Smart, & Boden, 1996).

Self-promotion can also be pursued in our online social behaviors. For example, a study in Taiwan conducted by Wang and Stefanone (2013) used survey methodology to investigate the relationship between personality traits, self-presentation and the use of check-ins on Facebook. Interestingly, narcissism was found to predict scores on a measure of exhibitionistic, self-promoting use of Facebook check-ins, which included items like “I check in so people know that I am with friends,” and “I expect friends to like or leave comments on my check-in status on Facebook.”

Other studies have also found associations between narcissistic traits and self-promotional activity on Facebook. Mehdizadeh (2010), for example, found that narcissistic personality scores were positively correlated with the amount of daily logins on Facebook and the duration of each login. Furthermore, narcissistic traits were related to increased use of self-promotional material in the main photo, view photos, status updates, and notes sections of people’s Facebook pages.

Analysis of the content and language used in Facebook postings has also revealed that they are sometimes used by individuals to self-promote. Bazarova, Taft, Choi, and Cosley (2013) explored self-presentation through language styles used in status updates, wall posts, and private messages from 79 participants. The use of positive emotion words was correlated with self-reported self-presentation concern in status updates. This is consistent with the idea that people share positive experiences with Facebook friends partly as a self-enhancement strategy.

Online self-presentation doesn’t seem to be limited to Facebook usage. There is also evidence that self-promotional concerns are often a part of blogging behaviors, too. Mazur and Kozarian (2010), for example, analyzed the content of adolescents’ blog entries and concluded that a careful concern for self-presentation was more central to their blogging behavior than direct interaction with others. This often seems to apply to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. Marwick and Boyd (2011) found that self-presentational strategies were a consistent part of celebrity tweeting, often deployed by celebrities to maintain their popularity and image.

You might not be surprised to hear that men and women use different approaches to self-presentation. Men are more likely to present themselves in an assertive way, by speaking and interrupting others, by visually focusing on the other person when they are speaking, and by leaning their bodies into the conversation. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to be modest; they tend to create status by laughing and smiling, and by reacting more positively to the statements of others (Dovidio, Brown, Heltman, Ellyson, & Keation, 1988).

These gender differences are probably in large part socially determined as a result of the different reinforcements that men and women receive for using particular self-presentational strategies. For example, self-promoting by speaking out and acting assertively can be more effective for men than it is for women, in part because cross-culturally consistent stereotypes tend to depict assertiveness as more desirable in men than in women. These stereotypes can have very important consequences in the real world. For instance, one of the reasons for the “glass ceiling” existing in some occupations (where women experience discrimination in reaching top positions in organizations) may be attributable to the more negative reactions that their assertive behaviors, necessary for career advancement, receive than those of their male colleagues (Eagly & Carli, 2007).

There are also some cultural differences in the extent to which people use self-presentation strategies in social contexts. For instance, when considering job interviews, Konig, Haftseinsson, Jansen, & Stadelmann (2011) found that individuals from Iceland and Switzerland used less self-presentational behavior than people from the United States. Differences in self-presentation have also been found in job interviews involving individuals from Ghana, Turkey, Norway, and Germany, with the former two groups showing higher impression management scores than the latter two (Bye et al., 2011).

So far we have been talking about self-presentation as it operates in particular situations in the short-term. However, we also engage in longer-term self-presentational projects, where we seek to build particular reputations with particular audiences. Emler & Reicher (1995) describe the unique capacity humans have to know one another by repute and argue that, accordingly, we are often engaged in a process of reputation management , which is a form of long-term self-presentation, where individuals seek to build and sustain specific reputations with important audiences . According to this perspective, our behaviors in current social situations may not only be to serve our self-presentational goals in that moment, but also be based on a consideration of their longer-term repercussions for our reputations. As many politicians, for example, know only too well, a poor decision from their past can come back to haunt them when their reputation is being assessed during a campaign.

