Looking Philosophical: Stuff,Stereotypes, and Self‐Presentation

Self‐presentation is a complex phenomenon through which individuals present themselves in performance of social roles. The success of such performances rests not just on how well a performer fulfills expectations regarding the role she would play, but on whether observers find her convincing. I focus on how self‐presentation entails making use of material environment and objects: One may “dress for the part” and employ props that suit a desired role. However, regardless of dress or props, one can nonetheless fail to “look the part” owing to expectations informed by biases patterned along commonplace social stereotypes. Using the social role of philosopher as my example, I analyze how the stereotype attached to this role carries implications for how demographically under‐represented philosophers may self‐present, specifically with regard to dress and decoration. I look, in particular, to the alienation from one's material environment that may follow on the frustration of self‐presentation through bias. One pernicious effect of bias, I argue, is the power it has to deform and distort its target's relation to her physical setting and objects. Where comfort and ease in one's material environment can be a significant ethico‐aesthetic good, bias can inhibit access to, and enjoyment of, this good.     

How Social Norms Promote Misleading Social Feedback and Inaccurate Self‐Assessment

Self‐assessments are often prone to error. Past research has identified cognitive and motivational biases that lead self‐assessments astray. In the present paper, we discuss how behavior shaped by social norms leaves the negative information that people require for accurate self‐assessments invisible. First, social norms lead people to suppress critical feedback in favor of more positive evaluations. Although people recognize that they prefer to provide positive feedback to others, they fail to consider that they might be the recipient of incomplete feedback. As a result, they are left with overconfident self‐impressions. Second, social norms lead people to hide their own negative emotional experiences from others. Again, people are aware that this positivity norm influences their own behavior but do not apply this knowledge to their understanding of others. As a result, people regard their own negative emotions as more socially aberrant than is actually the case.     

Organic imagination as intuitive intellect: Self‐knowledge and self‐constitution in Hegel's early critique of Kant

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self‐knowledge and self‐constitution from Kant's B‐deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self‐positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self‐constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self‐constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being.     

Self‐Affirmation: Understanding the Effects

Self‐affirmation theory proposes that individuals possess a flexible self‐system, such that they can respond to threats in one domain of life by affirming self‐worth in other domains. In social psychology research, this has been examined in studies where people affirm important values in the context of self‐threatening events or information. This paper reviews the literature demonstrating the effects of values affirmations and proposes a theoretical account to understand how self‐affirmations reduce defensiveness in response to threats to individuals' health, attenuate physiological stress responses to laboratory and naturalistic stressors, and improve academic performance among individuals experiencing identity threat. The proposed model has three components: Self‐affirmations boost self‐resources, broaden the perspective with which people view information and events in their lives, and lead to an uncoupling of the self and the threat, reducing the threat's impact in affecting the self. This model helps explain what occurs when individuals affirm values in the context of threats, and how self‐affirmations may instantiate lasting effects through changing the nature of ongoing experience.     

Self‐awareness and self‐understanding

In this paper, I critically examine Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self and show how the distinction he makes among “pre‐reflective minimal,” “interpersonal,” and “normative” dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call “pre‐reflective self‐understanding.” The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person's pre‐reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre‐reflective self‐understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi's claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre‐reflective self‐awareness. To carve off self‐awareness from the self's practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre‐reflective action shows that pre‐reflective self‐awareness and pre‐reflective self‐understanding are co‐constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience.     

Self‐Knowledge Failures and First Person Authority1

Davidson and Burge have claimed that the conditions under which self‐knowledge is possessed are such that externalism poses no obstacle to their being met by ordinary speakers and thinkers. On their accounts, no such person could fail to possess self‐knowledge. But we do from time to time attribute to each other such failures; so we should prefer to their accounts an account that preserves first person authority while allowing us to make sense of what appear to be true attributions of such failures. While the core idea behind Davidson's and Burge's accounts appears ioadequate to this task, I argue that it can be deployed in such a way as to deliver the desired result. What makes this possible is that two attitude‐types can differ as follows: the self‐knowledge required for an utterance to be a Oing that p is different from the self‐knowledge required for it to be a Ψfing that p.     

Self‐expansion and flow: The roles of challenge,skill, affect,and activation

The self‐expansion model posits that engaging in challenging activities with one's romantic partner increases the quality of that romantic relationship. Research on flow suggests that the optimal level of challenge for such experiences is determined by the skill of the individual. In a series of 5 studies spanning experimental, survey, and experience sampling methodologies, we elaborate on the self‐expansion model to describe how activity challenge effects romantic relationship quality. The results suggest that engaging in challenging activities with one's partner results in increases in relationship quality, though this effect is dependent on the skill of the individual. Changes in affect appear to fully mediate this process. We present a theoretical model combining self‐expansion and flow theories.     

