self representation theory

Nickel says we can see an arbitrarily chosen set of constituent squares “as prominent.” For example, in Figure 1 we can see the squares corresponding to 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 as prominent, or alternately see 2, 4, 6, and 8 as prominent, without changing where we look and, it seems, while representing just the same figure and its elements all the while. In particular, we need not change the focus of our vision, but leave it on the center of Figure 1, yet have different experiences.

The representationalist has several options here. First, focusing on Nickel’s phrase “see as prominent,” s/he could claim that a distance illusion is created, so that the “farther away” relation is represented; or, noting that the preposition “as” seems already to be representational language, s/he could appropriate Nickel’s own term “prominent” as designating a property and just leave it unexplicated. Second, the representationalist could insist that the figure is pictorial, and then invoke some version of figure-ground, or assimilate the case to seeing-as of some other sort (assuming s/he had already provided a representational account of seeing-as more generally). Third, s/he might reject Nickel’s assumption that the whole figure is actually seen at one time, writing off the contrary impression as what Noë (2004) calls “presence as absence.” And there are other possibilities, though each is bound to be contentious.

Block (2010) offers cases in which shifts of attention seem to change sensory qualities (Carrasco (2006)). “The effect of attention is experienced in terms of appearance of contrast, speed, size, color saturation, etc. Attended things look bigger, faster, more saturated, and higher in contrast” (p. 44). Realism about contrast, speed and the rest being assumed, it would seem clear that if an attended thing looks (e.g.) bigger than its actual size, that is just a false or inaccurate representation. But Block takes pains to forestall that inference.

Blurry vision . We must revisit that case (which actually was introduced as a problem for representationalism by Boghossian and Velleman (1989)), because it requires a wrinkle in the representationalist strategy. The normal representationalist move would be to say that the visual experience represents the relevant part of the world as being blurry, but here we want to concede that there is a phenomenal difference between seeing an object as being blurry and blurrily seeing a nonblurry object. Tye (2003a) points out that that difference can be characterized informationally: In the former case, as when looking at a blurry painting, vision represents the blurred edges as such, and just where they lie. But in the latter, vision provides less information, and fails to represent the sharp edges. Tye distinguishes similarly between nonveridically seeing a sharp object as blurry, which experience incorrectly represents the boundaries as fuzzy, and seeing the same object blurrily, which does not represent them, except to place them within broad limits. Allen (2013) contends, to the contrary, that a blurry visual experience represents objects as having multiple boundaries. Bourget (2015) argues that, whatever the positive details, a blurry experience loses some of the content that would be represented by a sharper experience of the exact same scene.

4.5.3 Inversions

Inversion examples in the tradition of Locke’s “inverted spectrum” form a special category of alleged counterexamples to representationalism. Some fit the foregoing model (same intentional contents, different sensory qualities), some do not. Lockean inversion was that of color qualities with respect to behavioral dispositions, which is regarded as possible by everyone except behaviorists and Wittgensteinians. To find an inversion counterexample to the representational theory, the objector would have to posit qualities inverted with respect to all representational contents, or, in the case of “mixed” or “quasi-” representationalism, qualities inverted with respect to all representational contents and all the relevant functional etc. properties. (It is important to see that the latter inversion hypothesis is much more ambitious and should be much more controversial than the original Lockean idea.)

Shoemaker (1991) contends that this strong sort of inversion is possible, i.e., that sensory qualities could invert with respect to representational contents. But his only argument seems to be that such an inversion is imaginable, or conceivable in a thin sense. Since the representationalist’s claim is precisely that sensory qualities just are representational contents of a certain kind, but not that this is analytically or conceptually true, Shoemaker has given her/him no reason to think that the inversion is really, metaphysically, possible. (Also, it is too easy to think of color looks inverting with respect to mere representation; cf. the opening paragraph of Section 2. One has to try to imagine their inverting with respect to visual representation of the appropriate type.) Yet there are further inversion scenarios, supported by argument, that the representationalist must take seriously.

Fish-heads . Building on an example of Byrne’s (2001), Levine (2003) supposes that there are creatures whose eyes are on opposite sides of their heads and whose heads are fixed, so that they never look at an object with both eyes. Now, imagine one such creature whose eyes’ lenses are color-inverted with respect to each other. (It is not that one lens has been inverted; the creatures are born thus mismatched.) It seems that identically colored objects simultaneously presented will look, say, green to one eye but red to the other. Yet the same worldly color property (i.e., a reflectance property of whatever sort) is being represented by each eye. Now, every eye is normal within the population, so neither can easily be described as mis representing the colors of red objects. Each eye just sees the colors differently, and so the difference is not exhausted by the common representatum.

The first point to be made on the representationalist’s behalf is that, as Levine goes on to admit (p. 71), the eyes seem to be representing the world differently; “space appears differently filled on the two sides of the head.” Also, if the fish-head were able to turn and look at the same object first with one eye and then with the other and back again, the object would successively appear to it to be different colors. So we do not here have a case of phenomenal difference without representational difference.

But there is still a puzzle. If the two eyes are representing different properties and neither is misrepresenting, and only the one surface reflectance property is involved, what are the two distinct representata? Several options are available. (i) One could try to find a basis for saying that one of the eyes is (after all) misrepresenting, though it is hard to imagine what basis that might be. (ii) As Levine points out, one could fall in with the view of Shoemaker (1994) mentioned in Section 2, that the eyes are representing distinct dispositions even though the dispositions are realized by the same physical properties. (iii) If the eyes are mutually color-inverted, then they differ functionally. A psychosemantics such as Dretske’s (1986) that makes essential reference to function might therefore distinguish representata here. (iv) To the extent that each creature’s two eyes differ functionally from each other, the creature has two different and nonequivalent visual systems. Perhaps, then, we cannot say that either eye represents its red object as red, or as green; the same reflectance property is one color for one of the visual systems and a different color for the other, as it might be between two different species of organism, and we do not know what those colors are. That the realizing reflectance property is the same in each case does not establish sameness of representatum, because that property may be a common disjunct of each of two distinct disjunctive properties that are respectively colors for the two types of visual system.

Inverted Earth . Block (1990) appeals to an “Inverted Earth,” a planet exactly like Earth except that its real physical colors are (somehow) inverted with respect to ours. The Inverted Earthlings’ speech sounds just like English, but their intentional contents in regard to color are inverted relative to ours: When they say “red,” they mean green (if it is green Inverted objects that correspond to red Earthly objects under the inversion in question), and green things look green to them even though they call those things “red.” Now, an Earthling victim is chosen by the customary mad scientists, knocked out, fitted with color inverting lenses, transported to Inverted Earth, and repainted to match that planet’s human skin and hair coloring. Block contends that after some length of time—a few days or a few millennia—the victim’s word meanings and propositional-attitude contents and all other intentional contents will shift to match the Inverted Earthlings’ contents, but, intuitively, the victim’s color qualities will remain the same. Thus, sensory qualities are not intentional contents.

A natural representationalist reply is to insist that if the intentional contents would change, so too would the qualitative contents. Block’s nearly explicit argument for denying this is that “qualia” (he fails to distinguish sensory qualities, sense (3), from their higher-order “what it’s like” properties, sense (4)) are narrow, while the intentional contents shift under environmental pressure precisely because they are wide. If sensory qualities are indeed narrow, and all the intentional contents are wide and would shift, then Block’s argument succeeds. (Stalnaker (1996) gives a version of Block’s argument that does not depend on the assumption that the qualities are narrow; Lycan (1996) rebuts it.)

Three replies are available, then: (i) To insist that the visual intentional contents would not shift. Word meanings would shift, but it does not follow that visual contents ever would. (ii) To hold that although all the ordinary intentional contents would shift, there is a special class of narrow though still representational contents underlying the wide contents; sensory qualities can be identified with the special narrow contents. (iii) To deny that qualitative content is narrow and argue that it is wide, i.e., that two molecularly indistinguishable people could indeed experience different qualities. This last is the position that Dretske (1996) has labelled “phenomenal externalism,” though (again) in our terminology that would have been “qualitative” externalism.

Reply (i) has not been much pursued. (ii) has, a bit, by Tye (1994) and especially Rey (1998). Rey argues vigorously that “qualia” are narrow, and then offers a narrow representational theory. (But as previously mentioned, it turns out that Rey’s theory is not a theory of sensory qualities; see Section 4.5.) Note that Fregean as opposed to Russellian representationalism is well suited to (ii); even if the Russellian contents shift, the Fregean contents need not. Chalmers (2004) advocates such a view. (Papineau (2014) offers a fourth alternative: to say that although sensory states do represent worldly properties such as color and shape, the sensory qualities themselves are simply not representata and do not shift when the environment is inverted; rather, they are just narrow properties of subjects. He tries to explain away our feeling that sensory qualities are presented to the mind as worldly.)

