How Do You Know Yourself? Personality refers to a person's typical thoughts, emotional responses, and behaviors that are relatively stable over time and across circumstances. Like everyone else, you have a sense of your own personality. It is part of what you mean when you say "myself." But what makes up your sense of self? Stop and think for a moment about 10 ways that you can answer the question,"Who am I?" . Your answers are important parts of your self-concept, which is everything you think, believe, and feel about yourself. Your self-concept includes your physical body and your conscious awareness of being unique and separate from others. For college students, the self-concept typically includes gender, age, student status, family status (son, daughter), interpersonal style (shy, friendly), personal characteristics (moody, optimistic), and physical traits (tall, short). Having a clear self-concept helps us feel like we are the same person over time . Your Sense of Self Includes Your Self-Schema A different aspect of yourself involves cognitive processes that monitor the world for information that is relevant to you. Picture yourself at a loud, crowded party. You can barely hear yourself speak. But when someone across the room mentions your name, your ears perk up. All of the information you have about yourself becomes part of your self-schema, which is an integrated set of memories, beliefs, and generalizations about yourself. This information is organized as a network of interconnected knowledge about yourself .Your self-schema helps you quickly perceive, organize, interpret, and use information about yourself. It also helps you filter information so that you are likely to notice things that are relevant to you, such as your name. Examples of your behavior and aspects of your personality that are important to you become prominent in your self-schema. For instance, being a successful student may be a major component of your self-schema, but having few cavities probably is not. Thus, if you are asked whether you are ambitious, you can answer without sorting through occasions when you did or did not act ambitiously. Your self-schema summarizes the relevant past information. Working Self-Concept Shows That Your Sense of Self Can Vary Do you feel that you are one person at home with your family and a different person when you are hanging out with your friends at a party or a club? Psychologists refer to the immediate experience of the self in the here and now as the working self-concept. This experience is limited to the amount of personal information that you are processing at one moment in time. Self-esteem is the evaluative aspect of self-concept that indicates how you value or feel about yourself. It indicates whether you view yourself generally as worthy or unworthy -that is, whether you feel good or bad when you think about yourself. You can objectively believe positive things about yourself and still have low self-esteem (that is, not like yourself very much). Thus, you might know you are a top student or very good at music but still not feel that you are a worthy person overall. Conversely, you can like yourself very much and therefore have high self-esteem, even when objective indicators do not support such positive self-views. Self-Esteem and Life Outcomes With so much emphasis placed on self-esteem in Western culture, you might expect that having high self-esteem is the key to life success. However, the evidence indicates that self-esteem may be less important than is commonly believed. A review of several hundred studies found that although people with high self-esteem report being much happier, self-esteem is weakly related to objective life outcomes . For instance, people with high self-esteem who consider themselves smarter, more attractive, and better liked do not necessarily have higher IQs and are not necessarily thought of more highly by others. In other words, your self-esteem has little to do with whether other people actually like you. Instead, your self-esteem influences your perception of how other people feel about you. Narcissists and the Dark Triad One characteristic associated with inflated self-esteem is narcissism. The term comes from a Greek myth in which a young man was named. Narcissus rejected the love of others and fell in love with his own reflection in a pond. In the psychological sense, people who are narcissistic are self-centered, view themselves in grandiose terms, and feel entitled to special treatment. Because narcissists' greatest love is for themselves, they tend to have poor relations with others. Most People Have Positive Illusions About the Sense of Self According to research, most people have positive illusions-that is, overly favorable and unrealistic beliefs about themselves-in at least three areas. First, most people continually experience the better-than-average effect. Second, they have unrealistic beliefs about the extent to which they can control what happens.For example, some fans believe they help their favorite sports teams win if they attend games or wear their lucky jerseys. Third, most people are unrealistically optimistic about their personal future. They believe they probably will be successful, marry happily, and live a long life. Positive illusions can be adaptive when they promote optimism in meeting life's challenges, but they can lead to trouble when people overestimate their skills and underestimate their vulnerabilities . Social Comparisons Affect the Sense of Self Social comparison occurs when you compare your own actions, abilities, and beliefs with those of other people. You are especially likely to make such comparisons when there is no objective standard. For instance, you might think you are doing better financially than someone else, even though a number of factors, from income to savings to lifestyle, play a part in financial success. Social comparisons are an important means of understanding actions and emotions. Social Comparisons Affect the Sense of Self Social comparison occurs when you compare your own actions, abilities, and beliefs with those of other people. You are especially likely to make such comparisons when there is no objective standard. For instance, you might think you are doing better financially than someone else, even though a number of factors, from income to savings to lifestyle, play a part in financial success. Social comparisons are an important means of understanding actions and emotions. In general, people with high self-esteem make downward comparisons. That is, they contrast themselves with people whom they view as inferior to themselves in the characteristic they are evaluating. People with low self-esteem tend to make upward comparisons. They contrast themselves with people they see as superior to them.Temporal comparison is a form of downward comparison in which people view their current selves as better than their former selves. Thinking of yourself as better than others, or as better than you used to be, tends to make you feel good about yourself . But constantly comparing yourself with others who do better may only confirm any negative feelings you may have about yourself Collectivist and Individualist Cultures Emphasize a Different Sense of Self Harry Triandis has noted that some cultures emphasize the collective self more than the personal self. Such collectivist cultures include those in Japan, Greece, Pakistan, China, and some regions of Africa.Collectivist cultures emphasize connections to family, social groups, and ethnic groups, along with conformity to societal norms and group cohesiveness. For example, in Japan people tend to dress similarly and respect situational norms. When a Chinese family goes to a restaurant in China, all the people at the table share multiple dishes. In collectivist cultures, one's sense of self is influenced largely by people's social roles and personal relationships . Children in collectivist cultures are raised to follow group norms and to obey parents, teachers, and other people in authority. They are expected to find their proper place in society and not to challenge or complain about their status.