The Duty of Self‐Knowledge

Kant is well known for claiming that we can never really know our true moral disposition. He is less well known for claiming that the injunction “Know Yourself” is the basis of all self‐regarding duties. Taken together, these two claims seem contradictory. My aim in this paper is to show how they can be reconciled. I first address the question of whether the duty of self‐knowledge is logically coherent (§1). I then examine some of the practical problems surrounding the duty, notably, self‐deception (§2). Finding none of Kant’s solutions to the problem of self‐deception satisfactory, I conclude by defending a Kantian account of self‐knowledge based on his theory of conscience (§3).     

Regret Regulation: Disentangling Self‐Reproach From Learning

This article begins with several testable propositions inspired by Zeelenberg and Pieters (this issue). I argue that a critical skill for decision makers is to decouple the aspect of regret that leads to self‐reproach from that aspect that can be used to learn from the outcome and improve future decision making. Results of an illustrative study are presented and discussed. Two other useful strategies are to match the decision effort to the decision's importance and to break big decisions into smaller ones. I close with a call for research examining regret as a self‐control mechanism.     

Addiction and Self‐Deception: A Method for Self‐Control?

Neil Levy argues that while addicts who believe they are not addicts are self‐deceived, addicts who believe they are addicts are just as self‐deceived. Such persons accept a false belief that their addictive behaviour involves a loss of control. This paper examines two implications of Levy's discussion: that accurate self‐knowledge may be particularly difficult for addicts; and that an addict's self‐deceived belief that they cannot control themselves may aid their attempts at self‐control. I argue that the self‐deceived beliefs of addicts in denial and of self‐described addicts differ in kind. Unlike the self‐deception of an addict in denial, that of the self‐described addict allows them to acknowledge their behaviour. As such, it may aid an addict to develop more self‐control. A paradoxical implication is that this self‐deception may allow an addict more self‐knowledge.     

Reason and Emotion in the Ethics of Self‐Restraint

In this essay I argue that Reinhold Niebuhr's ethics of self‐restraint, though promising, is based on an incomplete and imprecise moral psychology. Although Niebuhr claims that reason cannot provide a sufficient grounding to motivate self‐restraint, he does not disclose which human capacity might serve this purpose. I suggest that we can address this oversight by strengthening Niebuhr's tentative embrace of David Hume, and by developing a concept of the emotions in order to explain how human beings can cultivate a stable inclination to self‐restraint. This project is informed by and in the service of feminist critiques of Niebuhr and social concerns.     

Self‐analysis and the development of an interpretation

In spite of the fact that Freud's self‐analysis was at the centre of so many of his discoveries, self‐analysis remains a complex, controversial and elusive exercise. While self‐analysis is often seen as emerging at the end of an analysis and then used as a criteria in assessing the suitability for termination, I try to attend to the patient's resistance to self‐analysis throughout an analysis. I take the view that the development of the patient's capacity for self‐analysis within the analytic session contributes to the patient's growth and their creative and independent thinking during the analysis, which prepares him or her for a fuller life after the formal analysis ends. The model I will present is based on an over lapping of the patient's and the analyst's self‐analysis, with recognition and use of the analyst's counter‐transference. My focus is on the analyst's self‐analysis that is in response to a particular crisis of not knowing, which results in feeling intellectually and emotionally stuck. This paper is not a case study, but a brief look at the process I went through to arrive at a particular interpretation with a particular patient during a particular session. I will concentrate on resistances in which both patient and analyst initially rely upon what is consciously known.     

Reflective Self‐Control in Self‐Control Scholarship: A Peircean Analysis

Vosgerau, Scopelliti, and Huh (this issue) present an important critique of much self‐control research, highlighting some of the ways that our customary operationalizations and methods may have created more confusion than clarity. Their insights, rooted in past literature and new data, offer recommendations that will undoubtedly help us improve our research in consumption self‐control. In this commentary, I frame their work using the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher, mathematician, and logician whose frustration with the management of the self‐control construct and subsequent revision parallels Vosgerau et al's in many ways. Further, his thought proposes that their thought traces the boundary of another type of self‐control problem, which I'll refer to as “reflective self‐control.” Taking together consumption self‐control and reflective self‐control, we're able to address a wide range of human experiences and connect self‐control to ethics, consistent with a long tradition bridging the two. Perhaps most importantly, though, a Peircean analysis suggests that Vosgerau et al's paper—whether we agree or disagree with its conclusions—exemplifies the kind of scholarly self‐control we need to display to make scientific progress, regardless of our specific domain of study.     