Reply (iii) has been defended by Dretske (1995, 1996), Tye (1995) and Lycan (1996, 2001). A number of people (even Tye himself (1998)) have since called the original contrary assumption that sensory qualities are narrow a “deep / powerful / compelling” intuition, but it proves to be highly disputable. Here are two arguments, though not very strong arguments, for the claim that the qualities are wide.

First, if the representational theory is correct, then sensory qualities are determined by whatever determines a psychological state’s intentional content; in particular, the color properties represented are taken to be physical properties instanced in the subject’s environment. What determines a psychological state’s intentional content is given by a psychosemantics , in Fodor’s (1987) sense. But every known plausible psychosemantics makes intentional contents wide. Of course, the representational theory is just what is in question; but if one grants that it is independently plausible or at least defensible, the further step to externalism is not a giant step.

Second, suppose sensory qualities are narrow. Then Block’s Inverted Earth argument is plausible, and it would show that either the qualities are narrow functional properties or they are properties of a very weird kind whose existence is suggested by nothing else we know (see Ch. 6 of Lycan (1996)). But sensory qualities are not functional properties, at least not narrow ones: recall the Bertie dilemma. Also, they are ostensibly monadic properties, while functional properties are all relational; and see further Block’s anti-functionalist arguments in Block (1978). So, either sensory qualities are wide or weirdness is multiplied beyond necessity. Of course, that dichotomy will be resisted by anyone who offers a narrow representationalist theory as in (ii) above.

The Scrambler . Biggs (2009) constructs a complicated example in which a human-like species has evolved in such a way that the sensory qualities inhering in its members’ perceptual states are entirely disconnected both functionally and causal-historically from their worldly environments. Biggs argues that those states simply lack representational content, and he anticipates and rebuts the most likely replies.

Although until the mid-1990s the assumption that sensory qualities are narrow had been tacit and undefended, opponents of wide representationalism have since defended the assumption with vigor. Here are (only) some of their arguments, with sample replies. (For a fuller discussion, see Lycan (2001).)

Introspection . Block’s Earthling suddenly transported to Inverted Earth or some other relevant sort of Twin Earth would notice nothing introspectively, despite a change in representational content; so the sensory quality must remain unchanged and so is narrow.

Reply: The same goes for propositional attitudes, i.e., the transported Earthling would notice nothing introspectively. Yet the attitude contents are still wide. Wideness does not entail introspective change under transportation.

Narrow content . In the propositional-attitude literature, the corresponding transportation argument has been taken as the basis of an argument for “narrow content,” viz., for something that is intentional content within the meaning of the act but is narrow rather than, as usual, wide. The self-knowledge problem aforementioned, and the problem of “wide causation” (Fodor (1987), Kim (1995)), have also been used to motivate narrow content. And, indeed, any general argument for narrow content will presumably apply to sensory representation as well as to propositional attitudes. If there is narrow content at all, and sensory content is representational, then probably sensory states have narrow content too. Thus, sensory qualities can and should be taken to be the narrow contents of such states.

Replies: First, this begs the question against the claim that the qualities are wide. Even if there are indeed narrow contents impacted within sensory states, independent argument is needed for the identification of sensory qualities with those contents rather than with wide contents. Second and more strongly, narrow sensory contents still would not correspond to sensory qualities in our sense. So far as has been shown, the redness of a patch in my visual field is still a wide property, even if some other, narrow property underlies it in the same way that (mysterious, ineffable) narrow contents are supposed to underlie beliefs and desires.

Modelling a shift of qualities . If perceptual contents are wide and the environment is subject to change, we should expect a shift, even if the perceptual contents would not shift as readily as attitude contents would. Perhaps they would eventually shift after several centuries on Inverted Earth, if a subject could stay alive that long. But how would a distinctive quality even imaginably undergo such a shift? For example, suppose that a quality is supposed to shift from blue to yellow. A shift from blue to yellow might reasonably be supposed to be a smooth and gradual shift along the spectrum that passes through green. But it is hardly plausible that one would experience such a shift, or a period of unmistakable greenness in particular.

Reply: We have no plausible model for a shift of everyday attitude content either. How would a type of belief state smoothly go from being about blue to being about yellow? Presumably not by being about green in between. So our presumed quality shift is no worse off than the attitudinal shift in this regard; if the present argument works for the former case, it also works for the latter, contrary to hypothesis.

To this it may be rejoined that attitude contents are more tractable, in that they may yield to some view of aboutness according to which reference can divide for a time between contents such as blue and yellow. (E.g., Field’s (1973) theory of “partial reference.”) It is harder to imagine “divided” phenomenology.

Modes of presentation (Rey (1998); Chalmers (2004) defends a similar view). There is no such thing as representation without a mode of presentation. If a sensory quality is a representatum, then it is represented under a mode of presentation, and modes of presentation may be narrow even when the representational content itself is wide. Indeed, many philosophers of mind take modes of presentation to be internal causal or functional roles played by the representations in question. Surely they are strong candidates for qualitative content. Are they not narrow qualitative features?

Reply: Remember, the sensory qualities themselves are properties like subjective greenness and redness, which according to the representational theory are representata. The modes or guises under which greenness and redness are represented in vision are something else again.

But it can plausibly be argued that such modes and guises are qualitative or phenomenal properties of some sort, perhaps higher-order properties. See the next section.

Memory (Block (1996)). “[Y]ou remember the color of the sky on your birthday last year, the year before that, ten years before that, and so on, and your long-term memory gives you good reason to think that the phenomenal character of the experience has not changed…. Of course, memory can go wrong, but why should we suppose that it must go wrong here?” (pp. 43–44, italics and boldface original). The idea is that memory acts as a check on the sensory qualities, and can be used to support the claim that the qualities have remained unchanged despite the wholesale shift in representational contents.

Reply: Memory contents are wide, and so by Block’s own reasoning they will themselves undergo the representational shift to the Inverted-Earth complementary color. Thus, your post-shift memories of good old Earth are false. When you say or think to yourself, “Yes, the sky looks as blue as it did thirty years ago,” you are not expressing the same memory content as you would have when you had just arrived on Inverted Earth. You are now remembering or seeming to remember that the sky looked yellow, since for you “blue” now means yellow. And that memory is false, since on the long-ago occasion the sky looked blue to you, not yellow; memory is not after all a reliable check on the sensory qualities. (Lycan (1996) takes this line; Tye (1998) expands it in more detail.)

Structural mismatch. Following Hardin (1988) and others, Pautz (2014, 2019) argues that the structural properties of a sensory field, paradigmatically resemblance relations, match the neural substrates of the relevant experiences rather than the chemical or physical properties of the representata. For example, the sensory quality blue resembles purple more strongly than it resembles green, but the reflectances underlying worldly objects are the other way around: the blue reflectance type resembles the green reflectance type more than it does the purple. Even more dramatic mismatches obtain in the case of smell. Therefore, it seems that a sensory quality is a narrow property rather than the wide worldly one predicted by standard externalist psychosemantics.

Reply: First, that a sense modality represents two worldly properties as being similar to degree n does not entail that they are thus similar; there may be illusion regarding resemblance. Second, there will be room for debate regarding exactly what chemical or physical properties do constitute the representata, and regarding what psychosemantics connects those properties to the sensory experience.

Hardly anyone will accept all of the foregoing replies. But no one should now find it uncontestable either that sensory qualities are narrow or that they are wide. The matter is likely to remain controversial for some time to come.

5. What It’s Like

Some philosophers (e.g., Dretske (1995), Tye (1995)) use this troublesome expression simply to mean a sensory quality, and this is one of the two meanings it has had in recent philosophy of mind. But in the fourth paragraph of this entry, the phrase was introduced in the context, “‘what it’s like’ for the subject to be in a particular mental state, especially what it is like for that subject to experience a particular qualitative property,” which indicates that there is another sense (4) in which (when the mental state does involve a sensory quality) the “what it’s like” is something over and above the quality itself. In fact, since this second “what it’s like” is itself a property of the quality, it cannot very well be identical with the quality. It is the property of what it is like to experience that quality; alternately, the relevant introspectible property of the experience itself. Let us now just speak of “what it’s like” (WIL) properties, meaning just this higher-order phenomenal sort.

Block (1995), like many other writers, fails to distinguish WIL properties from sensory qualities. But Carruthers (2000) elaborates nicely on the distinction: A quality in the first-order sense presents itself as part of the world, not as part of one’s mind. It is, e.g., the apparent color of an apparently physical object (or, if you are a Russellian, the color of a sense-datum that you happen to have encountered as an object of consciousness). A sensory quality is what the world is or seems like. But what it is like to experience that color is what your first-order perceptual state is like, intrinsically mental and experienced as such.