The concept of reputation management can be used to help explain a wide variety of social and antisocial behaviors, including corporate branding (Smith, Smith, & Wang, 2010), sociomoral debate (Emler, Tarry, & St. James, 2007), and teenage criminal activity (Lopez-Romero & Romero, 2011). In the last example, it is argued that a lot of teenage antisocial behavior results from a desire to build a reputation for toughness and rebelliousness with like-minded peer audiences (Emler & Reicher, 1995). Similarly, antisocial and self-destructive online actions, like people posting to Facebook their involvement in illegal acts during riots, or individuals engaging in life-threatening activities in Internet crazes like Neknominate, may make more sense if they are considered partly as stemming from a desire to project a particular reputation to specific audiences. Perhaps the perceived social kudos from doing these things outweighs the obvious personal risks in the individuals’ minds at the time.

People often project distinct reputations to different social audiences. For example, adolescents who engage in antisocial activity to build reputations for rebelliousness among their peers will often seek to construct very different reputations when their parents are the audience (Emler & Reicher, 1995). The desire to compartmentalize our reputations and audiences can even spill over into our online behaviors. Wiederhold (2012) found that, with some adolescents’ Facebook friends numbering in the hundreds or thousands, increasing numbers are moving to Twitter in order to reach a more selective audience. One critical trigger for this has been that their parents are now often friends with them on Facebook, creating a need for young people to find a new space where they can build reputations that may not always be parent-friendly (Wiederhold, 2012).

Although the desire to present the self favorably is a natural part of everyday life, both person and situation factors influence the extent to which we do it. For one, we are more likely to self-present in some situations than in others. When we are applying for a job or meeting with others whom we need to impress, we naturally become more attuned to the social aspects of the self, and our self-presentation increases.

There are also individual differences. Some people are naturally better at self-presentation—they enjoy doing it and are good at it—whereas others find self-presentation less desirable or more difficult. An important individual-difference variable known as self-monitoring has been shown in many studies to have a major impact on self-presentation. Self-monitoring refers to the tendency to be both motivated and capable of regulating our behavior to meet the demands of social situations (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). High self-monitors are particularly good at reading the emotions of others and therefore are better at fitting into social situations—they agree with statements such as “In different situations and with different people, I often act like very different persons,” and “I guess I put on a show to impress or entertain people.” Low self-monitors, on the other hand, generally act on their own attitudes, even when the social situation suggests that they should behave otherwise. Low self-monitors are more likely to agree with statements such as “At parties and social gatherings, I do not attempt to do or say things that others will like,” and “I can only argue for ideas that I already believe.” In short, high self-monitors use self-presentation to try to get other people to like them by behaving in ways that the others find desirable, whereas low self-monitors tend to follow their internal convictions more than the demands of the social situation.

In one experiment that showed the importance of self-monitoring, Cheng and Chartrand (2003) had college students interact individually with another student (actually an experimental confederate) whom they thought they would be working with on an upcoming task. While they were interacting, the confederate subtly touched her own face several times, and the researchers recorded the extent to which the student participant mimicked the confederate by also touching his or her own face.

The situational variable was the status of the confederate. Before the meeting began, and according to random assignment to conditions, the students were told either that they would be the leader and that the other person would be the worker on the upcoming task, or vice versa. The person variable was self-monitoring, and each participant was classified as either high or low on self-monitoring on the basis of his or her responses to the self-monitoring scale.

As you can see in Figure 3.12 , Cheng and Chartrand found an interaction effect: the students who had been classified as high self-monitors were more likely to mimic the behavior of the confederate when she was described as being the leader than when she was described as being the worker, indicating that they were “tuned in” to the social situation and modified their behavior to appear more positively. Although the low self-monitors did mimic the other person, they did not mimic her more when the other was high, versus low, status. This finding is consistent with the idea that the high self-monitors were particularly aware of the other person’s status and attempted to self-present more positively to the high-status leader. The low self-monitors, on the other hand—because they feel less need to impress overall—did not pay much attention to the other person’s status.

High self-monitors imitated more when the person they were interacting with was of higher (versus lower) status. Low self-monitors were not sensitive to the status of the other. Data are from Cheng and Chartrand (2003).

