Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is often defined in terms of an ability to engage in reflective awareness. According to most theorists, this requires certain types of cognitive abilities. Even in its most primitive form (visual selfRecognition and the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror), self-awareness appears to be restricted to a small subset of animals including humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and dolphins. In humans, this ability is not present at birth and only begins to appear around 12 to 18 months of age. Furthermore, there appears to be some support for George Herbert Mead's claim that development of this ability requires a social rearing history in which the individual comes to recognize that he or she is distinct from others.

Beyond an ability to be reflectively aware of oneself, self-awareness is often associated with executive processes essential to self-regulation. Thus, the selfaware individual is often viewed as more controlled and intentional in his or her actions. Within social psychology, self-awareness is often associated with a theory of objective self-awareness by Shelley Duval and Robert Wicklund. According to this theory, situational cues that remind individuals of themselves (e.g., mirrors and video cameras) lead to attention focused on the self and away from the environment. The result is a self-aware state in which individuals are proposed to compare their current selves with ideal self-standards. Because the current or actual self is usually found to be lacking when compared with these standards, Duval and Wicklund proposed that self-awareness creates a negative emotional reaction. This negative affect then motivates the individual either (a) to regulate his or her behavior with respect to the standard in an effort to reduce the discrepancy, or (b) to avoid the self-aware state.

Although this theory has yielded a great deal of research in support of its basic tenets, several researchers noted that self-awareness inducing stimuli often motivate self-regulation without inducing self-criticism and negative affect. Charles Carver and Michael Scheier proposed an alternative theory of self-awareness that retained some features of the Duval and Wicklund model (e.g., self-focused attention), but argued that the comparison of the current self with an ideal standard is itself sufficient to motivate behavior without creating negative affect. Their model of self-awareness was inspired by other cybernetic models of behavior. Jay G. Hull and Alan Levy proposed a more drastic departure from the original Duval and Wicklund model. According to Hull and Levy, self-awareness inducing stimuli essentially act as self-symbolic primes that activate self-knowledge [Page 791]and cause the individual to process situations as personally relevant. Behavior follows as a consequence of focusing on the self-relevant aspects of the environment (as opposed to focusing inward and evaluating self).

Although social psychologists are typically interested in situationally manipulated self-awareness, personality researchers are interested in individual differences in tendency to become self-aware. To measure such differences, Alan Fenigstein, Michael Scheier, and Arnold Buss created the Selfconsciousness Scale. This personality inventory has three subscales: private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness, and social anxiety. Private self-consciousness focuses on the internal experience of self-awareness. It is measured with items such as “I'm always trying to figure myself out,” “I reflect about myself a lot,” and “I'm alert to changes in my mood.” Public self-consciousness focuses on the self-presentational motives sometimes associated with self-awareness and is measured with items such as “I'm concerned about the way I present myself,” “I'm concerned about what other people think of me,” and “I'm usually aware of my appearance.” Social anxiety focuses on negative emotions sometimes associated with being the focus of attention of others and is measured with items such as “I get embarrassed very easily,” “I feel anxious when I speak in front of a group,” and “Large groups make me nervous.” Although the social anxiety subscale captures the colloquial understanding of what it means to be self-conscious, the private and public self-consciousness scales assess individual differences in the psychological processes most often theorized to be associated with the selfaware state.

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