Here are two further reasons for maintaining such a distinct sense of the phrase. First, a sensory quality can be described in one’s public natural language, while what it is like to experience the quality seems to be ineffable. Suppose Ludwig asks Bertie, “How, exactly, does the after-image look to you as regards color?” Bertie replies, “I told you, it looks green.” “Yes,” says Ludwig, “but can you tell me what it’s like to experience that ‘green’ look?” “Well, the image looks the same color as that,” says Bertie, pointing to George Edward’s cloth coat. “No, I mean, can you tell me what it’s like intrinsically, not comparatively?” “Um,….” —In one way, Bertie can describe the phenomenal color, paradigmatically as “green.” But when asked what it is like to experience that green, he goes mute. So there is a difference between (a) “what it’s like” in the bare sense of the quality, the phenomenal color that can be described using ordinary color words, and (b) “what it’s like” to experience that phenomenal color, the WIL property, which cannot easily be described in public natural language at all.

Second, Armstrong (1968), Nelkin (1989), Rosenthal (1991), and Lycan (1996) have argued that sensory qualities can fail to be conscious in the earlier sense of awareness; a quality can occur without its being even slightly noticed by its subject. But in such a case, there is a good sense in which it would not be like anything for the subject to experience that quality. (Of course, in the first, Dretske-Tye sense there would be something it was like, since the quality itself is that. But in another sense, if the subject is entirely unaware of the quality, it is odd even to speak of the subject as “experiencing” it, much less of there being something it is like for the subject to experience it.) So even in the case in which one is aware of one’s quality, the second type of “what it’s like,” the WIL property, requires awareness and so is something distinct from the quality itself.

It is the second sense of “what it’s like” that figures in anti-materialist arguments from subjects’ “knowing what it’s like,” primarily Nagel’s (1974) “Bat” argument and Jackson’s (1982) “Knowledge” argument, Chalmers’ (1996, 2003) Conceivability argument, and Levine’s (1983, 2001) Explanatory Gap arguments. To begin with the first of those: Jackson’s character Mary, a brilliant color scientist trapped in an entirely black-and-white laboratory, nonetheless becomes omniscient as regards the physics and chemistry of color, the neurophysiology of color vision, and every other public, objective fact conceivably relevant to human color experience. Yet when she is finally released from her captivity and ventures into the outside world, she sees colors for the first time, and learns something: namely, she learns what it is like to see red and the other colors. Thus she seems to have learned a new fact, one that by hypothesis is not a public, objective fact. It is an intrinsically perspectival fact. This is what threatens materialism, since according to that doctrine, every fact about every human mind is ultimately a public, objective fact.

Upon her release, Mary has done two things: She has at last hosted a red sensory quality, and she has learned what it is like to experience a red quality. In experiencing it she has experienced a “what it’s like” in the first of our two senses. But the fact she has learned has the ineffability characteristic of our second sense of “what it’s like”; were Mary to try to pass on her new knowledge of a WIL property to a still color-deprived colleague, she would not be able to express it in English.

We have already surveyed the representational theory of sensory qualities. But there are also representational theories of “what it’s like” in the second sense (4). A common reply to the arguments of Nagel and Jackson (Horgan (1984), Van Gulick (1985), Churchland (1985), Tye (1986), Lycan (1987, 1990, 1996, 2003), Loar (1990), Rey (1991), Leeds (1993)) is to note that a knowledge difference does not entail a difference in fact known, for one can know a fact under one representation or mode of presentation but fail to know one and the same fact under a different mode of presentation. Someone might know that water is splashing but not know that H 2 O molecules are moving, and vice versa; someone might know that person X is underpaid without knowing that she herself is underpaid, even if she herself is in fact person X. Thus, from Mary’s before-and-after knowledge difference, Jackson is not entitled to infer the existence of a new, weird fact, but at most that of a new way of representing. Mary has not learned a new fact, but has only acquired a new, introspective or first-person way of representing one that she already knew in its neurophysiological guise.

(As noted above, the posited introspective modes of presentation for sensory qualities in the first-order sense are strong candidates for the title of “qualia” in a distinct, higher-order sense of the term, and they may well be narrow rather than wide. This is what Rey (1998) seems to be talking about.)

This attractive response to Nagel and Jackson—call it the “perspectivalist” response—requires that the first-order qualitative state itself be represented (else how could it be newly known under Mary’s new mode of presentation?). And that hypothesis in turn encourages a representational theory of higher-order conscious awareness and introspection. However, representational theories of awareness face powerful objections, the perspectivalist must either buy into such a theory despite its liabilities, or find some other way of explicating the idea of an introspective or first-person perspective without appealing to higher-order representation. The latter option does not seem promising. And a further question raised by the perspectivalist response concerns the nature of the alleged first-person representation itself.

It has become popular, especially among materialists, to speak of “phenomenal concepts,”and to suppose that Mary has acquired one which she can now apply to her first-order qualitative state; it is in that way that she is able to represent the old fact in a new way. Phenomenal concepts figure also in responses to the Conceivability and Explanatory Gap arguments.

The Conceivability argument (Chalmers 1996, 2003) has it that “zombies” are conceivable—physical duplicates of ordinary human beings, that share all the human physical and functional states but lack phenomenal consciousness in sense (4); there is nothing it is like to be a zombie. The argument then moves from bare conceivability to genuine metaphysical possibility, which would refute materialism. According to the Explanatory Gap argument (Levine 1983, 2001), no amount of physical, functional or other objective information could explain why a given sensory state feels to its subject in the way it does, and the best explanation of this in turn is that the feel is an extra fact that does not supervene on the physical.

Lormand (2004) offers a very detailed linguistic analysis of the formula “There is something it is like for [creature] c to have [mental state] M,” and on its basis defends the claim that instances of that formula as well as more specific attributions of WIL properties can in fact be conceptually deduced at least from “nonphenomenal” facts about subjects.

What the Knowledge, Conceivability and Explanatory Gap arguments have in common is that they move from an alleged epistemic gap to a would-be materialism-refuting metaphysical one. Though some materialists balk at once and refuse to admit the epistemic gap, more grant the epistemic gap and resist the move to the metaphysical one. The epistemic gap, on this view, is created by the “conceptual isolation” of phenomenal concepts from all others, and it is conceptual only rather than metaphysical. Stoljar (2005) calls this the “phenomenal concept strategy”. There are a number of distinct positive accounts of phenomenal concepts and how they work; such concepts are: “recognitional” (Loar (1990), Carruthers (2000), Tye (2003c)); proprietary lexemes of an internal monitoring system (Lycan (1996)); indexical (Perry (2001), O’Dea (2002), Schellenberg (2013)); demonstrative (Levin (2007), Stalnaker (2008), Schroer (2010)); “quotational” or “constitutive” (Papineau (2002), Balog (2012)); “unimodal” (Dove and Elpidorou (2016)). Some of those accounts are minimal, aspiring only to block the key inferences in the anti-materialist arguments aforementioned. Others, particularly the constitutive account, are more detailed and offer to explain more specific features of WIL properties. For example, Papineau points out that the constitutive account explains the odd persistent attractiveness of some of the obviously fallacious antimaterialist arguments. He and Balog each argue that the account, according to which a phenomenal concept token is at least partly constituted by the very mental state-token that is its referent, explains the special directness of the reference: no feature of the state is appealed to (and a fortiori no neural, functional, causal etc. feature); Balog adds that since the referent is literally contained and present in the concept token, “there will always be something it is like” to do the tokening (p. 7).

The phenomenal concept strategy is criticized by Raffman (1995), Stoljar (2005), Prinz (2007), Chalmers (2007), Ball (2009), Tye (2009), Demircioglu (2013), and Shea (2014). For further works and references see Alter and Walter (2007), Sundström (2011) and Elpidorou (2015). Chalmers offers a “Master Argument” meant to refute any version of the strategy: it is a dilemma based on whether it is conceivable that the complete fundamental physical truth holds yet we possess no phenomenal concepts (having whichever features). The argument is criticized by Papineau (2007), Carruthers and Veillet (2007), and Balog (2012).

It is possible simply to deny the existence of WIL properties, as do Dennett (1991) and Dretske (1995); see also Humphrey (1992, 2011), Hall (2007), Pereboom (2011) and Tartaglia (2013). To do that is of course not to defend a representational theory or any other theory of them. But it would be good to explain away the majority belief in such properties, and some theorists do that in representational terms, arguing that other, real properties are misrepresented in introspection as WIL properties; Frankish (2016) calls this strategy “illusionism.” An obvious instance of such a misrepresentation would be to mistake a sensory quality for a WIL property; since the conflation of the two is already rife even among sophisticated philosophers, WIL deniers may suggest that what was introspected was only a sensory quality. (That is one way of understanding Dretske’s position, bar his resistance to the very notion of introspection as in Dretske (2003).) And as before, the phrase “what it’s like” has nontendentiously been used as referring to a sensory quality rather than to a property of a whole experience. Several authors point out that to reject WIL properties is not to grant Chalmers’ (1996) claim that for a zombie lacking WIL properties, “all is dark inside” (pp. 95–6).

