Hey everyone!
So it looks like my little plan of finding relevant songs
for these concepts will not always work as well as I thought it would.
Apparently, people don’t write many songs about the self-concept, the sum total of a person’s beliefs about their own
attributes. Nor do they write songs overtly featuring any psychological effects
of the self-concept. I’ve got some great ideas for later, though!
Moving on from that sad affair, I’d like to discuss self-schemas, or schematic traits. Markus
(1977) determined that everyone has some traits that are especially important
to them and that tend to dominate their attention. Weight is a classic example;
some people consider themselves over or underweight, and they sort of form
their sense of self around the idea
of their weight. Not only that, but they notice the weight of everyone else around
them.
People only have a few schematic traits, but they have a ton
of aschematic traits. These are the ones you just don’t care about. You don’t
think about them in yourself, and you don’t notice them in others.
This can cause problems.
I don’t particularly care about fashion. I have rarely paid
attention to how I dress on a day-to-day basis or to how other people dress. What’s
wrong with jeans and a T-shirt? Perfect for every occasion!
Unfortunately, that’s a horrible lie.
And just because I’m aschematic for a trait doesn’t make
everyone else aschematic for it, too. At some point in the past year, I awoke,
presumably shaking and sweating, to the realization that People cast Judgments
on those who don’t pay attention to appearances, and those People include potential
employers or networkees. No one will help the stranger in the jeans and
ill-fitting t-shirt; they help the stranger in the business-caj. It’s simple:
people don’t waste energy thinking about every detail of a person, according to
the cognitive miser perspective, but
make snap judgments to save effort.
Although I’ve always been a bit of a cynical optimist, the “nobody
cares what you know, it’s who you know that determines whether you’ll be able
to eat for the rest of your life” point of view has always seemed too unfair to me, a person schematic for
fairness and equality, to accept. But just because I’m schematic for a trait
doesn’t make everyone else schematic for it, too.
Fortunately, I’m also schematic for stubbornness and
optimism. As a result, over time I’ve been attempting to change my internal
wiring and pay more attention to—become more schematic for—clothing. That way, if
I happen upon someone in the supermarket who needs someone like me to do my
dream job, they won’t immediately discredit me for wearing clothes that, as my
roommate mentioned in astonishment one time last month, “people just don’t wear.”
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P.S. I’m also schematic for good, logical writing, which is
something that I think runs counter to the idea of blogging about my life
experiences. Lo siento.
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Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information
about the self. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 35, 63–78.
(n = 493 words)
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