The Perils of Having More Than One You

I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think you think I am.

~ Charles H. Cooley, 1902[1]

So.  Son Number One hates the blog.  Ouch.  He doesn’t think it sounds like me, and was expecting to see lots of our private jokes there.  I pointed out that (a) they’re ours, hence private ‘in’ jokes, which would (b) make them really boring for other people to read.  But he wouldn’t be persuaded.  I do believe he found it straight up boring.  OUCH.

I’m going to take the bad/sad thoughts I could have from that and turn them over to something else, instead.  Hence…

It reminds me that I (we?) have different voices for everyone.  This one is genuine, and I think it’s the voice I use with most of my friends.  The ones that let me waffle on, obviously.  Otherwise it would be very bitty.  It can’t be the voice I use with Son, though I thought it was.  It’s definitely not the voice I use with two very different friends, off the top of my head.

I have one friend, Alias Dreamer, who keeps me company on some of the days I stay in my head because the outside world is not liking me (or vice versa).  My imaginary Lands have had picnics with him there.  Stanley comes sometimes (though he likes to sit on the overcast beach and play guitar, mostly by himself), but Dreamer is the one who really likes to be with me here.  We tend to talk gibberishly playful nonsense; he cheers me up.  Then there’s Alias True, who comes from far away.  I have exceptionally formal conversations with him, because to him, words must be very carefully used.  They are very important and catch our essences.   We analyse, we speculate, we digress, we try and see how things work.  Two completely different tones there, alone.

Are  those different tones I/we use with different people actually almost whole separate selves, or just aspects of ourselves?  Fiction writers, to take an example, rely on being able to utilize many aspects of themselves for part of character creation:

This is, metaphorically speaking, the fission approach: an atom may be split into several, during which an enormous amount of energy is released. Fyodor Dostoyevski split his personality into many fictional ones, all of them as temperamental as he. Mel Brooks, the comedy writer and movie director, thinks this is the primary way to write: ‘‘every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities, and have them relate to other characters living with him.’’[2]

I’m pretty sure we all do this, not just people that bother to write stories.  William James, American philosopher of the 1890s, said a person ‘has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind’[3].  He wasn’t the first to suggest this; it’s been noted for a long time.

There’s more to it than that, though.  In the eighteenth century the good Scottish moral philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith had the idea that people get their recognition of themselves, almost their sense of self, from other people, largely:

Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with a mirror which he wanted [note: as in didn’t have] before.  It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with.  This is the only looking glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct.[4]

Those ideas, those of James, the Scots philosophers, George H. Mead, and the writer of the excellent tongue twister at the beginning of this post, Mr Charles Cooley, led to an idea called the ‘looking glass self’ – that we get our senses of self from interactions with others; we take our opinions of ourselves even, from the judgements of others[5].  So I succumb to thinking my blog is shite, because an important mirror to me, Son Number one (and we are usually in accord in most things) didn’t like it.  I feel oddly better about this mechanism, by simply understanding where I’m getting it from.  Because I find these concepts useful.  Its like worrying about an illness – be it minor or serious, once you have some information about it, some labels, some concepts to think within or around or against, you feel a bit better, more in control.  (At least, control freaks like me do.)

You can directly affect the way people feel about themselves by giving them a good or bad mirror.  Just so you don’t have to take my word for it, think about two of those deliciously daft experiments psychologists get up to. 

First, there was the excellently named Mr Videbeck experiment in 1960.  It was one of those set-ups where there were some students in a ‘speech class’ (real students), who were told a visiting expert on speech would be popping by and assessing their reading of a poem, for voice control and emotional expression.  Of course, that session of the class was an experiment and the expert was a cohort of the psychologist.  The students did not know this.  Each of them, regardless of actual performance, was assessed randomly – half the class were given a rave review; the other half disapproved of.  Before and again after the experiment, the students had to rate their own view of their capabilities.  After the experiment, unsurprisingly, those who had been rated highly had an increased view of their own abilities.  Those who had been rated badly had lost some self-esteem on the subject.  Especially when related to voice control – as you could argue that emotional intonation in a poem is a subjective thing; but voice control…the students judged this as something someone else could be objective about.  So the ‘expert’s’ opinions affected them[6].

And it’s not only that, you don’t even have to talk to someone to affect them.  You just have to Be There.  Other people not only provide a mirror on yourself, they provide a comparison between you and them.  Another brilliantly named psychologist, Mr Festinger, in 1954, proposed that we all have a need to have outside validation of ourselves and our abilities.  (This morning, I caught myself by email begging Alias Dreamer to follow this blog, after far too many cups of coffee.  I came out with: I am but an unidentified mass needing public validation (no personal identity to speak of), so do reflect me back on myself, it'll make me feel like I exist.  And winky emoticon.  That is why I usually only drink the one cup of coffee in a day.)

Mr Festinger’s idea was that this measuring of ourselves against others occurred most strongly when there was no objective physical standard to judge events by (like, the Moh Scale for the hardness of minerals, or the Richter Scale for earthquake magnitude).  Some things aren’t quantifiable physically, absolutely (like, how to have a successful relationship, how to bring up a child).  So you look to other people for comparison (and if you can’t find a comparison, your thoughts might likely shift about fluidly, till you did).  Social Comparison Theory, it’s called[7].  And we can also call it Keeping Up With the Joneses, for short.  Its one of my favourite theories to read about, because I see it happening all the time, everywhere.

