Self-Concept

In psychology, the term “Self-Concept” refers to one’s aggregated understandings and beliefs about oneself.

This might mean self-knowledge related to how one behaves in different circumstances (brave in the face of danger or unwilling to sacrifice for others), what one brings to the table in relationships (caregiver or breadwinner), or how one responds to a given stimuli (made anxious by uncertainty or inspired by others’ life stories).

It might also mean the practical parsing of personal properties. So your recognition that you’re slower at working through math equations than other people in your class might be categorized as self-awareness, but incorporating that information into your larger body of self-knowledge (which may also include other acknowledgements, like the fact that you tend to get the right answer more frequently than your speedier classmates) would be self-conceptual in nature.

Interestingly, research shows that people who have less developed self-concepts are more prone to things like anxiety and depression, and are more likely to suffer perceptual well-being and relationship issues.

There’s also evidence that flimsy self-conceptions are correlated with immoral behavior—the theory being that if you don’t have a good sense of who you are, doing immoral things may be less likely to conflict with your sense of personal morality (unless your self-conception is that of a person who does immoral things, in which case you’d presumably be more likely to behave immorally).

This seems to translate across cultures (based on the research that’s been done so far, at least), though what’s considered “moral” and “immoral” from place to place, and even person to person will of course vary.

There’s some indication that priming people to think about their self-conception in various ways (and at the right moment) can reduce immoral behavior, as long as the intended “moral” behavior lines up with prevailing local definitions for the term, and as long as that behavior hasn’t been overly politicized (which can result in deviances from social and even personal norms: people aligning their actions with their social group’s standards rather than their own).

There are several potential takeaways here, one of which is that reinforcing a population’s sense of self might help ameliorate low-level criminality while also helping ease (increasingly common) issues like depression and anxiety, at scale.

This also gestures at issues that arise when we sub-in group identities for our personal identities, though, as while an individual might be nudged into a better sense of well-being and more pro-social behaviors via these sorts of levers, said levers seem to become less effective if a population is divided up into polarized tribal groups that reward (with status) dedicates for aligning their actions with the party’s template.