In Psychology
In psychology, the concept of "self-awareness" is used in different ways:
- As a form of intelligence, self-awareness can be an understanding of one's own knowledge, attitudes, and opinions. Alfred Binet's first attempts to create an intelligence test included items for "auto-critique" – a critical understanding of oneself. Surprisingly we do not have a privileged access to our own opinions and knowledge directly. For instance, if we try to enumerate all the members of any conceptual category we know, our production falls much short of our recognition of members of that category.
- Albert Bandura has created a category called self-efficacy that builds on our varying degrees of self-awareness.
- Our general inaccuracy about our own abilities, knowledge, and opinions has created many popular phenomena for research such as the better than average effect. For instance, 90% of drivers may believe that they are "better than average" (Swenson, 1981) Their inaccuracy comes from the absence of a clear definable measure of driving ability and their own limited self-awareness; and this of course underlines the importance of objective standards to inform our subjective self-awareness in all domains. Inaccuracy in our opinion seems particularly disturbing, for what is more personal than opinions. Yet, inconsistency in our opinion is as strong as in our knowledge of facts. For instance, people who call themselves opposite extremes in political views often hold not just overlapping political views, but views that are central to the opposite extreme. Reconciling such differences proves difficult and gave rise to Leon Festinger's theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
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Famous quotes containing the word psychology:
“Idleness is the beginning of all psychology. What? Could it be that psychology is—a vice?”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)