Contemplations of the Nature of Self

Various Ways to Construct How We See Ourselves

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The following post will be more academically focused that usual, more exploratory of various concepts than declarative of my own opinions. I’ve been studying psychology for so long and have read such a ridiculous amount, that there are times it’s nice to sit down and consider things more formally. We’re practically begged on social media to have an opinion on everything, even when, or especially when, we don’t really know nearly as much as we think we do, nor should we be as certain in our prognostications as our biological impetus towards the need for certainty pushes us. In that spirit, this is an exploration of various perspectives on the self, notably neurological, trait-based, Skinner’s behaviorist perspective, and a constructivist school or two. Feel free to inquire back with any questions and thank you for studying with me.

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Self-Concept and Cross-Cultural Differences

If one begins with the notion that the brain is the ‘seat’ or locus of the personality, then it stands to reason that variations in brain activation will correlate to varying degrees of difference in personality between people. The question that immediately comes up here is whether brains were different at birth, i.e. subject largely to genetic influences, or shifted in their connections due to experiential differences.

A way to find this out is to study the brains of people of similar ages, but different cultural backgrounds. This is precisely what Zhu, Ziang, Fan and Han did by comparing college students from China, England and North America and taking brain images as each person was asked whether a series of trait adjectives were accurate descriptions of themselves or of their mothers (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). While this may sound like the set up for a Freud joke, previous research has indicated that activation of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is associated with judgments about the self. Consistent with this research, the brain scans of Chinese students showed higher activation of the MPFC during both questions about themselves and their mothers, but the English and North American students showed activation only when the question pertained to themselves (Cervone & Pervin, 2019).

This would seem to indicate that brain structures change or at minimum are utilized differently based on cultural influences throughout the development of the person. The result here seems to support the notion found in other research that one’s self-concept is one of social fusion with others in Eastern cultures and a lack of such fusion in Western cultures. When determining how to react to social situations and the ethics of personal behavior, social consequences may be more highly considered for a person with a greater degree of fusion with others. As such, that person’s actions will take into account behavioral possibilities that seek to help others more or at least mitigate the harmful consequences falling on others beyond themselves. For those lacking in such fusion with others, those considerations will carry lesser weight, at least on the average.

Trait Constructs

Consistent patterns in the way individuals behave, feel and think are what are referred to as ‘traits’ (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). A person who possesses or seen to possess a trait does not necessarily act in the exact same way each and every time, but more so on a consistency perspective, or more often than not. Thus, if a person is said to be kind, more often than not they will act consistent with such a trait, though not 100% of the time. The strength of trait theories of personality in scientific support varies on what questions are being asked, but as it concerns the layperson, traits are well established ways of describing people and predicting their behavior.

This latter point is where we are concerned with the importance of public belief in traits as legitimate means of describing people. If we take the person-as-scientist metaphor, the layperson is looking to use traits in much the same way that the theorists are: to describe a person, predict their behavior and explain that behavior once it has occurred. As such, if a person is said to be kind, like above, then ‘kind’ will be used to describe that person, as well as serve to predict their behavior for the purpose of determining how they may respond to one’s own behavioral overtures, and when behavior does occur, ‘kind’ is then used to explain why they did so. From the perspective of needing to predict future social contexts to determine how best to allocate one’s resources, for instance in forming friendships and intimate partnerships, traits offer a quick and easy short-cut for analysis.

Despite the utility of using traits by the layperson, the scientist is under no obligation to continue using the same words or constructs, particularly if evidence mounts to show their lack of utility in anything other than lay analysis. In other words, people have used words and concepts as ways of describing, predicting and explaining behavior since the first social gathering. History has shown that those ways are often wrong and don’t stand the test of scientific research over time.

The Five-Factor Model

Issues related to the explanatory power of personality traits in regard to behavior largely depends on the nature of what is meant by ‘explanation.’ As noted previously, there are three factors related to scientific research, that of description, prediction and explanation. Often the latter, explanation, is conflated with description, where a trait such as ‘Extroversion’ from the Big Five can be used as a post hoc explanation of a person’s behavior, when really it’s simply a label placed on a subset of the person’s behavior. This is similar to seeing images in clouds in the sky or on toast, where the description is then conflated with some external force as an explanation for why it supposedly appears.

