A laboratory experiment is a research method that involves a test of a hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions. In laboratory experiments, researchers bring research subjects into a lab, a room specifically designed for experiments. In the lab, researchers attempt to keep the experience of every subject exactly the same, with one exception: the independent variable.
A variable is simply any measurable phenomenon that varies. An independent variable is one that’s hypothesized to influence the dependent variable, or cause an effect. A dependent variable is one that’s hypothesized to be influenced by the independent variable; it’s the phenomenon expected to show an effect. Any other variables that might influence the dependent variable are called control variables. They reflect the phenomena that researchers attempt to keep exactly the same, or “hold constant,” so that changes in the dependent variable can be attributed to the independent variable specifically.
Experimenters assign research participants to one of two groups. Members of the experimental group go through the experience that researchers
believe might influence the dependent variable. Members of the control
group do not go through that experience. After the experiment is over, the researchers look to see whether the independent variable influenced the dependent variable by comparing the data collected from each group.
In the lab study about the effects of body spray, for example, the use of scented or non-scented body spray was the independent variable and women’s evaluation of the men’s attractiveness was the dependent variable.
Other features of the room and the experience were held constant, so every test of the hypothesis proceeded in exactly the same way. The men in the study were randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control group so that each group was about equally handsome on average.
Laboratory experiments are one of the few research methods that allow scientists to make causal claims, or assertions that an independent variable is directly and specifically responsible for producing a change in a dependent variable. Almost all other research methods only facilitate
correlational claims, assertions that changes in an independent variable correspond to changes in a dependent variable but not in a way that can be proven causal. ■
Our self-concept, then, emerges out of a lifetime of interactions, both real and imagined. Based on these experiences, we come to understand ourselves as a certain kind of person. We’re active participants in this process. We have some choices as to what looking glasses to seek out and take most seriously, but we don’t develop a self-concept alone. We need others to figure out who we are.
If our self is a product of our interactions with others, though, why do we feel like the same person from day to day? Cooley says that our selves are stable when our circumstances are stable. I’m a college professor, for example, so you’d be right to guess that I enjoy telling other people about ideas. That feels like a fixed thing about me. But is it? Do I keep showing up to teach classes because my self doesn’t change? Or does my self stay the same because I keep showing up to teach classes? Does your life stay the same because your personality does? Or is your personality stable because your life stays the same? Cooley believed the latter: Our personalities feel fixed largely because our life circumstances are relatively stable.
We also stabilize our selves by seeking out others who reflect back at us the people we think we are, even at the expense of thinking better of ourselves.23 In a study of college students living in residence halls, for example, people with strong self-concepts were more likely to want to continue to live with their roommate one year later if their roommate saw them as they saw themselves.24 Likewise, the most happily married couples are ones who have accurate understandings of each other, not overly romantic ones. We like people who validate our self-concepts, even at the expense of more positive evaluations.
It can be invigorating to shake things up, even if just a little, by taking a vacation, getting a new job, or switching schools. And sometimes we face identity crises that prompt real self-reflection and reinvention, like becoming aware of new facts about our ancestry or beginning to question the gender we were assigned at birth. Outside of these events, however, we rarely change very much. We’re attached to our selves. And so are the people around us. If we start acting noticeably differently, it can make others uncomfortable. If the foodie becomes a picky eater overnight, if the football fan loses interest in the game, if the introvert converts to an extrovert, people don’t take it in stride. Change, even when it’s neither positive nor negative, is disconcerting.
Our selves tend to resist change, too, because our lifetime of formative experiences is a buffer against sudden shifts. Our self-understanding is usually more influential than either our own whims or the whims of others.
Even when we go somewhere new or surround ourselves with fresh looking glasses, we know who we are and where we’ve been. Whether we’re in São Paulo, Seoul, or Saskatchewan, we remember who we were back home.