This differential sensitivity to social dynamics between high and low self-monitors suggests that their self-esteem will be affected by different factors. For people who are high in self-monitoring, their self-esteem may be positively impacted when they perceive that their behavior matches the social demands of the situation, and negatively affected when they feel that it does not. In contrast, low self-monitors may experience self-esteem boosts when they see themselves behaving consistently with their internal standards, and feel less self-worth when they feel they are not living up to them (Ickes, Holloway, Stinson, & Hoodenpyle, 2006).

Key Takeaways

• Our self-concepts are affected by others’ appraisals, as demonstrated by concepts including the looking-glass self and self-labeling.
• The self-concept and self-esteem are also often strongly influenced by social comparison. For example, we use social comparison to determine the accuracy and appropriateness of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.
• When we are able to compare ourselves favorably with others through downward social comparison, we feel good about ourselves. Upward social comparison with others who are better off than we are leads to negative emotions.
• Social identity refers to the positive emotions that we experience as a member of an important social group.
• Normally, our group memberships result in positive feelings, which occur because we perceive our own groups, and thus ourselves, in a positive light.
• Which of our many category identities is most accessible for us will vary from day to day as a function of the particular situation we are in.
• In the face of others’ behaviors, we may enhance our self-esteem by “basking in the reflected glory” of our ingroups or of other people we know.
• If other people’s actions threaten our sense of self according to self-evaluation maintenance theory, we may engage in a variety of strategies aimed at redefining our self-concept and rebuilding our self-esteem.
• The tendency to present a positive self-image to others, with the goal of increasing our social status, is known as self-presentation, and it is a basic and natural part of everyday life. Different self-presentation strategies may be used to create different emotions in other people.
• We often use self-presentation in the longer term, seeking to build and sustain particular reputations with specific social audiences.
• The individual-difference variable of self-monitoring relates to the ability and desire to self-present.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Describe some aspects of your self-concept that have been created through social comparison.
• Describe times when you have engaged in downward and upward social comparison and the effects these comparisons have had on your self-esteem. To what extent do your experiences fit with the research evidence here?
• What are your most salient social identities? How do they create positive feelings for you?
• Outline a situation where someone else’s behavior has threatened your self-concept. Which of the strategies outlined in relation to self-evaluation maintenance theory did you engage in to rebuild your self-concept?
• Identify a situation where you basked in the reflected glory of your ingroup’s behavior or peformance. What effect did this have on your self-esteem and why?
• Describe some situations where people you know have used each of the self-presentation strategies that were listed in this section. Which strategies seem to be more and less effective in helping them to achieve their social goals, and why?
• Consider your own level of self-monitoring. Do you think that you are more of a high or a low self-monitor, and why? What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages for you of the level of self-monitoring that you have?

