Social Psychology. Daniel W. Barrett

what it eats, how its fur would feel, its weight, its sharp teeth, and so forth. Now set the timer on your cell phone for one minute and try to stop thinking about that white bear until the alarm sounds. Can you do it? Well, if you are like the participants in a study by Wegner and colleagues, trying NOT to think of the white bear will result in more thoughts of a white bear when compared to a control group that was not asked to stop thinking about it (Koster, Soetens, Braet, & De Raedt, 2008; Wegner, Schneider, Carter, & White, 1987). The upshot of this is that conscious attempts to control one’s thoughts by avoiding a given topic can lead, ironically, to increased thoughts about that topic. That is, intended thought suppression can lead to apparent thought production. This ironic process of mental control produces the very thoughts or behavior that you are trying not to produce (Miklowitz, Alatiq, Geddes, Goodwin, & Williams, 2010; Wegner et al., 1987).

      Try not to think of a gray elephant, and you are more likely to think about a gray elephant. Why? The reason is that two tasks must be performed to effectively suppress a thought or behavior. One is an automatic process that monitors whatever it is that has been deliberately banished from consciousness—the monitoring occurs so that it can warn consciousness that the thought is emerging. The second process is more controlled and involves attempts to distract thoughts away from the undesirable topic toward some competing topic, such as a vision of a bright green parrot. The reason this happens is that the monitoring process requires that you think about the green parrot to be certain that you are not thinking about it. In order to be certain that you are not thinking about something, you need to “check” up on that very thing—to monitor it—to be sure that you are not thinking about it! In a sense these two systems are competing, and the automatic process sometimes will “win” by facilitating the intrusion of the unwanted thoughts into consciousness. Difficulty with thought suppression is particularly likely under conditions of cognitive load, when consciousness is attempting to multitask, such as when you are trying to recite the alphabet backwards or memorize a twelve-digit number (see Figure 4.6) (Miklowitz et al., 2010).

      Figure 4.6 Processes of Ironic Control

      Source: Adapted from Study 2, Wegner, D. M., Ansfield, M., & Pilloff, D. (1998). The putt and the pendulum: Ironic effects of the mental control of action. Psychological Science, 9, 196–199.

      Self-Regulation: The capacity to control one’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior

      Willpower: Mental energy needed to change the activities of the self to meet the desired standards

      Ironic Process of Mental Control: Trying to control one’s thoughts or behavior in a way that produces the very thoughts or behavior that one is trying to avoid

      Think Again!

      1 What are self-regulation and willpower?

      2 What is an ironic process? What are its two components?

      3 The next time you have a song “stuck” in your head, try to suppress it. Describe the experience.

      Confirming the Self: Self-Verification

      The final “self” concept that we will discuss in this chapter is based in a motive related to self-regulation and self-concept: what is called the need for self-consistency or self-verification. In the chapter on persuasion we’ll describe consistency theory in more detail; for now suffice it to say that people often seek feedback from others that is consistent with their self-concept. That is, they wish to confirm or verify what they believe is true about themselves, a tendency called self-verification (North & Swann, 2009a; Swann, 1990; Valentiner, Hiraoka, & Skowronski, 2014). According to Swann (1990), people want to maximize their perceptions of control and predictability with respect to themselves and their situation, and doing so involves confirming one’s beliefs about the self. Perhaps, paradoxically, people don’t just want others to verify their positive attributes, but they also seek feedback consistent with their self-identified negative attributes (Swann, 1990; Valentiner, Skowronski, McGrath, Smith, & Renner, 2011). For instance, in one study participants who held negative self-views chose to interact with individuals who had negatively evaluated them rather than others who had given them a positive evaluation (Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989). Note how this motivation differs from that for accurate self-knowledge and for self-enhancing information: Seeking true accuracy would require soliciting and being open to feedback that may not be consistent with one’s self-view, whereas self-enhancing implies searching for and/or attending to only positive feedback (Sedikides & Gregg, 2003). In contrast, self-verification invokes strategies designed to reinforce one’s self-concept, whether or not it results in accurate self-knowledge or unflattering evaluation (Swann, 1990; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & Angulo, 2008). Despite the fact that self-verification can provide individuals with negative feedback, this and other drawbacks are often outweighed by the benefits of self-verification (North & Swann, 2009b). By way of example, people tend to seek romantic partners who help verify their self-concepts, including their less desirable features (Swann et al., 2008).

      Self-Verification: Seeking information that will confirm one’s self-concept

      A Clash of Motives?

      As you can see from the preceding paragraph, the motives of accuracy, enhancement, and verification may be at loggerheads: Efforts to satisfy one of them may prevent the satisfaction of the others (Kwang & Swann, 2010). For instance, in one study, when given the option of choosing what feedback to receive, participants preferred self-enhancing to self-verifying feedback and were least interested in obtaining self-evaluative information (Sedikides, 1993). In other words, feeling good about oneself was more important than confirming the self, and obtaining accurate feedback was least important. Although direct research examining conflicts among these three motives is sparse, what is available suggests that self-enhancement may be one of the most fundamental of all motives (Anseel & Lievens, 2006).

      Final Thoughts: The Paradox of The Self

      As you can see from reading this chapter, the seemingly simple question, “what is the self?” is actually quite complex. The self is not one “thing.” Instead it is a nexus of motives, cognitions, and other features that intersect, overlap, and interact in complicated and fascinating ways. We learn about our selves in several ways, including introspection and by the self-perception process of observing how we behave. The self presents a bit of a paradox: It is defined as the experience of the self, suggesting that it is independent, stable, and coherent. However, research shows that it is also dependent on and tied closely to other people— at least how we perceive our relationships with others and how we think they view us—and other people play a particularly large role in self-evaluation. Moreover, our many selves differ from each other and may vary across situations as we engage in self-monitoring and impression management. The self is the product of all of these activities and is continually evolving even as we try to hold it steady. Finally, the self lies at the core of several of the fundamental issues of social psychology, including the extent to which we have free will and the rationality of our thought processes.

      Core Concepts

       The self is the psychological apparatus that gives a person the capacity to consciously think about him or herself and includes self-concept, self-esteem, the interpersonal self, and the executive self. The self-concept is composed of the characteristics that we believe we possess. Schemas are cognitive structures that organize knowledge about the world, including ourselves. Self-discrepancy theory states that we possess actual, ideal, and ought selves that vary in how different they are from each other.

       Introspection or looking within is limited because we often are unaware of our mental processes, even if we know their outcomes, and also because it can change how we feel. Self-perception involves looking at ourselves the way someone else might but applies primarily to when we are