Psychology for Dummies (38 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
Some psychologists emphasize the way people represent themselves and their experiences of the world as core aspects of their personalities and the way they act. Most of us have been to an office party or holiday party at school where some genius tries to be helpful by giving everyone a nametag. I’m always tempted to put something goofy on mine or to use someone else’s name. The tag is a crude form of representation, or presentation, of our self to other people. Sometimes I’ll put a nickname on mine — I’ve had a few. Nicknames are good examples of a “tag” that tells us a little more about a person than her everyday name. When you meet someone nicknamed “Stinky” or “Psycho,” you get a different impression than you would from “Lefty” or “Slim.”
Nametags, nicknames, and common names are all examples of representations of who we are. They are convenient and shortened ways to organize a whole lot of information about someone. Ever have a conversation about a movie and forget the name of the main actor? “You know, that guy who was in that one movie with that one woman?” Just saying “Brad Pitt” is so much easier than explaining the person’s characteristics every time you want to talk about him. This way of organizing information about people and the world is the product of the human mind’s tendency to impose order and structure on our experiences.
The structured representation of experience is based on recurrences of similar qualities of a person or experience across repeated events. This order takes the form of
schemas
or mental constructs for “Joe,” “Brad Pitt,” or “me.” Joe is my neighbor who plays his music too loud. Brad Pitt is a famous actor that every man envies. Me? I’m that guy who envies Brad Pitt. After these structured representations of people, including myself, are developed, they are used to recognize and understand newly encountered information.
Cognitive personality psychologists emphasize the schema-based representation of experience as the central organizing construct in human personality. Two basic types of schemas play a role in establishing regularities and patterns of personality: self-schemas and socially relevant schemas.
Self-schemas
are the organized units of information about yourself; sometimes these are called
self-concepts.
What is the concept of “you,” or “Me?” An in-depth discussion of how a person’s identity is developed is beyond the scope of this section, but no matter what the exact details are, our identities are represented in the form of schemas. These self-schemas are integrated conceptual networks that incorporate our own and others’ opinions of us. They provide detailed information about us, from demographics (like how old we are) to our values and can be updated automatically through experience or revised through conscious attention and effort.
The other key component in establishing personality,
socially relevant schemas,
involves the representation of categories of other people, environments, social behavior, and stereotyped expectations. These are sometimes called
scripts.
Is an actor in a movie presenting his off-screen personality or simply acting out a script that tells him how to act, when to speak, when to cry, and so on? It’s a script of course. Imagine, now, that we’re all just acting out a “personality” script of our own, written by the author of experience and development. These scripts determine the ways we act.
It may seem that our personalities are pretty simple. But we all have some sense that we’re more complex than that. Walter Mischel (1980) attempted to add some flavor to this rather dry version of personality. He introduced five specific classes of scripts to give shape to this robotic-like conceptualization:
competencies, encoding strategies, expectancies, subjective values,
and
self- regulatory mechanisms.
There is so much more to personality than meets the eye, and one important aspect of your personality is your personal collection of skills and abilities for solving problems and analyzing the world. Mischel called these
competencies.
How we engage and overcome the challenges in our lives in part defines our personality. Are you a “go-getter” or an “analyzer?” Have you ever built something like an extra room, a playhouse, or maybe a doghouse? How did you go about doing it? Some people sit down and figure everything out in advance, drawing out a blueprint with precise measurements and specifications. Others just get what supplies they think they might need and figure it out as they go along. A good way to test yourself is something I call the “Directions Test.” When you buy something that needs to be assembled, do you look at the instructions, or do you toss them to the side?
Because cognitive personality theory puts so much emphasis on information and how it is stored and interpreted, an important aspect of personality involves the strategies and constructs we use to organize information. This is the process of building those complex schemas and scripts that will eventually guide our behavior.
Encoding strategies
are a person’s unique way of attending to and interpreting the world. It is pretty easy for two people to witness the exact same event and come up with two entirely different interpretations of it. Anyone who’s ever had an argument with a wife, husband, or significant other can vouch for that.
You’re only as special as your expectations of a situation. Are you an eternal optimist or a pessimist?