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• 24814 reads
• Authors & Informations
• About the Book
• The History of Social Psychology
• The Person and the Social Situation
• Evolutionary Adaptation and Human Characteristics
• Self-Concern
• Other-Concern
• Social Psychology in the Public Interest
• Social Influence Creates Social Norms
• Different Cultures Have Different Norms Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Cognition: Thinking and Learning about Others
• Social Affect: Feelings about Ourselves and Others
• Social Behavior: Interacting with Others Key Takeaways Exercise and Critical Thinking
• The Importance of Scientific Research
• Measuring Affect, Behavior, and Cognition
• Social Neuroscience: Measuring Social Responses in the Brain
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• How Schemas Maintain Themselves: The Power of Assimilation Research Focus: The Confirmation Bias Research Focus: Schemas as Energy Savers Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Automatic versus Controlled Cognition Research Focus: Behavioral Effects of Priming
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• Self-Complexity and Self-Concept Clarity
• Overestimating How Closely and Accurately Others View Us Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Self-Esteem The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale
• Maintaining and Enhancing Self-Esteem Research Focus: Processing Information to Enhance the Self
• The Looking-Glass Self: Our Sense of Self is Influenced by Others’ Views of Us
• Social Comparison Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by Comparisons with Others Research Focus: Affiliation and Social Comparison
• Upward and Downward Comparisons Influence Our Self-Esteem
• Social Identity Theory: Our Sense of Self Is Influenced by the Groups We Belong To A Measure of Social Identity
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• Self-Perception Involves Inferring Our Beliefs from Our Behaviors Research Focus: Looking at Our Own Behavior to Determine Our Attitudes
• Creating Insufficient Justification and Overjustification
• The Experience of Cognitive Dissonance Can Create Attitude Change
• We Reduce Dissonance by Decreasing Dissonant or by Increasing Consonant Cognitions
• Cognitive Dissonance in Everyday Life
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• Detecting Danger by Focusing on Negative Information Social Psychology in the Public Interest: Detecting Deception
• Judging People by Their Traits
• Combining Traits: Information Integration
• The Importance of the Central Traits Warm and Cold
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• Making Inferences about Personality
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• Attributions for Success and Failure Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Are Our Attributions Accurate?
• The Fundamental Attribution Error
• The Actor-Observer Bias
• Self-Serving Biases
• Group-Serving Biases
• Victim-Blaming Biases Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Perceiver Characteristics Research Focus: How Our Attributions Can Influence Our School Performance
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• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Person Perception
• Informational Social Influence: Conforming to Be Accurate
• Normative Social Influence: Conforming to Be Liked and to Avoid Rejection
• Majority Influence: Conforming to the Group
• Minority Influence: Resisting Group Pressure
• The Size of the Majority
• The Unanimity of the Majority
• The Importance of the Task Research Focus: How Task Importance and Confidence Influence Conformity Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Reward Power
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• What Is Love? Research Focus: Romantic Love Reduces Our Attention to Attractive Others
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• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Liking and Loving
• Reciprocity and Social Exchange
• Social Reinforcement and Altruism: The Role of Rewards and Costs
• Social Norms for Helping Research Focus: Moral Hypocrisy Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Positive Moods Increase Helping
• Relieving Negative Emotions: Guilt Increases Helping
• Personal Distress and Empathy as Determinants of Helping Research Focus: Personal Distress versus Empathy as Determinants of Helping Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Latané and Darley’s Model of Helping
• Interpreting
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• Some People Are More Helpful Than Others: The Altruistic Personality
• Who Do We Help? Attributions and Helping
• Reactions to Receiving Help
• Cultural Issues in Helping
• Increasing Helping Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Altruism
• Is Aggression Evolutionarily Adaptive?
• The Role of Biology in Aggression
• Hormones Influence Aggression: Testosterone and Serotonin
• Drinking Alcohol Increases Aggression
• Negative Emotions Cause Aggression Research Focus: The Effects of Provocation and Fear of Death on Aggression
• Can We Reduce Negative Emotions by Engaging in Aggressive Behavior? Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Learning and Modeling: Is Aggression Learned?
• Violence Creates More Violence: Television, Video Games, and Handguns Research Focus: The Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggression
• Why Does Viewing Violence Lead to Aggression? Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Individual Differences in Aggression
• Gender Differences in Aggression
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Aggression
• Communication, Interdependence, and Group Structure
• Social Identity
• The Stages of Group Development Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Social Facilitation and Social Inhibition
• Person Variables: Group Member Characteristics
• The Importance of the Social Situation: Task Characteristics
• Social Loafing Research Focus: Differentiating Coordination Losses from Social Loafing Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Process Gains in Group versus Individual Decision Making
• Process Losses Due to Group Conformity Pressures: Groupthink
• Cognitive Process Losses: Lack of Information Sharing Research Focus: Poor Information Sharing in Groups
• Cognitive Process Losses: Ineffective Brainstorming
• Motivating Groups to Perform Better by Appealing to Self-Interest
• Cognitive Approaches: Improving Communication and Information Sharing
• Setting Appropriate Goals
• Group Member Diversity: Costs and Benefits Key Takeaways Exercises and Critical Thinking
• Thinking Like a Social Psychologist about Social Groups
• Spontaneous Social Categorization
• The Benefits of Social Categorization
• Liking “Us” More Than “Them”: Ingroup Favoritism
• The Outcomes of Ingroup Favoritism

Self Respect Movement, History, Objective, Significance & Important Aspects

Self Respect movement was a movement started by E. V. Ramasamy to have equal human rights. Read all about the Self Respect movement, History, Objective, Significance and Important Aspects for UPSC.

