Social Factors And Self-Esteem

The social environment that surrounds us could impact how we think, feel and behave in our daily lives. Bandura(1977) emphasizes the role of social factors in the development of the personality and how these factors combine to create a global self-concept. How we feel as a person will be gradually shaped through the different kinds of social environments, and eventually forming a self-recognition attitude called self-esteem, which is similar to the self-confidence. Social factors plays an important role in this shaping process, but genetic and other factors also contritube in forming it. Nathaniel Branden, the Canadian–American psychotherapist, had mentioned that the self-esteem is the key to success in life. It also means that high self-esteem

And this sense of self is usually associated with confidence, self-esteem and other social factors that can affect you. This conclusion gives the mean and standard deviation, and the spread of the data from the mean is measured by the standard deviation. All the results from the survey are perfectly matching the three different cognitions, which are Better-than-average effect, Unrealistic optimism and Self-serving attributions. When the questions are asking how good of a driver and how honest are you, the results show that most people are quite confident about themselves (the average score of these two questions are 6.5 and 7.0 respectively). It shows that most participants rate themselves as better than the average person. Also, the likelihood of the participants divorce average score is very optimistic, which is only 26.5% and this is far below the mid line 50%. This result fits the unrealistic optimism cognition, proving that most people are unrealistically optimistic about their future outlook and they think they will have a happy marriage. Lastly, from the number 4 to the number 7 question, it indicates that people tend to get personal credit for success and provide external excuses for failure.

Some psychology studies show that people who grow up with different cultural background would describe themselves differently. People who grow up in an individualistic culture (like North America) are willing to use their inner psychological characteristics to show their attitudes, personality traits and abilities. In contrast, people who grow up in a collectivist culture (Like Asia) are more willing to describe themselves in a collective role. Leon Festinger believed that people are tending to evaluate their own performance and abilities based on their observations of the people around them. An experiment can be designed to test the differences in self-esteem between different cultures. I was thinking about finding volunteers from different countries and taking pictures of them in a private room one by one. Before taking their photo, the photographer will tell them that we want to take their most confident look. After each one had finished, the photographer will ask the participants what aspects of themselves they would like to alter. And we will record the answer by asking them to rate their alterations in order of most important to least important. After the experiment, we will divide all the participants into two groups, the group one is people who come from the individualistic environment, the other group is people who come from collectivist environment. As the result, most people from the individualistic culture