Self‐transcendence as a psychological parenthood motive: When mortality salience increases the desire for non‐biological children

Reminders of existential threat increase people's desire for offspring. In line with terror management theory, we explain these effects by the motivation to transcend the self via offspring that complements biological accounts of reproduction motivation under threat. Accordingly, Study 1 shows that mortality salience increases self‐transcendence motivation but not other parenthood motivations. Furthermore, mortality salience increased willingness to adopt children (Study 2) or a 14‐year‐old child (Study 3) only for those participants who were told that the personality of children is the product of nurture (and thus determined by their parent's self). In addition, mortality salience increased general willingness to adopt, irrespective of whether nurture or genetic influence was made salient in Study 3, where participants imagined being unable to have biological offspring. We discuss how these findings contribute to explaining increased reproduction intentions under existential threat and processes of terror management.     

First‐Person Authority and Self‐Knowledge as an Achievement

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The Moral Insignificance of Self‐consciousness

In this paper, I examine the claim that self‐consciousness is highly morally significant, such that the fact that an entity is self‐conscious generates strong moral reasons against harming or killing that entity. This claim is apparently very intuitive, but I argue it is false. I consider two ways to defend this claim: one indirect, the other direct. The best‐known arguments relevant to self‐consciousness's significance take the indirect route. I examine them and argue that (a) in various ways they depend on unwarranted assumptions about self‐consciousness's functional significance, and (b) once these assumptions are undermined, motivation for these arguments dissipates. I then consider the direct route to self‐consciousness's significance, which depends on claims that self‐consciousness has intrinsic value or final value. I argue what intrinsic or final value self‐consciousness possesses is not enough to generate strong moral reasons against harming or killing.     

Self‐Regulation and Power: How Self‐Regulatory Failures Can Enhance Social Power

Low self‐control is often associated with poor life outcomes. Here, we propose that self‐control failures may also provide social benefits by signaling and maintaining power. We identify several pathways by which reduced self‐control can assist in ascending social hierarchies. First, the self‐enhancing tendencies adopted by people with low self‐control may contribute to making positive first impressions and advertising power to new acquaintances. The direct and disinhibited communication styles that stem from self‐control failures may also enhance power and lubricate difficult social interactions. Disinhibited aggression can help people maintain and acquire material resources and establish dominance over rivals. Finally, the parallels between the behavior of people with low self‐control and people with power (e.g., self‐enhancement, disinhibition, approach‐orientation, aggression) suggest that people with impaired self‐control will be perceived as more powerful than people with intact self‐control. Evidence for these propositions and directions for future research are discussed.     

Broadening Horizons: Self‐Expansion in Relational and Non‐Relational Contexts

The self‐expansion model posits that individuals are motivated to broaden their sense of self by acquiring new identities, developing new perspectives, enhancing capabilities, and gaining resources. The self‐expansion motivation is driven by individuals' desire to increase their potential self‐efficacy and ability to accomplish goals. In this article, we discuss two main ways individuals self‐expand – by forming relationships and including the other in the self and through engaging in novel activities that are challenging and/or interesting either on one's own or with a relationship partner. We provide an overview of recent research detailing the numerous interpersonal and intrapersonal benefits and implications of self‐expansion. Additionally, we differentiate self‐expansion from a series of potentially associated constructs.     

Self‐Control Inhibits Aggression

Aggression brings tremendous costs to individuals, relationships, and society. Yet, people behave aggressively toward strangers and close others at alarmingly high rates. The current article seeks to unlock part of the mystery of why people behave aggressively. We review evidence that self‐control failure plays an integral role in many acts of aggression and violence. We begin by reviewing theoretical models that emphasize the importance of self‐control processes in understanding aggressive and other criminal behaviors. We also discuss how a theoretical model that originally neglected self‐control processes can be extended to incorporate self‐control theorizing. We then discuss recent empirical evidence (a) showing that self‐control failure is a crucial predictor of aggression toward strangers and romantic partners and (b) identifying the neural processes relevant to the self‐control of aggression. Finally, we review evidence that self‐control processes can also explain why people engage in displaced aggression toward bystanders. By appreciating the importance of self‐control processes, researchers and laypersons can gain a better understanding of why people behave aggressively – and how aggression can be prevented.