Unless, of course, we don’t.
the self that emerges as a consequence of seeing ourselves as we think other people see us
a research method that involves an intimate conversation between the researcher and a research subject
a process in which segments of text are identified as belonging to relevant categories
a phenomenon in which what people believe is true becomes true, even if it wasn’t originally true
a research method that involves a test of a hypothesis under carefully controlled conditions
any measurable phenomenon that varies
the group in a laboratory experiment that undergoes the experience that researchers believe might influence the dependent variable
the group in a laboratory experiment that does not undergo the experience that researchers believe might influence the dependent variable
assertions that an independent variable is directly and specifically responsible for producing a change in a dependent variable
assertions that changes in an independent variable correspond to changes in a dependent variable but not in a way that can be proven causal
Note 08: Arthur Evans Wood, “Charles Horton Cooley: An Appreciation,” American Journal of Sociology 35, no. 5 (1930): 707–
Note 09: “Charles Horton Cooley,” American Sociological Association, accessed January 21, 2017,
http://www.asanet.org/about/presidents/Charles_Cooley.cfm; Edward Clarence Jandy, Charles Horton Cooley: His Life and His Social Theory (New York: Dryden Press, 1942).Return to reference 9
Note 10: Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner’s, 1902).Return to reference 10
Note 11: Richard B. Felson, “The (Somewhat) Social Self: How Others Affect Self-Appraisals,” in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, vol. 4, ed. Jerry M. Suls (New York and London: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 1–26.Return to reference 11
Note 12: Morgan Johnstonbaugh, “Sexting with Friends: Gender, Technology, and the Evolution of Interaction Rituals,” paper in progress.Return to reference 12
Note 13: J. Sidney Shrauger and Thomas J. Schoeneman, “Symbolic Interactionist View of Self-Concept: Through the Looking Glass
Darkly,” Psychological Bulletin 86, no. 3 (1979): 549–573.Return to
Note 14: Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order. Return to reference 14
Note 15: Ibid.Return to reference 15
Note 16: Michael Finkel, “The Strange and Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit,” GQ, August 4, 2014.Return to reference 16
Note 17: Ibid.Return to reference 17
Note 18: Thomas J. Scheff, “Looking-Glass Self: Goffman as Symbolic Interactionist,” Symbolic Interaction 28, no. 2 (2005): 147–
Note 19: John C. Turner, Social Influence (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991).Return to reference 19
Note 20: Robert K. Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy,” Antioch Review 8, no. 2 (1948): 193–210.Return to reference 20
Note 21: S. Craig Roberts, A. C. Little, A. Lyndon, J. Roberts, J.
Havlicek, and R. L. Wright, “Manipulation of Body Odour Alters Men’s Self-Confidence and Judgements of Their Visual Attractiveness by Women,” International Journal of Cosmetic Science 31 (2009): 47–
54,
http://www.scraigroberts.com/uploads/1/5/0/4/15042548/2009_ijcs.pdf
Note 22: Bradley Wright, “Cologne and Self-Fulfilling Prophesies,”
Everyday Sociology Blog, W. W. Norton, January 15, 2009,
https://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2009/01/cologne-and-self-
fulfilling-prophesies.html.Return to reference 22
Note 23: William B. Swann Jr., Brett W. Pelham, and Douglas S.
Krull, “Agreeable Fancy or Disagreeable Truth? How People Reconcile Their Self-enhancement and Self-verification Needs,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57, no. 5 (1989): 782–
Note 24: William B. Swann Jr. and Brett W. Pelham, “Who Wants Out When the Going Gets Good? Psychological Investment and Preference for Self-verifying College Roommates,” Self and Identity 1 (2002): 219–233.Return to reference 24
The role of memory in holding together a sense of self is acutely illustrated by the story of someone whose memory was lost. This is what happened to a twenty-eight-year-old American named David MacLean. One day, he found himself standing in a busy train station in India, and he didn’t know who he was. He could remember how to walk, talk, and read. He remembered his email password and the things he learned in school. But he couldn’t remember anything about his life or the people he knew. Nor did he know why he was in India. “It was darkness darkness darkness, then snap,” he wrote. “Me. Now awake. ”25
The first person to speak to him was a police officer. MacLean explained that he was lost and couldn’t remember who he was. The officer replied, kindly: “I am here for you. I have seen this many times before. You foreigners come to my country and do your drugs and get confused. It will be all right, my friend.”
MacLean’s brain flickered. He had a sudden vision of a dirty mattress in a run-down room and a redheaded girl, he said, “coming toward me twirling little baggies.” It was comforting to have a memory, despite the unpleasant conclusion he drew. Although it pained him to recall the drug use, in a way he wished he were still the person he used to be. “A drug addict could cry over his wasted life,” he said. “I was worse than a drug addict—I was nothing.” The police officer took him to an internet café and he logged into his email, figured out who his parents were, and sent a cry for help.
Later, MacLean would be diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, a loss of the ability to recall anything that happened before an injury or illness. The closest thing most of us will ever experience to retrograde amnesia is the occasional morning when we’re woken suddenly out of an especially deep sleep. It can take us a few seconds to remember who we are upon waking.