Table of Contents

Self Respect Movement

In 1925, E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (commonly known as Periyar), a Balija Naidu, started the Self Respect Movement. Naicker considered the brahmanical religion and culture as the main means of exploiting the lower castes, hence the movement’s aim was to reject it. Abolishing Brahminical hegemony, promoting equality for women and underprivileged groups, and reviving Dravidian languages like Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam were all part of this egalitarian movement’s demands.

To protest the ban on their admission into temples and other restrictions, depressed castes launched multiple satyagraha protests throughout India. The Self Respect Movement, its goals, the legacy it left behind, and other information for UPSC Exam Preparation will be covered in this article.

Read More: Prarthana Samaj

Self-Respect Movement History

The Self-Respect Movement was founded in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, with the goal of creating a society where underprivileged classes would have equal access to opportunities and human rights. In a caste-based culture where they were seen as the lowest social caste, it also encouraged backward classes to value themselves.

In Tamil Nadu, India, S Ramanathan spearheaded the self-respect campaign against Brahminism. The program had a significant impact not only in Tamil Nadu but also in other countries with sizable Tamil populations, such as Malaysia and Singapore.

Several political organisations, notably the All-India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), which broke away from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (D.M.K.) in 1972, were founded in Tamil Nadu as a result of the self-respect movement. Both groups are popular and have a social democratic bent.

Read More: Satyashodhak Samaj

Self Respect Movement Meaning

The Brahmins’ monopoly on power and influence steadily diminished due to E.V.R.’s never-ending anti-orthodoxy crusade. People were motivated to confront the institutional racism of the Brahmins by a sense of self and, more crucially, self-confidence.

As a result, marriages across different castes and religions were encouraged, and they were also recognized by the law. Tamil Nadu was the first state after independence to enact legislation permitting Hindu marriages without a Brahmin priest present. In addition, the practice of providing Harijan members exclusive representation on local councils was ended.

As a result of the hotels’ continuous support from the Self Respect Movement, the name panels were changed from “Brahmins Hotel” to “Vegetarian Hotel.” People began to take pride in dropping their caste name.

Read More: Servants of India Society

Self Respect Movement Objectives

This movement’s three main goals were the abolition of Brahminical authority, employment equity for women and underrepresented groups, and the revival of the Dravidian languages, which included Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Tamil.

In the two pamphlets “Namathu Kurikkol” and “Tiravitakkalaka Lateiyam,” the movement’s proponents outlined their objectives. These were the movement’s main aims:

• To create a society where lower castes and higher castes share the same fundamental civic rights.
• To strive to give everyone the same opportunities for development and advancement.
• The building of a just and peaceful society and the complete eradication of untouchability.
• It aspired for a social revolution in which everyone experiences friendship and a sense of belonging spontaneously.
• To create schools and colleges, as well as to give the poor, orphans, and widows a place to live.
• To discourage individuals from erecting extra temples, mutts, chlorites, or Vedic schools. The goal of the effort was to stop people from using their caste names as their names and other mindlessly adhered to similar customs.

Read More: Social Service League

Self Respect Movement Significance

The Brahmins’ monopoly on authority and influence steadily diminished as a result of E.V.R.’s never-ending anti-orthodoxy campaign. People were inspired by a sense of self-respect and, more importantly, self-confidence as they prepared to fight the Brahmins’ social injustice. It led to the promotion of interfaith and inter-caste marriages as well as the legality of unions consummated absent a Brahman priest.

The first state after independence to pass legislation enabling Hindu marriages without a Brahmin priest present was Tamil Nadu. Additionally, the system of giving Harijan members exclusive seats in municipal councils was eliminated. The movement’s persistent support led to the name boards of the hotels being changed from “Brahmins Hotel” to “Vegetarian Hotel”. People started to be proud of giving up their caste name.

Read More: Paramahansa Mandali

Self-Respect Movement and Feminism in India

Veeramal and Annai Meenanmbal, two well-known women activists, served as the movement’s female leaders. They pestered Periyar relentlessly to find out more about Dalit women’s rights. The group dedicated a sizeable percentage of its efforts to eradicating societal prejudice against women and advancing women’s rights. For a while, the self-respect movement’s founders advocated for women to use permanent birth control.

