Foggy Weather

Chapter Two Reflection

People are vain. Even if they insist that they are not, or even if they don't seem to be, they are full of self-serving biases. The chapter starts off with spotlight effects and illusions of transparency which, if you think about it, are forms of self-handicapping. By using these big terms, you're relaying that your not-so-stellar paper presentation was out of your control. It's not that you didn't prepare or you weren't able to catch your audience's attention, you simply are an anxious wreck and that botched the presentation. This semi-subconscious relinquishing of control works by absenting you from fault (at least in your eyes).

The underlying mechanism here is the self-concept and the sub-related self-esteem and self-efficacy. To go through the definitions: self-concept is how you see yourself (in whole), self-esteem is how good you feel about yourself, and self-efficacy is how good in a certain domain you are (for example, academic self-efficacy). The multitude of research cited in the Chapter gives evidence or proves that these cognitive constructs are affected by the social environment a person moves around in.

Running through some points that interested me, there was one in the early part of the Chapter on how the social surroundings affects our self-awareness. Compare a Filipino strolling around their neighbourhood to the same Filipino strolling around in Kobe. Compare a middle-class Filipino bustling through Divisoria to the same Filipino transported to Rockwell. The Filipino may try to be a 'good exemplar' when they're in a markedly foreign place. They might try to fit-in with the crowd of the setting if there is an aspirational relationship between it and the person. It works in a similar fashion to the idea of multiple selves. Being in a foreign country also appears to realign a person's outlook on sexual activities.

Something running through this is the social comparison phenomenon that's been mentioned in class before. Basically, people like to compare. Sometimes, they use the upward comparison to establish goals and motivate themselves to do better. Sometimes (most times?), it has a detrimental quality when we take pleasure from other people's losses or when we try to reason away a loss on our part (oh, they had better facilities, better coaching, more preparation time, etcetera), which doesn't produce results.

What is happening is that we're seeing the world through corrective glasses that aren't the right prescription. Seeing the world in this way might be good for our self-esteem (itself of dubious importance), but it upends the other parts of us that want to see the truth and how things really are—us being our worst enemies. Even worse is that these biases go on unnoticed (by you, not by others, sorry) and particularly difficult to pin down. I wouldn't go into trying to explain the why either, since evolutionary psychology necessitates quite a bit of hindsight bias. That allows them to explain away (never good), and well, it's a bias (obviously never good). As a Psychology professor once told a class: psychologists use their brains, and anthropologists use their imagination. We're not the latter.

All these clouds add up to us incapable of helping ourselves because we don't really know ourselves. A funny example that was brought up was the Wobegon effect, where (almost) everyone thinks they're superlative in terms of certain things, compared to the general population. This is unlikely since a number of us will willingly push up the voltage in the Milgram experiment, and the fact that it just isn't possible for forty percent of the population to be in the top five percent. This is a good example of people generally not being very good in terms of self-knowledge. We like to misattribute the causes of our actions, and we're really poor in predicting how we'll act and feel facing a hypothetical situation. We see this in research where people are surveyed how they think they'll react when asked to help an unethical experiment (like the Milgram experiment), or how they will react to a certain experiment (like change blindness experiments and conformity experiments); and then the results of the experiment will say otherwise. Even worse (for me) is that other people are better at second-guessing you than yourself.

I'm really not sure why this is the case. Is it something like us not paying enough attention (people who call us narcissistic whores will disagree). Or are we just paying attention to different things? It's really murky at the moment. If we do try to check ourselves, and try to evaluate whether biases are intruding before making the in-your-head judgement final, will that completely work? Can we be taught to be less biased? Or will there always be a little bit (but significant enough) of bias in everything?

Self-efficacy seems to be a better, clearer field of research since the connection between the person's reflections (since that is how you are going to retrieve data) has a larger correlation to actual resulting behaviour and performance. Take in point research showing that academic self-efficacy really does predict academic performance (I was part of a research that also looked into this). So why is there a disparity between this assessment of self counter to other assessments? The basic feedback with self-efficacy are experiences ('mastery experiences') related to the task. So there is something concrete (if, say, these are doing well in exams; quantified evidence). But in other self-assessments, I argue that there is also (or there should be) evidence. You don't go around saying you're incredibly attractive if you haven't met a wide range of people. You've seen Karl Malden and Marlon Brando, and you decided that you looked more like the latter. What interferes with this compared to judgements of self-efficacy? What is (are) the hidden factor that we aren't seeing ourselves?

Is it because of a bias that we can't seem to pinpoint it?

The essential insight I got from the two activities could be paired up with Social Psychology itself with its myriad theories that tend to conflict with each other. For a discipline that is so multidimensional and so broad, people in he field still love to umbrella everything under a single master concept.

We have to see the evidence, and see history, and just admit that those cases aren't the mode. In fact, they're more of special cases than anything else.

In the example of individualism as to collectivism, it's not a versus argument. They are not two poles of a continuum, it seems. In fact, there is evidence that they—however opposite they seem to be—are two plains coexisting. We could see that from the couple of responses that said they were equally high in both domains, and that it isn't a lot of one means little of the other. The second exercise is a similar thing.

Asked to define ourselves, a bunch of categories came up. There are social roles, social identities, personality and attitudes, physical characteristics, present disposition, etcetera. And after that, weigh them by salience and importance through chronological order and frequency. Assessing our sample, the part of social roles/social identity is interesting. In how the data came out, it's a mix of either being very frequent, or being up front but overwhelmed by other categories. Obviously, the consensus is that it's important.

But on the micro scale, we can see how things shouldn't be based on one criterion alone. If we only looked at frequency, personality traits would have come out as king. But retrospectively and reflectively, we did find that untrue. That we do value ourselves in a context rather than plain ourselves independent, and we could only understand that by looking at things from a multi-factorial perspective.