Social psychology



Social psychology

How do we perceive ourselves and our interactions with others?

Some nonhuman animals like chimpanzees, orangutans and dolphins, have a minimum a primordial sense of self. This is observed by different experiments conducted by the scientist or researchers. In one research or study, researchers did an experiment; they painted a red dot on the forehead of the sleeping Chimpanzees and put them in the cage with a mirror. When these chimpanzees woke up, they started looking at eh mirror and touched the red dot on their faces. They did not touch the faces on the mirror which shows that these chimpanzees understood that they were staring at themselves in the mirror and not any other animal, and thus it can be assumed by us that they visualized themselves that they exist as individuals. Different other animals like dog, monkeys and cats never observed that it is themselves they see in the mirror. Infants who have similar painted red dots on their forehead identifies themselves in the mirror in the same way that chimpanzees do, and this is done by them about 18 months of age (Saylor, 2013).

The self concept is a simple term, and it refers to how we see and evaluate ourselves. The children knowledge and concept about the self continues with the increasing of its age. By the age 2, the child becomes aware that he his boy or a girl. At about age 4, self-description are most likely to be dependent on the physical characteristics, such as one's color of hair, and at 6 years of age, the kid most likely understands the ideas and concepts of traits and emotions, and also understands his personality and can make statements such as “I am a nice person”. With the increasing age of children, when he is in grade school, children is clear about himself and knows and analyze his own behavior. They also show social situations awareness; now they know that other people are visualizing them and judging them, in the same way they are visualizing and judging others (Saylor, 2013).

Self awareness refers to the degree to which we are normally visualizing our self concept. When the self concept is visualized more often, because of our concerns that we are observed and judged by others, we are then induced to the self awareness termed as self consciousness. Self awareness is related to the actions and things that are related to others and how they will feel about our actions. We know that different things can make us happy and depressed, more expectations of ourselves and could not meet the expectations creates the situations of failure. Self esteem is the self knowledge and self respect about what we are. Self esteem is directly related to the self presentation and social status. It also refers to the negative or positive observations that we make to ourselves. Acting self also refers to the things that are automatically done by us, and it shows are attitude and behavior of ...