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What is “your” self? Pause for 60 seconds and write down the first six to ten thoughts that come to mind. . . . Most likely you wrote down external features of your self, such as your gender, race, university affiliation, family status, and so forth. Although these are undoubtedly important aspects of who you are, social psychologists would urge you to delve more deeply into the mystery of the self and to consider less obvious attributes of the self, to even go as far as to ask if you possess just a single self. Over 100 years ago the famous American poet Walt Whitman (1892) wrote “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Whitman felt that he had multiple selves that, together, constituted “Walt Whitman.” Social psychologists follow Whitman in viewing the self in a more abstract sense that cannot be narrowed down to one noun or adjective. Recently, in the 2015 animated movie Inside Out, the mental life of the main character, Riley, is portrayed as a struggle among her various emotions (anger, disgust, joy, fear, and sadness), each presented as a different self. Although this fictional movie does not reflect how social psychologists view the self, it is consistent with the general idea of multiple selves. As you will see, the self may be more accurately construed as a multiplicity of properties and psychological processes that interrelate in complex and fascinating ways (Sedikides & Gregg, 2003).

One compelling perspective defines the self as that something that allows us to even ask the question, “what is the self?” According to this view, the self is the psychological apparatus that gives a person the capacity to consciously think about him or herself (Leary & Tangney, 2003; MacDonald, 2007). The self is defined as the ability to think about the self! It is almost impossible to imagine that a being can be said to have a self if it lacks the capacity for self-reflection. If a creature can’t ask, “what is the self?” then it doesn’t have one! Because the self lies at the center of our very being, as you’ll see in this chapter, social psychologists have exerted enormous effort toward developing a better understanding of its nature.

Table 4.1

The self, then, is your experience of who you are. This encompasses your beliefs about yourself, what you present to other people, and how you regulate your self (see Table 4.1). These three components of the self are called the self-concept, the interpersonal self, and the executive self (Baumeister, 1987, 2011; Baumeister, Schmeichel, & Vohs, 2007; Cavallo, Holmes, Fitzsimons, Murray, & Wood, 2012). An additional component is self-esteem or how you feel about yourself. In this chapter we will review each of these aspects. We will also revisit several of the core themes of social psychology introduced in Chapter 1, including free will, rationality, sociality, and of course, the self. The self is the place where all of these themes intersect: Each is a constituent of the self, and together they comprise the fundamental dimensions of the self.

Self: The psychological apparatus that gives a person the capacity to consciously think about him or herself