Rey (1992) suggests that introspection mistakes the lack of detail it delivers for the accurate representation of a simple ineffable property. Alternately or in addition (1995), having detected stable and identifiable complexes of involuntary responses to states of ourselves and to living creatures who look and behave like us, for example the commonsense causal, representational, conative and affective syndrome we lump together using the word ‘pain’, we project a simple quality onto the others and into ourselves. Rey and Pereboom each compare the projection of WIL properties into the mind by introspection to vision’s projection of simple homogeneous color properties onto environmental objects.

Illusionism is criticized by Strawson (2006), Prinz (2016), Balog (2016), Nida-Rümelin (2016), Schwitzgebel (2016), and Chalmers (2018). Though highly sympathetic to illusionism, Kammerer (2018) argues that no previously existing account can explain the strength of the illusion. For general discussion, see the essays collected in Frankish (2017), and for further defense, see Shabasson (2022).

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Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory

Uriah Kriegel, Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory , Oxford UP, 2009, 333pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199570355.

Reviewed by Joseph Levine, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

C onsciousness is a hot topic these days, what with online conferences, associations for its scientific study, and the like, and Kriegel’s book is squarely in the middle of this ferment. Kriegel’s aim is to provide a comprehensive theory of phenomenal consciousness. As a lot of what I have to say will be critical, let me state up front that in many ways I really like the book. For one thing, it combines an impressive attention to the empirical side of the matter with a genuinely philosophical treatment. And though the book is quite long, it reads easily and is not repetitive. There are new ideas and arguments in every section, far too many to survey and evaluate here. And though I find some of the arguments unconvincing and ill-considered, with Kriegel the rule is: you don’t like that one, well I have three more for you to consider. The question is, what does it all add up to? So let me proceed to try to answer that question by first providing an overview of the main line of argument of the book. Kriegel has a complicated story to tell, so bear with me, as even a brief presentation of it can’t be brief enough. I’ll do my best.

We begin with a distinction that I myself emphasized in Levine (2001). Consider a paradigm conscious experience, such as the one you have when looking at a ripe tomato in daylight. What seems to be distinctive of this mental state as a conscious experience can be divided into two components: what Kriegel calls its “subjective character” (I called it “subjectivity”) and its “qualitative character”. One way to get at the distinction is by way of the standard “what it’s like” locution. When we say that there is something it is like for me to see a ripe tomato on the kitchen counter in daylight, that there is something at all it is like for me is the subjective character, and precisely what it is like for me is the qualitative character. All conscious experiences share subjective character, but they differ in their qualitative character.

Phenomenal consciousness, according to Kriegel, is that feature of mental life that is responsible for the “explanatory gap” (Levine 1983) and the “hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). While most philosophers have grappled with qualitative character, Kriegel argues that it is really subjective character that is at the heart of the problem. Still, as phenomenal consciousness is composed of both kinds of character, and he seeks a fairly comprehensive theory of phenomenal consciousness, Kriegel provides an account of qualitative character alongside his principal account of subjective character.

Kriegel’s theory is called the “self-representational” theory of phenomenal consciousness. Subjective character is that feature of a conscious state by virtue of which there is something it is like for the subject. But being “for the subject”, according to Kriegel, means being something of which the subject is aware. Kriegel defends this claim by way of defending the “ubiquity thesis”, the thesis that every conscious state is a state of which we are aware. Once we grant this, we then need to analyze “awareness”, which, according to Kriegel, is best understood in terms of representation. As will become clear by the end of this review, it is this move that I believe leads to all the problems. Kriegel rightly notes that analyzing awareness in terms of representation is a substantive hypothesis, and defends it on the grounds that it is the only model for which we have a clear model and with which we have some prior familiarity, not to mention that the representational model more easily allows for physicalistic reduction. So the upshot of this first stage of investigation is the view that a state has subjective character by virtue of being represented to be a state of the subject.

Now this much had already been argued by “higher-order” theorists, most notably David Rosenthal (1997). Rosenthal emphasizes that conscious states are those we are conscious of , which turn out to be those represented by suitably related higher-order thoughts. Where Kriegel differs from Rosenthal is that Kriegel claims that the higher-order state and the first-order state are in fact one and the same; hence the self-representation referred to in the name of the theory. Kriegel offers several arguments for preferring the single-state self-representation theory to the standard two-state higher-order theory, a matter to which I’ll return.

When it comes to qualitative character, Kriegel holds a narrow representational view. According to a representational view, qualitative character is identified with the representational content of a perceptual or sensory representation. So, for example, the reddish qualitative character of a visual experience of a ripe tomato is the property of representing the tomato to be red. At this point, representational theories divide over how to understand the relevant representational content. Externalist representationalists take the relevant content to be something like a spectral reflectance, a mind-independent and response-independent property of the object (Dretske 1995 and Tye 1995). Kriegel opts for a different view. He identifies qualitative character with the representation of a certain response-dependent property of the object: that disposition of the object to cause certain neural states in organisms of the relevant type under normal conditions. As he notes, his view is internalist, in the sense that qualitative character supervenes on the physical structure of the perceiver, whereas for externalists it supervenes on the way the world is outside the head as well.

This is how Kriegel describes his view in chapter 3, but, as he warns the reader there, there is actually a crucial amendment to the view that appears in chapter 4. It turns out that the first-order content of the representational state does not determine the state’s qualitative character after all. Rather, to find out what the qualitative character is, we have to look at the higher-order content of the state — the self-representational component of the state’s content.

To see how this works, consider again the visual experience of the ripe tomato. This conscious state has a first-order content that attributes a particular response-dependent property (among others) — call it R — to the tomato. At the second-order level, the state represents itself as having a certain content — say, as attributing R to the tomato. The first-order content he calls the “schmalitative character” of the conscious state, and the content attributed to the state by the second-order content is the qualitative character strictly speaking. Of course in standard cases these contents will coincide, so the schmalitative and qualitative characters will be the same. But sometimes they may come apart. One’s visual system may be representing the tomato as instantiating R, but one may be representing oneself to be representing the tomato as instantiating G. In such a case the qualitative character of the experience is G, not R.

Getting back to subjective character, an important part of the story for Kriegel involves a distinction between “peripheral” and “focal” inner awareness. As applied to normal, outer-directed perceptual attention the distinction is familiar. As I type this review on my computer, I see the words on the screen, but also the envelopes on my desk, the keyboard, and a number of other objects in my field of vision. I am visually attending to the words on the screen — and not to all of them, of course, but the ones appearing as I type — they occupy my focal attention. But I am also aware of the other objects; certainly in a way that I am not visually aware of the door behind my back. We can describe these other objects of which I’m visually aware as occupying the periphery of my visual attention.

The application to inner awareness is meant to capture the difference between standard cases of conscious perceptual experience, on the one hand, and full-blown introspective attention to experience, on the other. As I’m looking at the computer screen while typing I am consciously aware of the words as they appear on the screen, and it’s clear that my attention is directed toward the screen, not myself or my experience. Yet, if this is to count as a conscious experience, there must be some sense in which it is “for me”, and, for Kriegel, this means it’s being represented by me. Kriegel captures the difference between the two objects of awareness – the screen and the experience of the screen – by appeal to the difference between peripheral and focal attention. I am focally aware of the screen, but only peripherally aware of my experience. Once we have this distinction in play, we can then say that what happens when I indulge in full-blown introspection is that an attention shift takes place. Whereas before I was focally aware of the screen and peripherally aware of the experience, now I am focally aware of the experience.

At the end of chapter 4, Kriegel provides a full-dress articulation of his account of subjective character, which goes like this:

(SR) Necessarily, for any mental state M, M has subjective character iff M is non-derivatively, specifically, and essentially self-representing.

Non-derivative representation is the sort that minds do, as opposed to the representation of the words on my screen. Specific self-representation involves picking out the state in question through a singular representation, as opposed to some general description it happens to fall under, such as “all the mental states I’m now occupying”. Finally, essential self-representation is the sort one has with first-person indexicals like “I” and “me”, as opposed to definite descriptions that happen to pick one out. So “the mental state representing the computer screen” doesn’t count, while “this very mental state” does.

So does this theory work? Does it give a convincing account of phenomenal consciousness? I don’t think so. In fact, I find the position riddled with holes. I will confine my critical remarks to three important issues: the argument for abandoning the two-state higher-order theory for the self-representational theory, the account of qualitative character, and the ontological structure of conscious states on the self-representational view.

1. Kriegel’s principal argument that we need self-representation, as opposed to standard two-state higher-order representation, goes like this. On a two-state view, only the lower-order state is conscious, not the higher-order one (unless, as is usually not the case, it is targeted by yet a higher-order state itself). But clearly subjective character, the conscious state’s being “for me”, is itself “phenomenologically manifest”, and thus must be conscious. If we grant this requirement, we are off on an infinite regress, unless we stop the regress in its tracks by the one-state self-representational move.

Why must we say that the higher-order state is conscious as well? Kriegel realizes that appealing to the intuition that it is phenomenologically manifest will not convince his opponents, so he trots out an interesting argument, which goes like this. If subjective character were not something itself of which we were conscious — which, on the standard two-state view, it isn’t — then how would we know about it in the first place? That is, on what basis would we argue that all conscious states have subjective character? He discusses various options and dismisses them, leaving only the claim that it is because subjective character is phenomenologically part of every conscious experience do we know that it is an essential component of phenomenally conscious states.

