Self-Consciousness

Overview

The significance of and interest in self-consciousness came from research on the effects of people's behavior and emotion under conditions of an increased sense of awareness about the self and its relationship to surroundings. Early scholarship on self-awareness or self-focused attention showed that directing attention toward oneself provokes a comparison process. This process allows people to judge their behavior against relevant personal standardsgoals, attitudes, values, beliefsand allows them to reflect on how to match their behavior to the standard set by self or society. When people are self-focused, they tend to behave consistently with the standards they set for themselves; when they are not self-focused, they do not place as much emphasis on scrutinizing the self in various situations. Self-consciousness is also associated with self-evaluation. The quality of the self-evaluation, whether positive or negative, is often determined by what one perceives as self-relevant information. For example, those who are overly self-conscious may examine more behaviors (e.g., a look, a comment, a gesture) as being directly related to them, whereas those who are less self-conscious may not evaluate as many behaviors as being relevant to the self. Scholars developed an interest in the personality trait of self-consciousness when it was discovered that people vary greatly in the degree to which they focus on the self. The degree to which people focus on the self also influences their actions, behaviors, and communication with others.

William James, who was influential in experimental and systematic psychology, made the observation that whenever humans are thinking, they are at the same time aware of themselves and their personal experiences. This observation promoted further discussion on self-consciousness. Researchers looked to the family to understand how a sense of self-consciousness is developed and found that family life provides some of the parameters for self-consciousness. Children come to understand who constitutes their family and use this information to formulate an initial sense of the self. The development of self-consciousness proceeds with the attainment of more experiences outside the family. For example, children start to realize differences when they interact with other children outside the home (e.g., at school, at a friend's house, at the playground). Awareness of the self and one's own personal existence start to shape self-consciousness. Throughout life, people become more conscious of how others, objects, physical features, and events shape their lives. Moreover, people remain conscious of themselves in relationship to people, objects, features, and events. Experience with the world brings about this tension between self-consciousness and people as social entities. This interest in the self and the self in relationship to the other helped develop the research agenda on self-consciousness and led to the development of the self-consciousness scale. The most commonly used measure of self-consciousness is the self-consciousness scale. This scale includes subscales for private and public self-consciousness and for social anxiety. The scale has demonstrated reliability and validity as a means of measuring individual differences in self-consciousness. The scale has been translated into several languages including Chinese, French, German, Brazilian, Dutch, and Turkish. As a result, cross-cultural differences in self-consciousness have been observed. Moreover, the private and public dimensions of self-consciousness may relate differently for other cultures than they do in U.S. samples. These [Page 679]private and public dimensions add to a textured understanding of self-consciousness.

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