Gandhi, on the other hand, vehemently opposed all forms of birth control for women. Actually, one of the group’s most successful phases was the creation of the ego marriage system.

The Vaikom Satyagraha, which emerged in the 1920s to seek equal access for people from all castes in public spaces, had considerable participation from women. Nagammai, a well-known social reformer and crusader who eventually attained the position of editor of Kudi Arasu, the monthly journal that once supported the Self Respect Movement, led the group.

Nagammai frequently organized women’s associations to oppose toddy shops in Erode as part of an Anti-Arrack movement. Gandhi accepted the fact that the cause was “in the arms of the ladies from Erode,” a monument to the persistence and tenacity of their organization, and acknowledged that there was nothing he could do about the picketing’s occasionally violent outbursts.

Read More: Reform Movements in Southern India

Self-Respect Movement Important Aspects

Brahmins were impacted.

It campaigned against the hegemony of Brahmins as the higher caste in order to promote the promotion of self-respect for people under India’s caste-based system. The movement holds that one may only develop originality after gaining respect.

The main goal of the movement was to achieve equality in all spheres of life. It intended to eradicate harmful social behaviors supported by caste and religion that fueled a cycle of discrimination, including lower castes and caste-based hiring practices.

Castes forced people to act irrationally because it barred them from using reason, understanding, and perspective.

Self-Respecting Organizations

The legislation of self-respect weddings, which allowed marriages to begin without the presence of a Brahmin priest because most ceremonies were conducted in Sanskrit, a language that even the majority of people did not understand, was one of the most significant societal changes brought about by the Self-Respect Movement. Rituals were therefore predicated on strict compliance.

Inter-Caste and Inter-Religious

Marriages shouldn’t be prohibited by class, according to the movement, which promoted inter-caste and inter-religious unions in which one must be allowed to meet the partner of one’s choice. Due to the predominance of child brides, many young girls experienced loss; the self-respect weddings also applied to widows remarrying.

As a result, the ad was successful in drawing a big female audience. Due to Tamil Nadu being one of the first states to let Hindu marriages to take place without a Brahmin priest being present, inter-caste marriages increased.

Read More: Brahmo Samaj

Self-Respect Movement UPSC

Brahminical ideals have historically governed Indian civilizations, and people have experienced constant persecution. In the past, several events and activities have taken place to challenge this dominance. One of the movements that opposed Brahmin supremacy in Indian society was the Self Respect Movement. True democracy was made possible by the Self-Respect Movement’s unwavering goals and demands. This article has all the details about Self Respect movement for preparation of UPSC.

Read More: Arya Samaj

Sharing is caring!

Who founded Self-Respect Movement?

The self-respect movement was founded by E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker, commonly known as Periyar.

What was Self-Respect Movement also known as?

This is also called the Dravidian Movement, the self-respect movement was basically demanding the equal right for the backward cast, and the main focus of this movement was women's rights.

What are the principles of Self-Respect Movement?

Self-Respect Movement was a dynamic social movement aimed at destroying the contemporary Hindu social order in its totality and creating a new, rational society without caste, religion and god.

What is Self-Respect Movement?

The Self- Respect movement was a movement started by E. V. Ramasamy that aimed at achieving a society where the oppressed castes would have equal human rights.

What is the purpose of self-respect?

Self-respect remains important because it helps us to work through challenges, build resilience in life, and maintain our emotional health.

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Presentation Master’s thesis -Kyra Gantrel – Developmental Psychology

Roeterseilandcampus - Gebouw G, Straat: Nieuwe Achtergracht 129-B Ruimte: GS.01

Adolescents with a migration background often face unique challenges, especially regarding school adjustment. One important factor influencing school adjustment is national language proficiency. Nonetheless, research is inconclusive about how fluency in the national language impacts school adjustment among immigrants, suggesting that there might be a third factor at play. Hence, this thesis proposes a sequential mediation model in which this relationship is mediated by national peer contact and self-esteem. The thesis uses secondary data from the ICSEY study. 633 second-generation immigrants between the ages of 13 and 18 residing in Sweden completed a survey. Results show that national peer contact and self-esteem independently mediate the relationship between national language proficiency and school adjustment. However, no significant effects were found for a sequential mediation. This study concludes that national peer contact and self-esteem play important roles in individually shaping school adjustment in second-generation immigrants.

