Self-Models and Selves

Abstract

How Should We Look for the Self?There is a long tradition in philosophy for asking about the nature and metaphysics of the self.David Hume famously observed that "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself . . .I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception."Most would likely agree that the self is not easy to catch in introspection, and this difficulty has led to a wide range of psychological and philosophical theories about the self.In work led by my colleague Kelsey Perrykkad, we tallied them, stopping at thirty-nine conceptions of the self.Here is a sample of fifteen of them-variously saying that fundamentally the self is an agent, bounded, a disposition, illusory, integrative glue, interpersonal, material, minimal, narrative, a person, social, spiritual, transparent, unconstructed, and unified.Not only are many of these concepts in tension with each other, many appear to stem from accounts of very dif fer ent aspects of the self, and dif fer ent explanatory proj ects about the self.There is little philosophical or theoretical consensus on what the self is or how to focus on the question. 1 There is nevertheless little doubt that, psychologically, we all have a sense of self and engage in much self-related pro cessing.There are therefore rich and impor tant research programs on the sense of self in several domains of cognitive science and clinical psy chol ogy.Several mental disorders and conditions are characterized to some degree by disturbances in self-related processes, and overall well-being and our interactions with other people depend on our sense of self.Schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, depersonalization, and autism all involve dif fer ent aspects of the sense of self, such as instability and weakening; psychological measures and constructs such as clarity of self-concept, sense of agency, and sense of self-efficacy have dif ferent kinds of impact on well-being, anxiety, and compassion.Some studies that I have been involved in can illustrate the multifaceted research on the sense of self and self-related cognitive pro cessing.With Perrykkad and our collaborators, we showed that clarity of self-concept and self-efficacy predicts how compassionate we report ourselves to be, although not whether we actually donate to a charity.Perrykkad also did an in-depth review and analy sis of self-related pro cessing differences in autism and systematically analyzed the involvement of the sense of self in healthy people scoring differently in traits associated with the mental disorders listed here, finding that they differ along several dimensions.