One option Kriegel dismisses is that we know about subjective character through introspection. He has two objections to this view. First, since the vast majority of our conscious states are not explicitly introspected, the fact that we find subjective character in the ones we do introspect provides an insufficient inductive basis to project to the rest. But if every time we introspect we discover this feature of our conscious experience, under all circumstances, why wouldn’t this be sufficient evidence? Why think the un-introspected ones are any different? This is where the second objection comes into play. Since when we introspect we are obviously making ourselves aware of our conscious state, there is reason to think that the sample is biased. Yes, we find subjective character when introspecting, but that’s just what the introspecting itself is introducing, and therefore we shouldn’t consider these cases as representative of all conscious states.

But this objection confuses two distinct levels of higher-order representation. On the standard higher-order theory, introspection involves three levels of representation: the ground-level perceptual state, representing whatever it does about the external world; the second-order state, representing the ground-level one, and thus making it conscious; and a third-order state, representing the second-order one (or maybe both second-order and ground-level), constituting the introspective state. True, the third-level state only appears when introspecting, but of course it isn’t the state of which we are conscious in these circumstances (unless we go ahead and introspect the introspecting, thus introducing a fourth-order state). What we are conscious of when introspecting is the second-order state, and there is no reason to think that the introduction of the extra level of awareness through introspecting is responsible for introducing this second-order state that is found there. Thus there is no reason to think the introspected sample is biased. Hence, no real argument against the two-state view. 1

2. Remember, for Kriegel qualitative character is the representation of a response-dependent property of the object. (For present purposes I’m ignoring the qualitative/schmalitative distinction.) Any such account has to find a way to independently characterize the relevant response, on pain of circularity. As mentioned above, Kriegel’s move is to go neural. But then he notices a problem: namely, if we specify the relevant response neurally, then we lose multiple realizability. It will turn out that no two creatures who are physiologically different can ever have an experience with the same qualitative character. Kriegel’s response is to claim that we can characterize the relevant response as a “conjunctive disposition”. It’s the property of eliciting R1 in creatures of kind K1 in circumstances C1, and R2 in creatures of kind K2, in circumstances C2, etc.

So, let’s work out a case. Norma is looking at the sky and having an experience with bluish quality, Stella is looking at the sky and having an experience of the same quality, and Norman is looking at the sky and having an experience of yellowish quality. We want to say that all three experiences are (or at least can be) veridical. That means the sky must have both properties, what Norma and Stella represent it to have and what Norman represents it to have. These can’t be the same property, for then it would follow that Norma and Norman are experiencing the same qualia, and, by hypothesis, they aren’t. So they have to be two distinct properties instantiated by the sky at the time in question.

According to Kriegel, these are response-dependent properties. The issue then is to specify the response without appealing to qualitative character itself, on pain of undermining the reductive character of the account. As just mentioned, Kriegel proposes to use physical properties as the relevant responses, and then to deal with multiple realization of qualitative character by appeal to “conjunctive dispositions”. So what makes Norma’s and Stella’s experiences both count as of bluish quality, given that Norma’s involves physical state N1 and Stella’s involves N2? Well, it’s that they represent the same property B. What is B? It’s the conjunctive disposition to cause N1 in Norma (and her relevant peers) and N2 in Stella (and her relevant peers).

Okay, so now we have Norma, Norman, and Stella all looking at the sky together. Each is responding with a different physical state, N1 for Norma, N2 for Stella, and N3 for Norman. However, Norma and Stella are experiencing the same quality by virtue of their representing B, which is defined in terms of causing N1 in Norma and N2 in Stella, but Norman’s response is not among the dispositional conjuncts of B, so he isn’t sharing their qualitative experience. But of course there’s property C, which does include all three conjuncts. So what makes it the case that it’s B they are representing and not C?

Perhaps Kriegel will say that you start out with an intuitive grasp of Norma and Stella sharing a quality and Norman not, and then fashion your specification of the response to fit this. But this seems unworkable for two reasons. First, on what theory of representation — particularly some sort of nomic or teleological theory of the sort Kriegel likes — are you going to get it to come out that it’s precisely B and not C (or any other of the infinitely many conjunctive dispositions one can specify) that Norma and Stella are representing? Second, it clearly relies on an independent fix on qualitative character, one that is totally ungrounded on this account. Of course if you give up multiple realizability, so there’s one response for each possible physical state caused by seeing an object, then this particular problem goes away, but then you get others.

3. Perhaps the most serious question Kriegel addresses is how to understand the self-representation relation itself. That is, what makes it the case that a state represents itself? If Kriegel were not interested in a reductive theory of consciousness he could avoid the problem and just take the representation relation as primitive, and thus self-representation as primitive as well. But Kriegel wants a naturalistic theory, so he must rely on a naturalistic account of representation.

Unfortunately, the only candidates we know of are causal/nomic accounts on the one hand, and functional accounts on the other. The former don’t help much with self-representation, since states don’t cause themselves. (The problem is basically that either everything represents itself on such a view or nothing does.) Functional role accounts might work, but then we lose something else that is crucial to Kriegel: the categorical, or manifest nature of self-awareness. After all, straight representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness — without any explicit higher-order representation — handle subjective character in terms of a disposition to be available to various high-level processes, such as report and action planning. 2 Kriegel’s main reason for insisting on explicit higher-order representation is that without it the self-awareness of subjective character loses its status as a categorical state, and thus ceases to be the sort of thing that can be phenomenologically manifest. But if we adopt a functional account of self-representation, then we lose this advantage over the straight representationalist position, and we might as well abandon any appeal to higher-order representation, whether of the two-state or the one-state variety.

Note that the two-state view doesn’t have this problem. The two-state view can help itself to whatever causal or nomic theory of representation eventually wins out, since there is no obvious reason one mental state couldn’t stand in this relation to another. So what Kriegel does to solve his problem is to compromise a bit with the two-state view. That is, rather than what I will call a “one-vehicle-one-state” view, Kriegel holds a “two-vehicle-one-state” view. On the former, though the physical state realizing the self-representational mental state has physical parts, it does not break down into representational components with one representing the other. On the latter model, however, there are separable parts of the state, such that one part represents the distal situation and the second represents the first part. Since there is a physical distinction between the two parts of the one state, it is possible to employ some sort of causal account of representation to ground the second part’s representing the first part.

Of course now the problem is to distinguish this two-vehicle-one-state view from the standard two-state view. After all, calling two states “one state” doesn’t make them so, and since the representational contents of these two parts of the one state are distinct, there seems to be every reason to consider them two states. Kriegel responds in two ways. First, he claims that there is a difference between a view that treats two states as parts of one state merely by “summing” them, and one that treats them as parts of one state by virtue of their standing in a relation that genuinely integrates them into a “complex” state. The integration he has in mind involves the kind of “binding” of two representations that we see in normal perception. In perception the visual system must integrate a representation that something is red with a representation that something is square — representations realized in different visual sub-systems — to get a representation of something that is a red square, and one hypothesis for how this is done has to do with synchronous firing in the two sub-systems. Kriegel proposes that just this sort of integration occurs between the first-order and the second-order representations involved in a conscious perceptual experience (hence he calls this “cross order integration”), and he speculates that synchronous firing could be the mechanism that implements the integration in this case as well.

The second element in the response is to introduce the idea of “indirect representation”. The point is that we want the entire state to be what’s represented, not just one part by another, for otherwise we wouldn’t have any advantage over the standard two-state view, since the subjective character would not itself be phenomenologically manifest, since not self-represented. But we can only get a causal account going if we have one part representing the other, and therefore not representing itself. The way out is to claim that the causal account gives us the “direct” representation of the first-order part by the second-order part, and the entire state counts as self-represented by virtue of the second-order part’s “indirectly” representing the entire, complex state. A case that exemplifies the distinction is the way a picture can represent a house, indirectly, by directly representing (picturing) the front of the house. Similarly, the visual system always has only partial access to what’s being viewed, yet, by directly representing what’s in the field of vision, it indirectly represents an entire object, including parts that are occluded from vision. Basing his account on this sort of analogy, Kriegel claims that the second-order part of the conscious state indirectly represents the entire state by directly representing the first-order part.

It seems to me that neither the appeal to cross-order integration nor to indirect representation works. [ 3] Consider again the way that representations of color and shape are bound together. It’s supposed to work something like this. We start with two distinct representations of the form “x is red” and “y is square”, where the singular terms are keyed to features maps. Through some implementing mechanism (maybe synchronous firing) the two representations become one and we get “z is red and square”. The point is that the latter representation, with “z” representing the object, is distinct (functionally, that is) from either of the other two. Now, what sort of merging of first-order and second-order contents on Kriegel’s view is supposed to work like that? We are given no idea how the relevant contents are supposed to be merged. 4 What’s more, if they were integrated in anything like the way that standard binding works, we’d have a one-vehicle model after all.