Self-Esteem

Jul 26, 2014

770 likes | 2.28k Views

Self-Esteem. Objectives: Students will understand self-esteem as it applies to the individual. i.e. self respect Students will recognize the benefits of high self esteem and the risks that a low self esteem promotes.

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• potential self actualization
• negative thoughts
• low self esteem
• esteem develops
• list maslow

Presentation Transcript

Self-Esteem Objectives: Students will understand self-esteem as it applies to the individual. i.e. self respect Students will recognize the benefits of high self esteem and the risks that a low self esteem promotes. Individuals will learn how self-esteem develops through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Students will focus on techniques to improve self-esteem. Each person will become familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Indian Hills Middle School

Self-Esteem & Your Health Self-Esteem refers to how much you respect yourself and like yourself. • Most psychologists think that high self-esteem has a positive effect on health, while low self-esteem has a negative effect on health.

Self-Esteem & Your Health Risk of Low Self-Esteem Benefits of High Self-Esteem • People with high self-esteem accept themselves for who they are. • They have a realistic views of their strengths and weaknesses. • They maintain positive attitudes even when they fail a task. • People with high self-esteem maintain close relationships with others who respect and value them. • If you feel good about yourself you take care of yourself: eat better, exercise, set goals, bounce back from disappointment & avoid risky behaviors. • People with low self-esteem do not respect themselves. • They judge themselves harshly. • Worry about what others think. • They put on an “act” in public to impress others and hide insecurities. • Fear of failure. • Afraid to try new things. • Negative thoughts: I am not good enough, not smart enough,…. • Low self-esteem leads to drug use, dropping out of school, early pregnancy, eating disorders.

How Self-Esteem Develops: • Childhood: • Receives support and encouragement from family members. • Learns to succeed at small tasks. • Most children enter school with high self-esteem. • Attitudes change when mixed with other students. Self-Esteem is not constant---it changes through one’s life! • Adolescence: • Changes in attitudes: critical of appearance, abilities, interests, • Compare abilities to others. • The world around you influences self-esteem. • Adulthood: • Self-esteem begins to rise. • Goals are accomplished. • Taking control of one’s life • Decreases in older adults

Improving Your Self-Esteem 1. Make a list of your strengths and weaknesses. 2. Set ambitious, but realistic goals for yourself. 3. Do not be too hard on yourself. 4. Rely on your values. 5. Learn to accept compliments. 6. LOOK BEYOND YOUR OWN CONCERNS! 7. Do not focus too much on appearance.

The Goal: Self-Actualization The psychologist Abraham Maslow taught that people have an inborn drive to be the best that they can be. This process by which people achieve their full potential is called self-actualization. • According to Maslow, before people can achieve self-actualization, their basic needs must be met.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Achieving Your Potential Self Actualization

How Self-Esteem Develops: 1. Physical Needs: the basic needs of the body; food, shelter, sleep…if these needs are not met a person has little or no means to pursue higher needs. 2. Safety: A person needs to have a safe environments; shelter from the elements, needs to feel safe from violence, a need for enough money to support the basic physical needs and other safety needs. 3. Belonging:A need to connect with other people. Family, friends, love, acceptance… needed for emotional health. 4. Esteem: Self-esteem and approval from others. Includes recognitions, respect, appreciations, attention, & can include fame, glory, status---your position in life. Self-esteem is the cape stone more important than approval from others. 5. Self-Actualization: Once all other needs are met, an individual can go on to achieve the qualities of a self-actualized person.

Personality Traits of Self-Actualized People Realistic and accepting Independent, self-sufficient Appreciative of life Concerned about humankind Capable of loving others Fair, unprejudiced Creative and hard-working Not afraid to be different

Good Health Review & Questions Define self-esteem and explain the effects high and low self-esteem can have on health. What are the three different stages of self-esteem development? Why does self-esteem drop during adolescence years? Explain. List 5 different ways you can improve your self-esteem and give an example. List Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Explain each step.

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