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and experience, and they can also think about what they are thinking, doing, and experiencing. In
social psychology, the study of self-awareness is traced to Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklunds
(1972) landmark theory of self-awareness. Duval and Wicklund proposed that, at a given
moment, people can focus attention on the self or on the external environment. Focusing on the
self enables self-evaluation. When self-focused, people compare the self with standards of
correctness that specify how the self ought to think, feel, and behave. The process of comparing
the self with standards allows people to change their behavior and to experience pride and
dissatisfaction with the self. Self-awareness is thus a major mechanism of self-control.
Research since the 1970s has strongly supported self-awareness theory (Duval and Silvia 2001).
When people focus attention on the self, they compare the self with standards, try harder to meet
standards, and show stronger emotional responses to meeting or failing to meet a standard. The
tendency to change the self to match a standard depends on other variables, particularly
perceptions of how hard it will be to attain the standard. Remarkably, many experiments have
shown that when people are not self-focused, their actions are often unrelated to their personal
standardsself-awareness is needed for people to reduce disparities between their actions and
their ideals.
Self-awareness theory remains a fruitful and controversial theory. One new
direction is the application of self-awareness theory to clinical disorders involving
negative self-evaluation (e.g., depression) and excessive self-consciousness (e.g.,
social anxiety). One controversy, reviewed by Paul Silvia and Guido Gendolla (2001),
is whether self-awareness enables accurate judgments of the self. Many researchers
have proposed that self-awareness creates clearer perceptions of internal states,
emotions, and traits. Other researchers, however, have noted that the self-concept
is fluid, complex, and contextualit is not a static object that can simply be
apprehended and examined. Ironically, by making some aspects of the self
especially salient, self-awareness may exaggerate and bias judgments of what the
self is like.
SELF-AWARENESS THEORY
Even though the concept of self-awareness has likely existed for a very long time, the first major
studies on the theory of self-awareness emerged during the early 1970s from psychologists
Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund.
Although their study - like all scholarly research - was fairly complicated, Duval and Wicklund
primarily wanted to analyze the effects of focusing attention exclusively on the self in an
objective evaluation. To do this, the researchers asked participants to view themselves in a
mirror, showed them video of their behavior, and had them listen to audio recordings of their
own voice, which they were then asked to evaluate.
What they discovered was that when people viewed themselves objectively, they evaluated their
image, behavior, and voice using the values and standards that they had developed over the
course of their lives, which caused them to see themselves from an objective perspective. Based
on their research, Duval and Wicklund concluded that such evaluations were a positive
experience because the objective analysis helped participants identify what improvements they
needed to make in order for their appearance and behavior to align with their internal standards.
Similar observations are used as an indicator of entrance to the mirror stage by human children in
developmental psychology.
SELF-EFFICACY THEORY
Self-efficacy is the extent or strength of one's belief in one's own ability to complete tasks and
reach goals. Psychologists have studied self-efficacy from several perspectives, noting various
paths in the development of self-efficacy; the dynamics of self-efficacy, and lack thereof, in
many different settings; interactions between self-efficacy and self-concept; and habits of
attribution that contribute to, or detract from, self-efficacy.
This can be seen as the ability to persist and a person's ability to succeed with a task. As an
example, self-efficacy directly relates to how long someone will stick to a workout regimen or a
diet. High and low self-efficacy determines whether or not someone will choose to take on a
challenging task or "write it off" as impossible.
Self-efficacy affects every area of human endeavor. By determining the beliefs a person holds
regarding his or her power to affect situations, it strongly influences both the power a person
actually has to face challenges competently and the choices a person is most likely to make.
These effects are particularly apparent, and compelling, with regard to behaviors affecting health.
SELF-DISCREPANCY THEORY
Self-discrepancies are comprised of inconsistencies between individuals self-concept and
pertinent self-guides. For instance, a woman might experience an actual/own versus ought/other
discrepancy if she works hard to further her career but her mother thinks she should settle down
and start a family. Such discrepancies produce discomfort in the individual, which may motivate
the person to minimize discrepancies in order to alleviate the discomfort.
What patterns of self-beliefs cause people to suffer?
Expanding upon his original self-discrepancy theory of 1987, Higgins emphasizes the
motivational assumptions of SDT: 1) people are motivated to reach a condition in which their
self-concept matches their personally relevant self-guides and 2) relations between and among
different types of self-state representations represent different kinds of psychological situations,
which in turn are associated with distinct emotional-motivational states (Higgins, 1989, p.9596). Higgins also details information-processing assumptions of SDT: 1) a self-discrepancy is a
cognitive structure interrelating distinct self-beliefs and 2) the likelihood that a self-discrepancy
will produce psychological distress depends on its level of accessibility (Higgins, 1989, p.97).
The combination of these two assumptions yields a general hypothesis of SDT: the greater the
magnitude and accessibility of a particular type of self-discrepancy possessed by an individual,
the more the individual will suffer the kind of discomfort associated with that type of
discrepancy (Higgins, 1989, p.98). Higgins also proposed two further domains of the self: the
can self (your representation of the attributes that someone [yourself or another] believes you
can possess) and the (expected) future self (your representation of the attributes that someone
[yourself or another] believes you are likely to possess in the future) (Higgins, 1989, p.116).