0.15 Social cognition, personality, and emotion  (Page 10/18)

Of course, in investigations of behavioral confirmation processes in social interaction, it has been possible to manipulate experimentally those aspects of the individual (i.e., their conceptions of other people) of concern to the investigators. Other attributes of the individual (whose impact on social situations the personality-social psychologist might wish to investigate) may not be so readily amenable to experimental manipulation. For example, it is in practice (if not in principle) somewhat more difficult to manipulate and control an individuals conceptions of self, characteristic dispositions, attitudes, and values than it is to manipulate and control his or her conceptions of other people. Nonetheless, one need not be deterred from investigating the impact of individuals on their situations either in the domain of conceptions of self or in the domain of characteristic dispositions. In either case, a consideration of the influence of individuals on their social situations suggests that it may be possible to characterize individuals in terms of the social world that they construct for themselves to habitate.

This brings up the point, what is the difference between beliefs people have of themselves and beliefs people have of others? Obviously people know themselves better than they do other people. They certainly know their attitudes and values better than those of the people they meet. They know how to be themselves, they don't know how to be other people. Their understanding and beliefs of themself are probably a lot more highly developed than their understanding of those attributes in other people. I mean, there is a certain understanding everyone has of themself that is superior to any sort of analysis anyone can make. I think that it is possible to have one type of understanding that can't be changed by thinking something else because your natural understanding is so powerful. If you really feel like someone is dumb, then maybe you cannot change that belief even though you try to think differently.

Consider, first, examples drawn from the domain of self-conceptions. It goes almost without saying that some individuals regard themselves as more competitive than other people. What influences might these competitive self-conceptions exert on the social worlds within which these individuals reside? As it happens, individuals with competitive conceptions of self believe that the world is composed homogeneously of competitive individuals; by contrast, those with cooperative conceptions of self construe the world to be composed heterogeneously of both cooperative and competitive people. Kelley, H. H., + Stahelsky, A. J. The social interaction basis of cooperators' and competitors' beliefs about others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 1970, 16, 66-91. Furthermore, and perhaps as a consequence of these stereotyped beliefs about other people, individuals with competitive self-conceptions are highly likely to treat all people as if they were competitive individuals and thereby elicit competitive responses from all others with whom they interact, whether these individuals have cooperative or competitive conceptions of themselves. Effectively, those individuals with competitive conceptions of self create for themselves social worlds that no only provide behavioral confirmation for their stereotypic beliefs that all people are competitive, but also justify and maintain their own competitive dispositions. They construct their social worlds in their own self-images. Moreover, these social worlds are ideally suited to expressing or acting out their competitive conceptions of self.