Chapter 2: The Self in a Social World

The self-concept, defined as the integrated answers to the question "Who am I?", develops through multiple influences including social roles, comparisons with others, experiences of success and failure, feedback from others through the looking-glass self mechanism, and cultural frameworks that emphasize either independent or interdependent identity. Despite these elaborate self-perceptions, people demonstrate surprising limitations in understanding their own behavior, exhibiting planning fallacy when estimating task duration, affective forecasting errors when predicting emotional responses, and gaps between their implicit automatic attitudes and explicit conscious beliefs. The chapter explores how self-esteem functions as both an adaptive psychological resource and a potential source of problematic narcissism when rooted in fragile external sources rather than secure internal foundations. Control perception—encompassing self-efficacy, locus of control, and vulnerability to learned helplessness—significantly influences motivation and resilience, though excessive choice paradoxically reduces satisfaction. The self-serving bias systematically distorts self-evaluation through self-serving attributions, the better-than-average effect, unrealistic optimism about personal futures, and biased judgments about the commonality of one's failures versus the uniqueness of one's virtues. Finally, people actively manage their social presentation through impression management strategies and self-handicapping, with individual differences in self-monitoring determining how flexibly people adjust their behavior across social situations.