Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 155

How do you know who you are? Sounds like an odd question, right? You are probably thinking something like “I know who I am because I can look inside and see myself.” Unfortunately, looking internally at the self to examine who we are, how we feel, and so forth—a process we call introspection—may not be as straightforward as it seems (Corallo, Sackur, Dehaene, & Sigman, 2008). As we’ll discuss in a moment, there is no guarantee that mere reflection will uncover important aspects of the self. When introspection falls short, we can engage in a second process called self-perception, during which we essentially examine ourselves from the outside, similarly to what others may do. A third method for learning about the self involves focusing on the responses that other people have to us. In these different ways, others can serve as mirrors that help us better understand who we are.

Cooley (1902) called this aspect of the self the looking-glass self, because we see ourselves partially through the eyes of others or, rather, how we think they perceive us (see Chapter 3). Not only can we gain self-knowledge by taking the perspectives of others, but we may also derive an element of our self-esteem from how we believe they appraise us, what are called reflected self-appraisals (Asencio, 2013; Carlson, Vazire, & Furr, 2011). The interdependence between our self-understanding and our relationships with others further demonstrates once again the close connection between two of our fundamental questions: the nature of the self and of our sociality.