PSYC 2740 Chapter 11: Chapter 11 - Personality and the Self-Concept
15 Dec 2011
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Document Summary
Early psychology was largely a psychology of personal experience. One of the first self-concept theorists and provided one of the first definitions of self-esteem. He believed the self is multidimensional and we may have a social me for each significant person in our lives. James didn t examine the material me, social me and spiritual me in terms of cross-cultural differences. James defined self-esteem as the number of our successes divided by our pretensions (aims and expectations) Two ways james believed one could raise our self-esteem is to increase our accomplishments or lower our goals and expectations. Sociometer theory- the notion that our self-esteem is essentially a barometer of our relationships with others. Meta-accuracy- is the term for how accurate we are in our sense of how other people view us. It s relatively low and is more accurate when the data involves a global assessment of the self rather than the dyadic assessment in a specific context.