Just darkness darkness darkness, then snap. Now awake. It can make us momentarily confused about where we are, what day it is, and what we’re
supposed to be doing, but it takes our brain only microseconds to reassemble our reality. Then we get up and proceed with our lives.
Imagine if that feeling never left us. That was what MacLean experienced.
To have amnesia, he wrote, was to have a pulsing, palpable nothingness inside:
I could feel the heavy absence in my brain, like a static cloud. I couldn’t remember anything past waking up. There was a thick mass of nothing up there. ...... I was alone, alone with no idea how far I was from anyone who knew me. I was alone and empty and terrified.26
His memory was gone and, with it, his self-concept.
Cases of amnesia like MacLean’s show us that our self-concept is reliant on our ability to reassemble our reality, like we do routinely each morning. Our reality is our self-narrative, a story we tell about the origin and likely future of our selves.27 We write it in collaboration with others, though we are its primary author and editor. The non-amnesiac brain remembers its self-narrative. This is how our I recognizes our me every morning. We recall a journey—we note where we’ve been and where we’re going—and then get out of bed and step back on the path.
MacLean’s amnesia left him with no such narrative, and he felt this absence acutely. He described himself as a “blank sheet that had just been rolled in the typewriter. No backstory, no motivation, no distinguishing characteristics.” He didn’t know where he’d been or where he was going and that left him with absolutely no idea as to who he was. He had no narrative.
Someone gave him a cigarette, which he smoked with relish, though he later learned that he’d never smoked a day in his life. Another offered him a glass of Scotch and he recoiled from the taste, only to discover later that he’d been an avid drinker. He leaned heavily on the looking glasses around him for guidance. “All I had to go on for my identity was the reactions of the people around me,” he explained. “I assembled a working self out of the behavior of others.” And it was a self-fulfilling prophecy: “People treated me a certain way and I became the kind of person who is treated like that.”
When a person imagines themselves to be fulfilling the wildest dreams of their ancestors, they are placing their life story into a larger narrative.
This changes the meaning of their personal accomplishments.
Like the idea of a drug addict’s “wasted life,” many of the self-narratives we employ are prepackaged, including familiar characters and plot lines. People rise from “rags to riches” or find themselves “born again. ”28 You can too.
“Love at first sight” stories send a message about how we find soulmates.
“Coming out” stories offer models for how Two-Spirit, LGBTQIA, asexual, or polyamorous people should process and respond to their desires. Attend any Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and you might hear a narrative about
“rock bottom,” implying a transition between the harmful path that brought the person there and a path of redemption.
We sometimes even nest our narratives in the narratives of others.29 Those of us whose self-concepts are shaped by the stories we tell about our ancestors, for example, are framing our lives as another chapter in a longer story. We may be a child of immigrants, whose parents braved a new land to give us a better life; a third-generation Louisianan who’s carrying on the family tradition of crab fishing; or an adherent of Judaism who’s reminded at the annual Passover seder to carry on the legacy of the Jews who came before.
Our self-narrative, then, is built out of a lifetime of experiences and drawn from prepackaged stories. It’s the source of our self-concept and what makes it feel real. Being able to pull events and episodes out of our past to explain our present gives our self-concept a feeling of authenticity. Look, we say to others and ourselves, I was always this way or I’m this way because of that or I share my story with people like me. Out of our experiences and cultural narratives, we craft a believable story, one that makes our self feel coherent, stable, and authentic.
But it’s never wholly true.
Our self-narrative is not a true story. First, it’s not true because most of us forget almost everything that happens to us. Most every conversation, meal, game, and exam are lost to our conscious memory. They’re not special enough to merit remembering. Or they were, and they didn’t stick anyway.
Second, of the events we do remember, we have considerable leeway in deciding which are plot points, which characters play a starring role, and which story arcs to draw out. Likewise, we can usually discount the things and people in our past that contradict our narrative. In other words, the version of our selves we believe in is probably far more coherent than our actual life history can support. Our self-narrative isn’t a faithful account of our life; it’s an imaginative one.
Well into my twenties, for example, I told people I grew up on a farm. I described a childhood filled with barbed wire fences, mud pits, and trees to climb. There was an enormous gentle-hearted horse named Jughead, a spotted goat named Joker, and a menagerie of guinea pigs, rabbits, cats and dogs, chickens, and the occasional pair of ducks. We also had a black cow named Valentine that we rode awkwardly; it’s very uncomfortable to ride a cow, in case you haven’t tried.
