Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a small piece of the Continent, a part of the main. Devotions, 17. John Donne 1624 William James (1890) distinguished between the “I” and the “Me.” The “I” is the self as experienced, the active thinking processor. The “Me” is the stock of empirical information about oneself, which has material, social, and spiritual components. The self is a central concept in social psychology ( Ashmore & Jussim, 1997 ; Baumeister, 1999 ; Dweck, 1999 ), reflecting in part the importance of the individual in modern society as a target for social influence and a unit of economic activity. However, much of the research activity only considers the self as an individual, and this misses an important part of James's analysis. James argued that, in principle, one has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize one. In practice, these selves are determined by the groups of people about whose opinion one cares. James argued that people can change their persona to reflect the social audience. These transformations involve shifts of identity in different contexts, not merely forms of strategic self-presentation. James believed that the “club opinion” is a powerful psychological force. That is, there are times when we see ourselves wholly in terms of our representativeness of a group, and we embody the group's perspective as our own. ... log in or subscribe to read full text