Three Ways of Perceiving Oneself

• There are three ways to perceive oneself: The self as a social actor, the self as a motivated agent, and the self as an autobiographical author.

• The self as a social actor focuses on playing out social roles that are scripted thus one’s traits are intelligible to others only in these social roles. Children start to engage in this stage around 18 months after birth and they show outward demonstrations that they understand themselves in relations to objects and others. At the age of 4, children have the ability to describe themselves as simple traits, for example, describing their hair color, living in a small or big house, and more simple facts that are easy to observe. Around age 10, along with the development of mind and language, children have more complex means of understanding and explaining the things they observe, for example, describing their own emotions like honesty or being moody. Traits and roles that children take on are social currency and changing these traits or roles requires a concerted effect from a desire.

• The Rouge Test is a test that involves the concept of being aware of oneself.

• The self as a motivated agent focuses on acting on one’s inner desires…formulating goals, values, and plans. This concept discusses wanting to learn more about one’s desires, values, and chasing one’s goals. Social perspective describes the desires that come from social intercourse or interaction. Theory of mind describes how children at the age of 4 understand that others have their own goals and drives, and this helps them learn how they set up their own goals.

• The self as an autobiographical author focuses on taking stock of one’s life up till now past, present, and future…creating a narrative. There are debates as to this form of the self-developing in the adolescence stage but can develop in other stages of life as well. This form of the self requires having “temporal continuity” which describes the reflective understanding of how one comes to be aware of their existence. Narrative continuity describes an internalized and evolving story of the self being designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and some purpose.

• The Role of Social and Cultural Identity plays an important role in developing into who one becomes today. For example, one can experience the “rags to riches” way of life. It can influence our medias, the stories told through media, ourselves, and the stories we tell about ourselves. There are two research methods that can be used for personality, the nomothetic strategy (or approach), and the idiographic approach.

Two Research Methods

• The nomothetic approach describes show psychologists want to study what people can have in common with each other. Some strengths that can be found in this method is that it is generally regarded as more “scientific” in terms of studying and predicting behavior and typically involves control groups and statistical analysis. However, it also has limitations such as failing to adequately account for individual experiences and expressions of personality that run contrary to norms and could make it likely to lose sight of the person themselves.

• The idiographic approach is person-centered and focuses on many characteristics integrated in a unique person, it also focuses on specific features within an individual. Some strengths of this method include exploring a person in their own context and aims to do so as completely as possible, helping researchers understand the person’s experience, and the finding from using this method often are the source for hypotheses and theory-building. however, limitations of this method include it being time-consuming, expensive, and does not capture reliable data in the statistical sense. Which strategy do we choose for conducting personality research? To answer this question, it would depend on the research question and the kind of data one is looking for. It is not an either/or situation but a both/and situation.