Let me elaborate on this last point. When individuating mental states, there are (at least) two levels of aggregation to consider: the physical implementation level and the psychological level (the level of the virtual machine). What are counted as individual psychological states may be implemented by extremely complex physical states, containing physical state parts that are integrated in various ways. The part-whole structure of the physical implementation, however, does not automatically transfer to the psychological state(s) implemented. It depends on whether these physical parts receive a psychological interpretation.

Now, on Kriegel’s story we start with two states, S1 and S2, where S1 is a representation of a ripe tomato, and S2 represents that S1 is occurring. Now suppose that they are integrated via something like synchronous firing. The physical integration is irrelevant to the question of whether or not we have one state unless there is a genuine merger of the contents of the two states. But what sort of merger are we talking about? If it’s still the case that S1 represents the ripe tomato and S2 represents S1, in what sense do we have a single psychological state? If, however, the S1 and S2 contents genuinely merge — so that either, as in the binding case, a representational element from both parts functions as a single symbol 5 , or somehow the two parts function to spread the two representational contents over the entire combined state — then it’s unclear why the psychological state is considered to have two distinct parts. Again, the two-part structure at the physical implementation level is irrelevant. Kriegel’s attempt to have it both ways — two states in one — exchanges the mystery of consciousness for the mystery of the Trinity.

But suppose this could work. (After all, many people do believe in the Trinity.) There is still the question of what precisely is being represented at the higher-order level. Does S2 represent just S1, or the combined S1-S2 state? As mentioned above, Kriegel needs it to be the latter, for if it isn’t, then the advantage over the two-state version is lost. The principal advantage of the one-state view over the two-state view is supposed to be that it makes subjective character itself phenomenologically manifest. Being phenomenologically manifest, on Kriegel’s theory, is to be represented. So the representing of S1, done by S2, must itself be somehow represented. This is where the appeal to indirect representation is supposed to do the job.

But how does this work? Again, we are given examples that are importantly unlike the situation at hand. Pictures and perceptual experiences represent entire objects by picturing (or seeing) their parts. But is that what happens? True, I say I see the house when I see its front, but does that mean my visual system is literally representing the whole house by virtue of representing the front of it? And is the whole house phenomenologically manifest to me? It seems to me that one might say I represent the entire house in thought based on the visual presentation of the front, thus yielding two representations, not one with both direct and indirect contents. The problem is that we just have no clear model of indirect representation that would help us determine if its application in this case yields a position that meets the necessary desiderata.

On page 230 Kriegel worries about this problem, but treats it as relatively unimportant. To my mind this issue strikes at the heart of his theory. Again, if the higher-order (part of the) state is not represented, then we aren’t aware of it, and then we have no fundamental difference between this view and standard higher-order theory. It’s not enough that somehow the entire state is indirectly represented if that doesn’t amount to an awareness of the subjective character itself. In fact, at an earlier point in his argument a similar problem arose, and there too it seemed to me that Kriegel brushed it off too quickly with an expedient that doesn’t really speak to the problem.

When initially laying out his argument against the two-state view, Kriegel set it up as a dilemma: either the higher-order state is itself unconscious (bad, for reasons discussed above) or it’s conscious, but then we invite a regress of increasingly higher-order states. At that point he considers an objection that his view is subject to a regress of sorts as well. After all, even if there’s one state, aren’t there two contents, the first-order one and the second-order one? But can’t we ask whether a content , as well as a state, is conscious? If so, then the same dilemma ought to work against Kriegel’s own view. His response is to say that for a content to be conscious is just for it to be the (or a) content of a conscious state. So the higher-order content needn’t be itself represented by another content to be conscious, since it is already a content of a conscious state; that is, of a state that is the explicit target of the higher-order content itself.

But while this move allows Kriegel to call the higher-order content “conscious”, and I can’t object to a stipulation here, it doesn’t seem to do the work we need done, which is to get subjective character into our awareness. If we’re going to understand awareness as representation, then the content of awareness has to be identified with representational content. I don’t see how we can allow something to count as what we’re aware of by, as it were, proxy — which is what this move and the indirect representation move seem to have in common.

Finally, now that we have Kriegel’s two-vehicle-one-state model presented, we can return to the other argument I mentioned in note 1 against the two-state view. The problem is that on the two-state model it ought to be possible for the higher-order state to occur even though there is no lower-order state it is actually representing. We can think of this as a kind of internal hallucination. I represent myself as having an experience I’m not actually having. The problem is that it seems to undermine the relational character of the higher-order view. If, as we assume would be the case on this view, what it’s like for one suffering such an internal hallucination is just the same as what it’s like for someone really having the represented experience, then it seems that the internal hallucinator is really having the experience as well. But this then makes the lower-order state superfluous.

Whether or not one finds this problematic, Kriegel thinks it is, and therefore he argues that his self-representational account is better since it isn’t subject to this objection. Since the state is representing itself, the higher-order representation cannot occur without the lower-order state it is representing, namely, itself. But once we adopt the two-vehicle version of the one-state view, the objection reappears. Why couldn’t S2 occur without S1? Now Kriegel will say that since S1 isn’t there, and so there is no state with which S2 can integrate, there is no basis for the indirect representational content; therefore the relevant higher-order representational content does not appear without the state it’s representing — that is, the integrated state consisting of S1 and S2. While that’s certainly right, we still want to know, according to Kriegel, what it’s like for the subject. Is there any reason to think he can avoid the same dilemma that faces the two-state view? I don’t see why. Remember, given his view that qualitative character, the “what” of what it’s like, is identified by the representational content of the higher-order state, not the lower-order one, is there any basis in his theory for thinking that in an S2-without-S1 situation it would be any different for the subject than it is when we have the full-fledged S2-with-S1 situation?

What then to make of these various problems with the view? Is there a lesson here? To me, the lesson is that consciousness really is like the Trinity in the end. Somehow conscious awareness has a differentiable act-object structure but of a sort that involves genuine, not superficial, unity. This is why I have come to believe that the awareness relation involved in conscious experience cannot be explicated in terms of representational states, at least not reductively, as one must either sacrifice the phenomenology or sacrifice the representation relation. Kriegel has done us the service of showing us the limits of the representational approach through his long and arduous attempt to make it all work.

Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind . Oxford: Oxford UP.

Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the Mind . Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/The MIT Press.

Levine, J. (1983). “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 354-361.

Levine, J. (2001). Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness . New York: Oxford UP.

Rosenthal, D. (1997). “A Theory of Consciousness”, in Block, N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. eds., The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates , Cambridge: MIT Press, 729-753.

Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind . Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/M.I.T. Press.

1 There is actually another argument Kriegel employs to establish the superiority of the self-representation theory over the two-state theory, which is its ability to avoid the possibility plaguing the two-state view of there being a kind of internal hallucination, with the higher-order state occurring without an appropriate lower-order target. I will return to this question after developing my criticism of his position on the ontological structure of conscious states below.

2 As in Tye’s (1995) so-called PANIC account, where the “P” stands for “poised”.

3 In both cases I’m tempted to use the dachshund joke to exemplify the problem. (Don’t know it? Ask Louise Antony, it’s her favorite joke.)

4 This is the relevance of the aforementioned joke: it’s just like the standard binding case, just different.

5 In the binding case the two singular terms come to function as one.

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Representing Oneself and Others

Bernhard hommel.

1 Institute of Psychology, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Abstract. Human beings are assumed to own a concept of their self, but it remains a mystery how they represent themselves and others. I shall develop a theoretical framework, inspired by the Theory of Event Coding, of how people represent themselves and others, how and under which circumstances these two kinds of representations interact and what consequences this has. In a nutshell, I shall argue that self- and other-representations can overlap to the degree that they share features, that the shared features are particularly relevant or salient, and that the individual is under a particular metacontrol state. Then I shall argue that self-concepts emerge through active exploration of one’s physical and social environment during infancy and childhood, as well as through cultural learning, and that their main purpose is related to social communication but not online action control.

The self is a particularly colorful concept that occupies a central position in the cognitive and social sciences since their existence: It is the agent that is doing the thinking in Descartes’ quest for a proof of human existence, the target of religious and political persuasion, the ultimate goal of personal development and therapeutic intervention, and the key factor in attributing legal and ethical responsibility. But what is the self? It is often taken as a given, or at least as a useful fiction (as in juridical thinking), but it is hotly debated how it works, where it comes from, and what its potential might be.