I always talked about the farm as if I were describing my life. Then one day it dawned on me that I wasn’t. I didn’t grow up on a farm. I grew up in the city of San Jose, California, on the border of Milpitas in the left side of a duplex in a crowded multiracial neighborhood. Granted, I spent every summer on the farm with my cousins—the stories were real—but it was they who grew up on a farm. Not me.
Those summer months were so memorable, though, and I recalled them with such enthusiasm that I came to feel like and identify as a farm girl. It became part of my story, even though it wasn’t technically accurate. In a way, I was unconsciously telling a lie to get at something that felt true. It’s a common type of misrepresentation.
Think about how routinely we’re asked to tell the story of our lives. You probably told some version of your self-narrative as part of your college application. In writing it, you may have made an argument about your self.
The act of making that argument might have strengthened that self-narrative in your own mind. It may feel more true today than it did the day before you wrote it, especially if you were validated with college admission.
As a child, I spent my summers with my sister, cousins, and a whole host of farm animals. That’s me in the middle with Cookie, a Shetland pony. Even though I grew up in San Jose, California, I came to identify as a farm girl.
We tell other kinds of stories in other contexts: with new friends, to therapists, on dates, and in all manner of situations. When we tell these personal stories, we usually do so with a goal other than accuracy.30 We may be trying to bond with someone, be understood, affirm someone else’s experiences, get sympathy, put on a brave face, seem wise, or get a job or a
laugh. Each of these goals changes how we draw out the story, what we emphasize and what we leave out. Over time, the real story can get lost in our memory. This makes our autobiographical memories particularly vulnerable to distortion.
In fact, our strongest memories are the ones most likely to be untrue. That’s because the more often we recall a memory, the less well we remember it. It feels like the opposite must be the case—that recalling memories would keep them fresh in our minds—but that’s not how memory works. Instead, each time we recall a memory, we add the recollection to the memory itself.
Over time, all the recollections blend in with the original memory, and their content slowly drifts.
To put it metaphorically, if a memory were an oil painting, it wouldn’t be finished and hung up on the wall for later reference. Instead, it would stay on the easel. Each time we recalled the memory, we’d paint over it again.
The first time, we’d likely repaint it quite faithfully because the original painting would be right there in front of us. It would be easy to copy precisely. But the second time we recalled it, we’d do so just a little less perfectly because, with a layer of paint on top, we wouldn’t be able to see it quite as crisply as we did the first time. The third time we recalled it, we’d paint over it again. And so on. Each recollection would mean a new layer of paint. Over time, the content, color, and texture of the painting would inevitably change. The original would get quite lost underneath all those recollections.
Memory distortion is so predictable, and it occurs with such swiftness, that experts recommend trying to avoid recalling memories when accuracy is important. For example, police officers are now advised not to ask eyewitnesses to describe a person they saw committing a crime. Doing so actually reduces the likelihood that they’ll be able to accurately pick a guilty person out of a lineup.31 Recalling the face, even one time, distorts the memory, making it harder for witnesses to recognize the person when they see them again.
Counterintuitively, then, it’s our most often recalled memories that are most likely to be untrue. The memories that we most relish, and the ones that most torture us, become the most distorted, because we think about them
over and over again until they’ve taken on a life of their own. To our brain, the last recall is as true as the first.
Meanwhile, some of the memories out of which we build our self-narrative are complete fabrications. Our brain is vulnerable to suggestion. In a famous study, research subjects were asked to look over an advertisement featuring a child shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland.32 Sometime later, a third of the research subjects said they remembered meeting Bugs themselves. This, of course, is impossible; Bugs Bunny belongs to Disney’s competitor, Warner Bros. We may resist the idea that this could happen to us, but it almost certainly already has. We all have false memories—
probably pretty elaborate ones—and we have no way of knowing which ones they are.
