Development of a General Measure of Individuals' Recognition of Their Self-Perception Processes

Abstract

Self-perception theory (Bem, 1972) states that people come to know themselves by observing their own behaviors. This study resulted in a scale to measure self-perception processes in individuals. Statements about one's observation and definition of oneself were rated by participants. The dimensionality of the initial 28 items was analyzed using maximum likelihood factor analysis. Three criteria were used to determine the number of factors to rotate: the hypothesis that the construct is not unidimensional; the scree test, and the interpretability of the factor solution. The scree plot indicated that our hypothesis was correct. Three factors were rotated using a Varimax rotation procedure. The rotated solution yielded 3 interpretable factors consisting of 24 items: observing one's own behavior in various situations, observing one's reactions to one's own feelings, and self-awareness after talking about or simply trying a new behavior. How do we come to know ourselves? Walker Percy, the existential novelist, recognized the mystery of the self and of self-knowledge. A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second's glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all. in Lost in the Cosmos (pp. 7-8). This question is more than a musing for psychology. The manner in which we answer it shapes our work in psychotherapy, our framing of social psychological research, and our understanding of human nature and interpersonal relationships. Two influential ways that the answer to the question of self-knowledge has come to be framed within psychology are: It is either a process of self-perception of one's own behaviors or a matter of access to and insight into our internal cognitions. In the first case, Bem's self-perception theory is the predominant paradigm. According to Bem's (1972) self-perception theory, everyone comes to know oneself in the same way that we come to know others. That is, we observe our own behaviors in a variety of situations and then we make attributions about our behaviors. As observers of another person we try to induce that person's motives without having access to his or her internal states or thoughts. We rely on our observations of that person's overt behaviors. Central to this model is the assertion that individuals may also have little direct introspective access to their own higher order cognitive processes (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). That is, people are often either unaware of the existence of stimuli that influenced their responses, or are unaware of their responses, or are unaware that the stimuli have affected their responses. People's reports of why they behave a certain way are assumed to be based on a priori, implicit causal theories that may or may not fit a particular situation. In other words, we are all simply left to rely on the observation of our own overt behaviors (verbal and otherwise) in order to make causal attributions about them. When people are induced to act as if they feel something, they typically report actually feeling it, even when they are not aware of how they are acting, or the manner in which their feeling arose. This phenomenon has been shown for a variety of feelings and behaviors (Laird and Bresler, 1992). Behaviorists, beginning with Skinner in his book, Verbal Behavior (1957), have strained to explain individuals' responses to internal stimuli such as feelings. Since individuals learn primarily through reinforcement, the problem of how we learn such things as what we are feeling (or who we are) is particularly tricky because others do not know our feelings. We may learn to identify events and things that are outside of ourselves by being rewarded for a correct naming of something. But, pointing-and-naming is more problematic as an explanation of how we come to know ourselves because this is not outside of ourselves. …