Philosophical approaches distinguish between the so-called “minimal self” and the “narrative self” (e.g., Gallagher, 2000 ). The concept of a minimal self relates to a person’s phenomenal experience in the here and now and to the way one is perceiving oneself in a particular situation. While this experience is likely to be dominated by information delivered by the senses, that is, by self-perception in a literal, immediate sense, human beings also have knowledge about themselves, amassed over years, and a sense of understanding how their self relates to others. The concept of a narrative self is considered to capture these aspects, which include the past and the future, and communication about the self both with oneself and with others. In the following, I shall focus on the minimal self for the most part (and thus speak of “self” whenever I mean “minimal self”) and suggest a theoretical framework explaining how people might represent others and themselves, how these two kinds of representations might interact and emerge through experience during infancy and childhood. Finally, I shall briefly touch the possible connection between minimal self and narrative self (which I shall consistently refer to as “narrative self”) before I conclude and ask some open questions.

Representing Others

How do we cognitively represent another person? Imagine yourself to be a newborn being exposed to your caregiver, say, your mother. While your sensory systems might not yet be fully developed, you are likely to perceive a number of features, even though not all of them will be relevant or salient for you: She will have a face of a particular shape that you learn to recognize after a while, particular hair, fingers, breasts, and so on. With the visual features come auditory features, such as the sound of her voice, tactile features, such as the feeling of her touch, and so forth. Insights into object perception suggest that all these features will be bound into some integrated feature network that can be considered the representation of the person that is your mother. How spontaneous this binding works is demonstrated by research showing that arbitrary stimuli enjoy privileged/efficient processing if they were simply presented as “representing” oneself or a close family member ( Schäfer, Frings, & Wentura, 2016 ; Sui, He, & Humphreys, 2012 ). However, people are not as static as objects are but act more or less continuously. Some of these actions will be specific to your mother, such as caressing and breastfeeding you, while others are shared by other people, such as moving around and talking. It will thus be essential to not only represent these actions but also to bind them to the people that carry them out. How does that work?

According to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC; Hommel, 2009 ; Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001 ), actions are represented by codes of features of their sensory consequences, which is true for both the actions of others and the actions one is carrying out oneself. Hence, both stimulus and action events are represented by codes of their perceptual features that are integrated into multimodal event files ( Hommel, 2004 ). As pointed out elsewhere ( Dolk et al., 2014 ; Hommel, Colzato & van den Wildenberg, 2009 ; Ma & Hommel, in press ), the concept of an event file is perfectly suited to account for the representation of people, even though representations of human beings are likely to be more complex than representations of objects and also contain more abstract features ( Greenwald et al., 2002 ). For instance, the feature of fatherhood is likely to be grounded in sensorimotor experiences with other adults caring about and playing with a particular infant, driving a particular adolescent to school, hosting the grown-up adolescent on important holidays, and living with someone else doing the same (cf. Hommel, 2016, pp. 85–88 ).

Representing Oneself

As one of its key characteristics, TEC assumes that perceiving a stimulus event is not any different from carrying out an intentional action (given that both are considered more or less dynamic events) and that perceiving other people is not systematically different from perceiving oneself. This implies a bundle-self concept as propagated by David Hume (1739) , who claimed that the (what now would be considered minimal) self consists of nothing but the total of all perceptual information a person currently has about herself. As soon as active perception stops, like when going to sleep, the self is literally assumed to “cease to exist.” Nevertheless, perception is always constrained by the mechanics and position of the receptors it relies on and bound to a particular perspective. Given that the perspective from which we perceive ourselves is systematically different from the perspective from which we perceive others, as nicely illustrated by Ernst Mach’s famous picture ( Figure 1 ), we tend to have somewhat different information about ourselves than we have about others – which can lead to dramatically different interpretations of perceived events ( Jones & Nisbett, 1972 ).

But even the perceptual quality of a given event is likely to differ between self- and other-perception: In addition to the perspective dependency of the information provided by exteroceptive channels, like vision, audition, tactition, and olfaction, information from interoceptive channels is exclusively available for the self-perceiver – at least in a strict online sense of perceptual awareness. Accordingly, a perceived action will have a stronger proprioceptive and affective (given that many internal receptors are closely linked to affective experience) feel to it if it is carried out by oneself rather than by another person. However, as we will see below, the possibility to have overlapping representations of self and other can reduce this discrepancy.

A second important difference between self- and other-perception relates to one’s motor activity. According to TEC, it is not only feature codes that become integrated into event files but codes of motor activity (which by itself is not considered to be perceivable) as well. This reflects the ideomotor heritage of TEC. Ideomotor theories aim to tackle the question how people can carry out intentional actions (i.e., generate goal-directed motor activity) despite their “executive ignorance” ( Turvey, 1977 ), that is, despite having no direct access to, and no specific knowledge about their motor system. Ideomotor theories account for this ability by assuming the obligatory integration of the motor components of actions, which are cognitively inaccessible, and the perceptual representations of these actions’ outcomes, which are cognitively accessible (for a review, see Shin, Proctor, & Capaldi, 2010 ). While TEC has broader ambitions, it contains this assumption by claiming that event files integrate feature codes related to the context and the perceivable consequences of an action as well as the motor codes driving it ( Hommel et al., 2001 ). On the one hand, this implies that representations of, or including, self-performed actions have a stronger motor component than representations of, or including, other-performed actions (except for other-performed actions that systematically co-occur with particular self-performed actions, such as in interactive sports). On the other hand, however, we will see that this discrepancy is likely to be less pronounced if and to the degree that representations of self and other overlap.

A third difference between representations of self- and other-performed actions relates to prediction. Some actions performed by others may be very easy and reliable to predict, but most of the time we will do a better job in predicting our own actions. According to Wegner (2003) and the cybernetically inspired comparator model of action control ( Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000 ), we perceive ourselves as an active agent by comparing the predicted outcomes of an action with its actual outcomes (for an overview, see Hommel, 2015a ): the better the prediction the more agency we perceive. Given that we can predict the outcomes of our own action more often and more reliably than the outcomes of other people’s actions, we are likely to perceive ourselves more as being the originator of our actions and less as being the originator of other people’s actions. Again, this discrepancy might be moderated by the degree of self–other overlap, but the degree of perceived agency will commonly be more pronounced for self-performed actions.

Intentional Weighting and Metacontrol

In the non-social world, what we perceive as one event and what as another is often relative and heavily context-dependent. Depending on our attentional set and current intentions, we can perceive the components of a letter as different and separate or as part of the same letter, which can be perceived as part of a word that is part of a title that is printed on a book that is placed in a shelf that is located in a room, and so forth. Similarly, Gestalt psychology has taught us that items or objects that share particular features, like color, orientation, or motion, can be perceived as one object or event. Buddha (see Harvey, 2012 ) has applied the same logic to self and other. In particular, he has emphasized the relativity of the self and proposed that the degree to which an individual is perceiving herself as separate from, or as a part of a larger social unit (such as a couple, group, or society) can vary. He even suggested that overcoming the perceived separation from others would constitute an important goal for life and proposed particular kinds of meditation as a means to overcome this separation. Indeed, there is evidence that the perceived distinction between self and other differs between cultures and religious practices ( Colzato, Zech, et al., 2012 ) and can be affected by priming ( Colzato, de Bruijn, & Hommel, 2012 ; Colzato, van den Wildenberg, & Hommel, 2013 ; Kühnen & Oyserman, 2002 ). How can we explain these kinds of observations?

TEC and recent TEC-related developments provide two theoretical tools to make sense of both intra- and inter-individual differences in the degree of self–other overlap. First, the original TEC has suggested that not all feature codes of a given event file are involved in representing a particular event in a particular situation. Rather, codes that refer to a perceptual dimension that is (or seems) either relevant for the current task and action goal or particularly salient in the current situation are “intentionally weighted” ( Memelink & Hommel, 2013 ), which means that their impact on the processing of this event (e.g., selecting an appropriate action) is increased relative to codes that do not receive intentional weight. This is indicated in Figure 2 , where a female tall student represents herself, as well as a short male student who happens to be a father of a kid (other). In the situation captured by this figure, three feature dimensions are relevant: body size, perhaps because this is the topic that the two are discussing, studenthood, because they met in a university after a psychology course, and the fatherhood of the male student, which might be another topic of the communication. Another feature is perceivably available: the gender of the two, but it is not currently relevant and does not receive any weighting, which is why it plays a minor role at best in the current representation of the two students.

The second theoretical tool is labeled “metacontrol.” As elaborated elsewhere ( Hommel, 2015b ; Hommel & Colzato, 2017a ), the way people exert cognitive control over their cognitive processing shows considerable intra- and inter-individual variability. Depending on individual predisposition and learning history, as well as on situational circumstances, cognitive control can either be characterized as showing persistence or exhibiting flexibility, and truly adaptive behavior requires an appropriate balance between these two extreme metacontrol poles ( Goschke, 2003 ). Following the Metacontrol State Model ( Hommel, 2015b ), biases toward persistence and flexibility moderate processing as indicated in Figure 2 . The dominant metacontrol state is assumed to emerge from the interaction of two competing functional systems (that may correspond to frontal and striatal dopaminergic pathways, respectively: Cools & D’Esposito, 2011 ), which modulate the degree to which goals impact the activation of cognitive representations (metacontrol of criteria impact) and the degree of competition between event files (metacontrol of competition). A strong bias toward persistence would strongly focus the system on currently relevant information and create a strongly “exclusive” processing state, whereas a strong bias toward flexibility would widen the focus and create a less selective, more “integrative” processing state ( Hommel & Wiers, 2017 ). Among other things, this can be assumed to affect the degree to which an agent discriminates between particular events. With respect to self- and other-representation, this implies that a bias toward persistence would increase self–other segregation while a bias toward flexibility would reduce segregation.

