A Dip into Personality
I haven't dipped much into personality theory yet, and I thought it was high time that I did so!
In 1902, Charles Horton Cooley came up with the concept of the Looking Glass Self. To Cooley, a person is comprised of many different selves which we portray to the world. The way we decipher which self to present in any given moment is dependent on the social situation that we are in. One way of looking at this is to watch and become aware of how you act around your dad, and compare it to how you act around your best friend. Clearly, "who you are" changes dramatically from one situation to the next. Why was this? It was because, according to the Looking Glass Self theory, you thought that these people viewed you in a different light and you felt it necessary to have to live up to their expectations. Cooley's theory is ripe with the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies. If I perceive you to think that I'm an asshole, I'm going to be resentful of that and fulfill your belief of me being an asshole to you. The sum of this theory can be found in the following statements:
I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I'm who I think you think I am.
So, as stated, we become what we believe others expect us to be, as illustrated in the picture. Think about a time when you were in the company of someone who you think respects you. You will do all in your power to be consistent with their expectations, doing your best not to let them down. Knowing this theory may give you some freedom to alter your actions; if you're aware enough of your motivation for your actions you can alter how you act around someone in order to change their opinion instead of playing into it, which most people have tried to do without knowing this theory. Dale Carnegie would adamantly agree with this theory; in one of his books, he said that the only way to make someone trustworthy is to treat them as if they already are. Don't misconstrue this. He's not saying it's guaranteed to make someone trustworthy, but it's the only situation that will bring forth such qualities. To turn it around, you can't make someone trustworthy by treating them suspiciously.
The Looking Glass Self is consistent with one of Carl Jung's theories of the archetypes of personality. There are many archetypes, but one in particular is related to Cooley's theory: the persona. To Jung, the persona is the mask that we wear in different situations. When at work, we're our working selves, with our kids, we're our parental selves, etc. Jung felt that these masks could become pathological if we ended up becoming too committed to any particular one. For example, If we became too committed to the introversion mask, we become awkward in social settings, unable to communicate effectively, and even more withdrawn due to our social awkwardness; conversely, if we become too committed to the extroversion mask, we become too flexible with our self, producing glaring inconsistencies from situation to situation that will produce other problems.
Overall, I found this to be a generally accurate and intriguing perspective to take on how behaviour changes from situation to situation. Our survival depends in large part to our co-operation with others, so it is wired specifically to read others well. This theory doesn't apply solely to negative reactions either, as demonstrated by Carnegie above. So, who are we, in general, you might ask? Well, personality is defined in the realm of psychology as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that uniquely influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviours in various situations. One of the key parts of personality, though, is its pervasiveness, which is not mentioned in that definition. We are the commonalities that appear between these social situations. Where does the isolated self - the self when you're alone - play into this? Well I'm not quite sure, so I'll throw that your way. Feel free to enlighten me in your comments.
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