Expectancies
consist of expectations or predictions that one event will necessarily follow another. These expectations set up the rules for what to do and how to manage specific situations. If the rules match the reality of a situation, then the behavior will be effective, and a feeling of mastery will develop. If not, I guess the only option is to keep on trying.
Do you work for free? Not many of us do. Most of us work for the incentive of getting paid. Incentives act as motivators toward a certain behavior. We’re not all tempted by the same things though. Our
subjective values
represent what things are important to us as individuals and determine what we are willing to do to earn them. Hey, if you like getting little golden stars on your paycheck instead of a raise for a job well done, knock yourself out. That’s what makes you so unique.
What are your goals in life? Do you have a master plan or a blueprint? You may not realize it, but according to Mischel, all of us have what he called
self-regulatory systems and plans.
You set a goal, you go for it, you analyze whether you meet that goal or not, and you make the necessary adjustments. Each of us has a unique way of doing this that characterizes our personal style.
Ultimately, according to this representational view of personality, how we see ourselves and view the world, and the ways that these views get planned out in the form of behavioral blueprints represent personality.
Does is ever seem like you’re being guided by some higher power or force? What if I was really just a complex robot sent here from another planet to research Earth and report back to my alien superiors? Seem a little far-fetched? Some cognitive personality psychologists seem to think that this view is not so far off after all. No, they’re not proposing that I’m a robot or that any of us are (well, maybe not most of us), but they do suggest that we are guided by a complex system of self-regulatory mental processes that form our personalities.
Think of it like a personality thermostat. The neat thing about a thermostat is that it is internally regulated. When you set your home thermostat to a certain temperature and select “Auto,” the heating and cooling systems are engaged when necessary to maintain the desired setting. If the temperature drops below the setting, the heater kicks in. If it gets above it, the air conditioner kicks in. Psychologists Ajzen and Fishbein (1988) proposed that the human personality works in the exact same way.
The “acts” of personality consist of forming behavioral intentions that are then employed to reach a particular setting. Here, a form of mental algebra is performed in which several types of information are integrated, resulting in a likelihood or probability of a particular behavior being performed. If the probability is high enough, an intention is formed, and the behavior is carried out. A behavior becomes important enough to perform through cognitive analysis and intention formation.
Intentions are formed based on the analysis of two specific types of information: likelihood of an outcome and desirability of that outcome. In this view, our personalities are kind of inherently lazy, often forming intentions based on those behaviors most likely to succeed. We go by the path of least resistance. The desirability of the behavior is based on its personal meaning and on whether people that are important to you want you to do the behavior. I am much less likely to form an intention for a behavior that someone I couldn’t care less about desires me to do.
In This Chapter
Knowing thy self
Connecting with others
Enjoying family
Hanging out with friends
O ne of the things that distinguishes psychology from other social sciences is the focus of its investigations and applications. Although psychologists do focus on groups at times, they focus a majority of their work on individuals. Therapy, for example, is typically an individual affair, even if it’s group therapy.
Americans love the classic individual. John Wayne walked tall and independently for years. Rambo single-handedly took on entire divisions of enemy soldiers. These guys stood on their own. They were individuals who resisted the pressure to go along with the crowd. They seemed to know who they were, and they were never willing to compromise on that issue. Sometimes that’s called integrity. One of the meanings of the word integrity is wholeness or completeness, and these guys were complete individuals. They had strong character and dominant personas. They knew who they were, and no one could tell them otherwise.
In case you haven’t noticed, however, psychologists take nothing for granted. If I had John Wayne in therapy and he came in with his macho, “I know who I am, and I’m not going to change” attitude, I’d take the bait. I’d say, “Okay, who are you?” It’s easy to take knowing who you are for granted. Until someone asks, most of us go around assuming we know who we are. This is the age-old question of
self.
What is a self, and how do I know if I have one? What is my identity? Who am I?
Showing up in the buffI used to have this recurring dream where I would find myself naked in some public place. In one of the dreams, I was back in elementary school, and the only thing that I had on was a fur coat, with nothing underneath. I was pretty worried about what these dreams meant. Did I have a fur-coat fetish, or was I just an exhibitionist? I was glad to find out that these dreams were probably about self-consciousness. Each of us has different situations that exemplify feeling extremely self-conscious and exposed. For some people, the situation is public speaking, and for others, it’s dancing in a nightclub.