David MacLean’s memory of using drugs, for example—the vivid images of a freckled redhead grinning and shaking a small bag of white powder, of shooting drugs into his veins, of a filthy mattress on the floor of a dirty room—were all invented by his brain in response to the policeman’s suggestion that he was disoriented because he was high. MacLean wasn’t a drug user. His amnesia was a rare side effect of a then-common medicine given to Americans traveling to countries with a risk of malaria. Physicians confirmed that he’d not been taking any illegal drugs. There was no redhead. There never was.
a story we tell about the origin and likely future of our selves
Note 25: David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).Return to reference 25
Note 26: Ibid.Return to reference 26
Note 27: Martin Conway and C.W. Pleydell-Pearce, “The Construction of Autobiographical Memories in the Self-Memory System,”
Psychological Review 107, no. 2 (2000): 261–288; Matthew D. Grilli and Mieke Verfaellie, “Supporting the Self-Concept with Memory: Insight from Amnesia,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 10, no. 12 (2015): 1684–1692.Return to reference 27
Note 28: Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans
Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).Return to
Note 29: Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen, “Narrative and the Self as Relationship,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 21
(1988): 17–56.Return to reference 29
Note 30: Elizabeth J. Marsh, “Retelling Is Not the Same as Recalling: Implications for Memory,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 16, no. 1 (2007): 16–20.Return to reference 30
Note 31: Christian A. Meissner and John C. Brigham, “A Meta-Analysis of the Verbal Overshadowing Effect in Face Identification,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology 15, no. 6 (2001): 603–616.Return to
Note 32: Kathryn A. Braun, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus,
“Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,” Psychology & Marketing 19, no. 1 (January 2002): 1–23, https://staff.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/BraunPsychMarket02.pdf.
Our brain has a great imagination. It forgets things, it alters memories, it makes stuff up, it merges memories together, it even borrows memories, taking the experiences of others and folding them into our own. Mirror neurons make us especially vulnerable to this. Inside of our head, our brain thinks all of this is real, no matter how warped, twisted, or contrived the memories really are. Maybe there never was a cow named Valentine on my cousins’ farm. No amount of digging around in my brain trying to remember her will prove it. And, because of the oil painting effect, the more effort I put into remembering her, the less likely I’ll be able to recall her with any clarity at all.
Our sense of self, then, is not true in the normal sense of the word. Instead, it’s a messy mix of constantly evolving memories, most of which are semi-true at best, that are passed back and forth between us and the people in our lives who serve as looking glasses.
As we narrate our past, we’re also imagining possible future selves.33 Some of these selves are the selves we think we ought to be, others are who we fear we’ll be, and still others are versions of our selves we hope to be. We work these out in collaboration with others too.34 Our looking glasses affirm or refute possibilities for our coming selves, encouraging us or casting doubt on this version or that. All their feedback shapes who we can imagine being tomorrow and the next day. And the self-fulfilling prophecy plays a role here too.
Our past self, our present self, and our future selves are all, in other words, social facts. From the moment we develop self-awareness, we begin constructing a self-concept out of our interactions with others, committing to memory a narrative about who we are, dismissing and misremembering things inconsistent with our self story, and imagining who we might be in the future. These experiences really do shape who we are, giving our self-concepts an impressive stability most of the time.
The precise nature of our consciousness, then, is a product of human interaction. Had we been born one hundred years ago, on the other side of the world, or into a different family, we’d be different, maybe a lot different than we are today. Of course, this doesn’t mean that our self isn’t real.
Quite the contrary. To Durkheim’s point, we are real because social facts are real. Surround yourself with different looking glasses, and you might change, but you’ll change into a quite different and equally real version of yourself. Who will you be tomorrow? It depends. ■
IN THE INTRODUCTION, this book suggested that we’re surrounded by social facts. This chapter made an argument that one of those facts is our sense of self. From our earliest moments, we look to others as an important source of self-understanding. And throughout life, we refine our self-concept. We internalize others’ gazes but also choose looking glasses that reflect what we want to see. We resist and challenge some people’s impressions of us too. But no matter what conclusions we come to, we don’t imagine who we are in a social vacuum.
Out of these experiences, we develop a self-narrative. These stories serve a social purpose. They help us communicate to others who we feel we are and enable us to craft the kinds of relationships we need and desire. They’re also the basis on which we plot our future selves, imagining ourselves on a coherent trajectory.
The next chapter will show that in becoming who we are, we become more than just social. We become cultural. Human groups collectively imbue the world around them with symbolic meaning. These meanings are arbitrary; they can be and often are different from group to group. But they’re also social facts. So, to get along with others, we must become familiar with the symbolic meanings shared by members of our group and act accordingly.
Note 33: Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, “Possible Selves,” American Psychologist 41 (1986): 954–969.Return to reference 33
Note 34: Sheila K. Marshall, Richard A. Young, José F. Domene, and Anat Zaidman-Zait, “Adolescent Possible Selves as Jointly Constructed in Parent-Adolescent Career Conversations and Related Activities,” Identity 8 (2008): 185–204.Return to reference 34
CULTURE & CONSTRUCTION
