- Characteristics which you think explain your most important qualities. 

- Construct that refers to these characteristics.

- Your personal qualities that make you a unique individual.

- Includes idiosyncratic/ personal qualities. 

- Known aspects of the self. 

- Your knowledge of who you are. 

- Any self-oriented pieces of knowledge. 

- How we were raised as children. 

- Learn cultural norms.

- Roles we are expected to play in life.

- Thinking privately of who you are. 

- Looking inside yourself and thinking privately of who we are. 

- Can gain some degree of Self-Knowledge, but has some important limitations. 

- Most people don't spend a lot of time doing this. 

- People who live in individualistic cultures tend to have this. 

- People think of themselves as autonomous individuals, focus on personal qualities and characteristics. 

- Research shows that men are more likely to have this.

- Collective cultures. 

- Tend to have more interdependent view of the self in terms of group membership.

- Ex. most East-Asian countries. 

- Ingredients of self-concept. 

- Used to organize and guide the processing of self-relevant information.

- Will look for information to do with your self-schema. 

- Visions of ourselves that we aspire to become.

- Postive when motivated towards something.

- Negative when motivated to avoid something. 

- When in heightened state of self-awareness (ex. seeing yourself in the mirror), you will compare your current thoughts and behaviours to your internal standards/ expectations of yourself. 

- These standards are often a product of how you were socialized. 

- Ex. store mirrors --> know stealing is wrong. 

- Watching/ observing ourselves and our own behaviour. 

- May find yourself consistently preferring certain activities over others. 

- Lead others to agree with our views of ourselves.

- Wanting others to agree with how we see ourselves. 

- Comparing yourself to others

- People usually compare themselves to others with similar attributes/ skills when there is no objective standard to measure yourself against. 

- Highly informative. 

- Comparison of the self to people worse than you. 

- Compare yourself to someone who is inferior to you. 

- Will make you feel good about yourself. 

- Comparison of the self to people better at something than you are. 

- Compare yourself to someone superior to yourself. 

- May feel better or worse -> Depends on which aspect of self-concept (self-schema) is activated. 

- Source of self-concept.

- Memories you have of your life.

- Without these you would not have a coherent self-concept. 

- Helps define who you are. 

- Individualism (North America) vs. Collectivism (East Asia)

- ex. "The squeaky nail gets the grease" vs. "The nail that sticks out gets pounded down"

- People believe they may be judged in light of a negative stereotype.

- People believe that they might confirm a negative stereotype.