Every day this week I will post a topic related to social perception and impression management – how we see ourselves and other people, and how we try to influence how other people see us. Today’s post looks at self-concept. By gaining some insight into a client’s self-concept, you may find yourself in a position to genuinely help them reach their goals (or as you will see below, get closer to their idealised self-image).

I came across a very clever advertisement yesterday, which you can view below. It is part of the brilliant Dove campaign in which they are trying to redefine the way in which women see themselves.

A parody has been made with men taking centre stage instead – it is not real, but plays into the gender stereotype of overly-confident males.

The original video (at the top) sends a very powerful message; that a person’s self-concept can have a tremendous impact on how they live their life. But what is self-concept? How can we define it? What does it include? I will attempt to briefly answer these. My academic background started off in psychology, so my post will be naturally biased towards it – there are plenty of other perspectives which, by necessity, I am ignoring here. I also only have space for select information, so please be aware there is so much more to this than I will present here – I’m barely scratching the surface and giving a very simplistic view here. That being said, here I go …

What is self-concept?

The self-concept is a theory we all develop about who we are and how we fit into the world in which we live; it is basically the set of attitudes we hold towards ourselves. It is never static or finished, but is constantly evolving and has been since early childhood as we repeatedly revise it with regard to cognitive development and social experience. Adolescence is reported as being a particularly critical period for the development of our self-concepts, in which other people’s perceptions and responses start to play a more pivotal role in shaping it. Self-concept is reportedly a general term that subsumes other important constructs; namely, self-image, self-esteem and idealised self-image.

What is self-image?

If you were to ask yourselves “Who am I?”, you will probably describe yourselves in terms of your social roles (e.g. father, brother, son, friend, student, teacher, …), your personality traits (those dispositions you perceive yourself as having (e.g. outgoing, reserved, happy, …), and physical characteristics, what we often refer to as ‘body image’ (e.g. fat, thin, muscular, short, tall, brown haired, …). All of these help us to describe ourselves and represent what we think we are like – our self-image is descriptive.

What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem can be thought of as our personal judgements of worthiness, which we convey through the attitudes we hold towards ourselves – how much we like ourselves, how much we approve of ourselves, how worthy we think we are. This can be an overall judgement, or it can be more specific to some aspect of our lives; for example, we might hold a high opinion of ourselves in general, but don’t like our fat thighs! Self-esteem can be viewed as our evaluation of our self-image; how much we like the person we think we are. The value we place on certain characteristics depend on other factors such as culture, gender and social background; for example, the media’s portrayal of women as thin – our self-esteem is evaluative.

What is our idealised self-image then?

This refers to the kind of person we would like to be. How much our self-image and idealised self-image differ by, can affect self-esteem – the larger the discrepancy, the lower our self-esteem (generally). Again, we might want to be different overall, or maybe just in certain aspects (e.g. “I wish my arms were bigger”).

What influences our self-concept?

There are purportedly four main influences on our self-concept. These are:

1. The reactions of other people: it is reported we continually construct and reconstruct pictures of ourselves based on our interactions with other people. Our perceptions of what they say to us and the implications of their behaviour towards us can impact all aspects of our self-concept.
2. Comparing ourselves to others: certain characteristics of self-image are only meaningful when we compare ourselves to other people; for example, we are only ‘fat’ in relation to other people who are thinner than ourselves.
3. Our social roles: we perceive roles as requiring certain behaviours and norms which can affect our self-concept.
4. Identification: this occurs when we assimilate some aspect or attribute from others into our self-concept.

How representative the men and women in the videos are to the general population, I don’t know; but I suspect gender stereotyping is at work here (especially for the second video). I can think of numerous counter-examples – just watch the early stages of X-factor or Britain’s Got Talent to see examples of those who appear to have undeservedly high levels of self-esteem!!

Tomorrow I will post on why people often have an unrealistic idealised self-image/body image, and possible implications for the gym instructor and personal trainer.