This conflation is essentially a matter of epistemic correspondence, or what exactly is the label or description being used to point to as an explanation. Is the label recursively pointing back on itself or is it directing attention to a more fundamental aspect of reality, a basic structure or force? Research indicates there is fundamental agreement between self-reports on the Big Five in questionnaires and those from family and friends, as well as general stability in those traits across the lifetime (Cervone & Pervin, 2019. However, this could be accounted for by the stability of culture, both in structure and verbiage, and therefore a continuity not in an underlying structure of the person. In other words, people are exceedingly good at picking out experiential data that conforms to a particular way of viewing the world while ignoring data that doesn’t, as well as curtailing their own behavior to meet socio-cultural standards. What could be occurring here is social conformity rather than people acting from an underlying structural homogeneity.

The Brain and Psychological Functions

When considering the possibility of a neurology of personality, the immediate philosophical question is that of reductionism, or the problem of reducing to component parts what only makes sense at the level of the whole. Consider meteorology, where a storm can be reduced to wind and rain, or even further to the molecular structure of air and water, yet neither of these layers of explanation will suffice to quantify what wetness is like or convey the power of wind blowing across your face. Yet, a storm is not, not those things either. As when discussing the Big Five and the potential sufficiency of those labels going beyond description to explanation, so we have then a similar problem with studying the brain and the supposedly underlying mechanisms of personality.

Like with a storm where molecules of wind and rain must be part of the broader structure, so then the brain or, better, the entire neurological system, must be part of personality. Where questions come up is in parsing out the limits of such reduction and that has to do with the type of questions being asked. As in the research regarding a possible neurological basis for cultural differences where the medial prefrontal cortex fires differently based on the culture of the person being asked questions about themselves, it is clear that a neural mechanism is at play (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). However, where this might be an explanation, it is not perhaps a description. Further, using the same example, the particular behavioral expressions will not all be exactly the same despite similarities in neural firing.

Where a neuroscience of personality leads us is in providing greater explanatory power for similarities and differences between population groups, and while at some future there may be tools to identify those mechanisms at an individual level, it remains likely for the foreseeable future that explanations will not lead inevitably to individual descriptions. In other words, one can point to variations in neural firing to note population differences, but when it comes to describing behavioral expressions and the felt feel of experience, we must still turn to the psychologist, the linguist and dialogue.

Skinner and Environmental Influences

A Skinner view of personality would, in one interpretation, be as reductionistic as that of the neurological. Instead of neural engrams and the neural firing of particular areas of the brain, there would instead be operants, or behavior that has no external stimulus, and all other behavior that is learned through successive approximations by reinforcement until contextual success is achieved (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). There is no need for concern about internal, unmeasurable, stimuli like emotions and cognitive motivation, as all behavior can be reduced to responses to context-dependent environmental stimuli.

This lack of concern over internal stimuli is seen in the behavioral assessment approach of ABC or identifying Antecedents, the Behavior itself and the Consequences of that behavior (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). The antecedents are all considered as environmental or external to the person. Where confusion may come is in how similar antecedents can illicit different behavior in people. Where initially this may be answered by variations in the individual histories of reinforcement, there seems to be something missing in a description of that reinforcement, namely, the way in which each person variably understands particular stimuli.

The strict Skinnerian behaviorist may still dismiss the causal nature of that internal understanding. However, since everybody lives in day-to-day interactivity within the realm of that understanding, such dismissal removes exploration of what is one of the most important aspects of the human experience. If everyone is the behavioral equivalent of 1’s and 0’s like a computer program, it might offer an explanation, but the descriptions at the heart of human relationships and dialogue will have been lost.

Kelly’s Constructive Alternativism

In any evaluation of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity, it is important to determine whether other concepts are being assumed. When it comes to Kelly, objectivism is assumed to also contain absolutism, when the two concepts are not the same when it comes to epistemology. As per Cervone and Pervin (2019), Kelly did not believe there was no truth, only that theoretical constructs should be understand as to their utility in prediction. Kelly was concerned with dogmatism, where a particular theoretical construct and its concepts, like trait theory and introversion, were being used to limit the understanding of individuals and curtail questions. This is where the understanding the difference between objectivity and absolutism is important. Absolutism is more akin to dogmatism, where any associated theory is thought to be either sacrosanct (often where it concerns a religious idea) or beyond criticism. Kelly sought to bring science as a philosophy rather than simply a methodology, into psychology.