The second experiment was dead simple[8].  You get an unwitting succession of students to wait in an area in a university, for what they think is a job interview (they are in the dark again). They fill out a chart (the baseline measure, but they don’t know this) which is about their self esteem.  Then, randomly, each applicant would be assigned another ‘applicant’ to wait with (yes, the other ‘applicant’ was the psychologist’s colleague, acting).  One of the assigned applicants would be ‘Mr Clean’ – well turned out, carrying shiny briefcase, philosophy books, statistical books.  The other half of the poor students would wait with ‘Mr Dirty’ – who had no socks, only battered shoes, was dressed very drably, and carried a battered old novel that he slouched over like a grumpy teenager.  You don’t even really need me to tell you how this affected the students waiting with each assigned stoodge.  You know that the ones who sat with Mr Clean felt thoroughly worried and crappy about their own prospects of getting the job when they filled out the form again afterwards.  And the ones who sat with Mr Dirty felt full of optimism…he couldn’t possibly get the job, could he?  Oh, the power of spin. 

Most importantly, was that the people affected most one way or the other by the terrifying social comparisons we all make everyday, were those who had an ‘inconsistent or poorly integrated self-concept’[9] anyway.  The most vulnerable.  Possibly due to the fact they had already experienced Bad Mirroring frequently in the past, so were uncertain enough to keep looking for outside validation; those were Festinger’s thoughts, anyway.

So where have I waffled to?  I said we have many parts of ourselves (and I write with lots of mine).  That we have different faces or voices for different people (explaining son’s not recognising me when he thought he would).  I suggested that a lot of these selves we relate to others with, are also partially formed from how they see us, mirroring back what we are shown by them (doesn’t it get wonderfully circular, off down the rabbit hole).  And from there, that we compare ourselves with others favourably or not (affecting how we judge ourselves).  Self esteem doesn’t just come from within.  If you mix with people, they affect you.  I’d say it behooves us all to try and be a Pleasant Mirror to whoever we meet – just because, in there somewhere, how we behave will be remembered and logged.  We affect other people.  No islands exist.  (If you think you don’t affect other people with what you do…I suggest there’s a ‘-path’ after your name, I just don’t know which one as I haven’t met you.)

Son Number one doesn’t like blog.  My uncertain and shifting self feels wobbly about this.  He didn’t recognise me because I didn’t use the voice he was familiar with and is comfortable with.  So though he judged it as boring (which ouch-ed me), I need not actually take on the judgement of this inside myself.  Because its natural for us to have more than one voice, many selves we show others, and have them in their turn contribute to.  I could get derailed by the Bad Mirror effect I got from Son…or I could just nod and remember that he hasn’t seen all of me.  Who has seen all of people they are close to, really?  That doesn’t make any of the other voices I use invalid.  They’re all me. I wish he liked this one, but the fact that we aren’t the same all the time with everyone means that we won’t agree all the time.  It’s natural and understandable.  And nothing for me to get all worked up about.

There.  Your average person could have gone and gotten a hug, had a quick rant, shrugged and done the next thing.  I over-thought that for 5 pages in Word!  Now I have neck ache.  And I’m hungry.  Time for something different.  Something preposterous.  Where’s my copy of Night of the Lepus?

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[1] Cooley, Charles H. (1902) Human Nature and the Social Order, New York: Scribners (pp.183-184, for specific references to the ‘looking glass self’)

[2] Novakovich, Josip (1995) Fiction Writer’s Workshop, Cincinnati, Ohio: Story Press, ‘Character’ (pp.48–66 – whole section most interesting)

[3] James, William (1892 [1961]) Psychology: the briefer course, New York: Harper Torch Books (p.46)

[4] Smith, Adam (1759), A Theory of Moral Sentiments, London; quoted in Stryker, S. and Statham, A. (1985) ‘Symbolic Interaction and role theory’, in G. Lindsay and E. Arohnson (eds.) The Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol 1, 3^rd edn, New York: Random House.

[5] As an umbrella, these ideas get called Symbolic Interactionism – a big thing in Sociology, as well as a useful idea to think with in Psychology. 

[6] Videbeck, R. (1960) ‘Self-conception and the reactions of others’, Sociometry, Vol 23 (pp.351-9).

[7] Festinger, L (1954) ‘A Theory of social comparison processes’, Human Relations, Vol 7 (pp.117-40). (He did another brilliant theory related to this one, called Cognitive Dissonance - but I'll waffle on that one later.)

[8] Morse, S. and Gergen, K.J. (1970) ‘Social comparison, self-consistency and the concept of self’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 16 (pp.148-56)

[9] Festinger, ibid.  For excellent discussion of all of this, I recommend the now defunct Open University textbooks for course DSE 202, primarily Roth, I. (ed.) (1990) Introduction to Psychology, Vol 1, Hove: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates Ltd in assoc. with the Open University.  Especially the whole of Part II.