Objectivity still allows for criticism as it does not require the removal of a shared reality, only that such a reality is not beholden to a singular perspective, and certainly no perspective that cannot be questioned. As noted by Cervone and Pervin (2019), Kelly’s ideas did not gain much traction at the time, in no small part because the philosophical notion of constructivism and other ideas often associated with post-modernism, hadn’t been developed or gained precedence yet.

Kelly’s alternativism allows for an ‘invitational mood,’ where inquiry is a practice or journey rather than a destination (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). This allows for a far more fruitful environment of discovery as it invites questions, challenges and debate, instead of ideological tribalism. Where such thinking becomes problematic is in thinking that any idea is of equal importance as any other merely by its utterance. Such isn’t objectivity, but relativism, the polar opposite of absolutism. We can have debate and increasingly better understandings of particular stratum of reality by agreeing on criteria for evaluation. Kelly’s focus on predictive strength is certainly one of them.

Skinner vs Social Cognitive Theory

Where Skinner’s mechanistic view of the human person removes free will, others, including those associated with social-cognitive theories, seek to reinstate free will as central to the human person. As Cervone and Pervin (2019) point out, social-cognitive theory posits reason through language, the ability to contemplate the present and past for conjectures about the future and personal reflection as particular descriptive of human beings, setting them apart from animals and therefore capable of free-will. Much here hinges on just what is meant by free-will. If it is defined as simply the ability to variably decide among a context-restrictive set of possibilities, then the various ways in which people think about the world, like evaluations and expectancies, constitute free-will. If, instead, free-will is believed to be the capacity to make decisions outside of cause-effect natural reality, then social-cognitive theory establishes no such thing. All the inclusion of thoughts does is bring in the phenomenological experience, but conscious experience is still derived from brain states and therefore are still physical states, thus beholden to cause-effect relationships. As we have no access to the mechanisms that bring about conscious states, so we have no free-will if defined in the second way.

By including phenomenology, social-cognitive theory is differentiated from behaviorism in personality structure and explanation (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). Where behaviorism contended that internal states like motivations and emotions were not needed to explain behavior, the expectancies of social-cognitive theory point to how one’s cognitive appraisal of the future plays a role in selecting our behaviors in the present. Here is where two people may respond differently to similar environmental stimuli, where each person’s expectancies of how their current behavior will develop into future consequences, differs. One person’s idiosyncratic way of putting together their personal experiences into a belief about the future will be different than another’s and therefore lead to different behavioral expressions.

Social Cognitive Theory, Problem-Focused and Emotion-Focused Coping

Where trait theorists would point to an individual’s possession of ‘agreeableness’ and ‘extroversion’ to explain the general moods of people where they are more or less upbeat, social-cognitive theorists take into account a person’s self-reflection. In the case of Bandura, one’s perceived self-efficacy, the belief in one’s capacity to achieve a particular end goal in a given situation, could be seen as contributing to a person’s general mood (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). If one believes themselves capable of addressing most of the situations they believe they’ll encounter, their mood may indeed be considered upbeat or lively, as opposed to depressed where one believes themselves incapable of succeeding in situations.

When assessing as to one’s ability to succeed at a situation, ways of coping will be attempted. Working through primary appraisal, or determining the stakes of the situation, proceeds next into secondary appraisal, or evaluating one’s resources, the result is a need to deal with the summation of such analysis (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). Coping strategies will be either problem-focused or emotion-focused, where the former is concerned with changing aspects of the situation and the latter with improving one’s internal state through avoidance or confrontation (Cervone & Pervin, 2019). Circumstances, combined with individual evaluations, will result in different coping skills being used, particularly those skills that have been determined as helpful previously.

In the end, behaviorism and learned responses still play a role.

References

Kelly, George A. A Theory of Personality.

Cervone, D., & Pervin, L. A. (2019). Personality : theory and research (Fourteenth edition. ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

McManus, Freda. Psychology: A Very Short Introduction

Storr, Anthony. Freud: A Very Short Introduction.