Taken altogether, intentional weighting and metacontrol can be assumed to co-determine the degree to which people represent themselves in a way that does or does not overlap with how they represent someone else. Shared features should increase the overlap but mainly if they receive strong intentional weighting – that is, if they are relevant or salient in the present context. In addition, representational overlap is more likely under a flexibility bias than under a persistence bias, irrespective of whether this bias is due to the impact of more permanent factors, such as genetic predisposition and cultural learning, or more context-sensitive factors, such as mood ( Hommel & Colzato, 2017a ). Given the strong evidence that open-monitoring meditation (the ultimate Buddhist means to overcome self–other boundaries) biases metacontrol toward flexibility ( Hommel & Colzato, 2017b ; Lippelt, Hommel, & Colzato, 2014 ), it is thus unsurprising that practicing Buddhists show evidence of greater representational self–other overlap ( Colzato, Zech, et al., 2012 ).

Sharing Experiences and Internal States

Apart from explaining individual variability and cultural differences, the combined impact of intentional weighting and metacontrol on self–other overlap helps to make sense of the intuition that some people seem to be better able to “put themselves into the shoes” of others and even seem to be able to share particular experiences with them. Recall that I have considered that perceiving a self-performed action is likely to have a stronger proprioceptive and affective feel than perceiving an action performed by someone else, that it may generate more motor activity, and create a stronger sense of agency. This is certainly true for a situation in which there is little self–other overlap, such as if an infant is comparing a self-performed action with that of an adult foreigner. But consider a situation with greater self–other overlap, such as when the infant is observing its own identical twin, say. Watching the twin will not only activate the codes of highly relevant or salient features but also retrieve/reactivate already stored event files that are sharing these features ( Hommel, 2004 ). Some of these files will have been acquired by having performed similar actions oneself in the past, and so, they are likely to contain proprioceptive, affective, and motor codes that were integrated on this occasion and that now tend to be reactivated ( Kühn, Keizer, Colzato, Rombouts, & Hommel, 2011 ). To the degree that this happens, and that metacontrol is sufficiently biased toward flexibility, the currently observed action will tend to have a proprioceptive and affective feel to it and even be accompanied by motor activity, which reduces the phenomenal discrepancy between mere observation and self-experience. Along the same lines, familiarity with the action and its expected effects will facilitate action–outcome prediction and therefore introduce some degree of perceived agency even for actions performed by others. This means that true sharing of perceptual and affective experiences is indeed possible, to the degree that the cognitive representations of observer and actor overlap, which is particularly likely if they share features, if the shared features are relevant or salient, if the observer is in a metacontrol state that is biased toward flexibility, and if the observer already had similar experiences before.

In a certain sense, increasing representational self–other overlap implies the blurring of the borders between self and other, just as recommended by Buddhist thinking. This blurring can be considered to facilitate informational exchange between self and other, and the sharing of perceptual and affective experiences might be one consequence thereof. An even stronger form of exchange has been demonstrated recently in our laboratory. Human participants were exposed to the head of an avatar on a screen in front of them, with the avatar’s head movements being either synchronized or not synchronized with the movements of the participant ( Ma, Sellaro, Lippelt, & Hommel, 2016 ). The idea was that synchronization would induce a perceptual experience not unlike when looking into a mirror, which also results in the view of a head that moves in synchrony with one’s own movements. As expected from previous studies in the rubber-hand illusion tradition ( Ma, Lippelt, & Hommel, 2017 ), synchronization increased identification with the avatar and perceived agency over the avatar’s movements. More interestingly, however, the avatar started to smile at some point, and the question was whether the mood state that this expression signals would transfer to the participant. Indeed, participants showed better mood and better performance in a mood-sensitive creativity task (as a more implicit mood measure) if being synchronized with a smiling avatar – but not if the avatar was smiling but not synchronized or synchronized but not smiling. In other words, the feature “mood” migrated from the representation of the avatar to the representation of the self, apparently facilitated by the self–other overlap created by the synchronization procedure. Another study successfully demonstrated the migration of perceived (or attributed) intelligence ( Ma, Sellaro, & Hommel, in press ): Participants were synchronized or not synchronized with a human avatar, which at some point started to morph into an ape. As expected, participants synchronized with the ape head showed lower scores in an intelligence test and were more convinced that animals have empathic abilities than participants whose movements were not synchronized with those of the ape head.

The Emergence of the Self

Buddhist accounts suggest particular ways to get rid of a self, with meditation being an important ingredient in this process. But where does the self come from in the first place? Self-theorists commonly take the existence of a self for granted and often assume or imply (explicitly or implicitly) that the self is a given from birth on, if not earlier (e.g., Bruner, 1973 ; Meltzoff & Moore, 1997 ; Rochat, 2001 ). Such self-as-a-given approaches are difficult to test and particularly difficult to disprove, because they fail to provide the mechanisms underlying the emergence or construction of a self. While the reasons for assuming a given self are not always obvious, some authors have pointed to signs of agency very early on, in some cases in newborns (e.g., Meltzoff & Moore, 1997 ). As elaborated elsewhere ( Verschoor & Hommel, 2017 ), the related evidence is unconvincing, and the case of very early agency seems overstated. More importantly for present purposes, however, there is evidence for the assumption that agency and ownership, the two ingredients of the minimal self ( Gallagher, 2000 ), emerge slowly and through active sensorimotor experience of the developing agent.

Regarding agency, much has been made of observations that infants are sensitive to contingencies between their own movements and particular action effects (for a review, see Gergely & Watson, 1999 ), such as of newborns that adjust their sucking rate in response to their mother’s vocal feedback ( DeCasper & Fifer, 1980 ). While sensitivity to action–effect contingency is certainly an important ingredient of the ideomotor learning process that is assumed to underlie voluntary action control, it does not yet show that newborns can make active use of expected action effects to carry out the movements necessary to produce them, nor does it show that they have integrated motor patterns with representations of the perceptual effects they produce. A direct test of this latter process has been conducted by Verschoor, Weidema, Biro, and Hommel (2010) , who presented 9-, 12-, and 18-month-olds with a touch-sensitive surface that generated salient audiovisual events if being touched. In one condition, participants were allowed to touch the surface and to generate one kind of event while in another condition another kind of event was generated without the surface being touched. Thereafter, participants were exposed to one or the other event, and the question was whether this would induce the tendency to touch the surface – which would indicate that bidirectional action–effect associations had been formed. All three age groups passed this test and showed more surface-touching tendencies when encountering the event that they had previously produced themselves. In a follow-up study comparing 7- and 12-month-olds, Verschoor, Spapé, Biro, and Hommel (2013) found no evidence for action–effect learning in the choices and reaction times of the 7-month-old. Interestingly, however, they did find an effect in the pupil-size behavior of this age group: even the 7-month-old showed bigger surprise if carrying out a movement that did not fit the presented action effect. This means that infants around that age are able to acquire knowledge that allows them to predict which action effect is associated with which a movement, but they are not yet able to employ this knowledge to select the action in order to generate that effect. In other words, they do have knowledge about the action and its consequences, but it is not yet “their” action that they carry out. Even if one considers having of this knowledge as being relevant for the self-concept, it seems to consist of a sort of causal knowledge but not yet functional agency. Accordingly, the human self seems to emerge from active exploration and sensorimotor experience, as suggested by Mead (1934) , but is unlikely to be a genetic given.

Functions of Minimal and Narrative Self

If the minimal self emerges from active sensorimotor exploration of one’s physical and social environment and if engaging in such exploration can be considered a goal-directed action, it follows that having a self in terms of body ownership (i.e., having the experience of the acting body as one’s own) and agency (i.e., having the experience of being the cause of one’s action) is not a precondition for the ability to carry out goal-directed actions but rather the consequence of having this ability. Indeed, in contrast to the often implicit assumption of self-as-a-given theorists that goal-directed action necessarily implies a self, there is no reason to assume that having a goal that is realized through some activity presupposes an agent who knows that it is him/her who is realizing this goal. There are good reasons to assume that not even conscious knowledge or insight into one’s goals is a requirement for goal-directed action, as there is indeed no unequivocal evidence for any functional role of conscious experience in action control ( Hommel, 2013 ; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2013 ). So what is having the concept of a self good for?

It is interesting to note that theorists are commonly not overly explicit with respect to why they think the concept exists in the first place and what particular cognitive functions it might have. In fact, one may ask why an agent might find it important to determine the individual authorship of a given action – beyond having reached the intended goal. While the widespread absence of a justification of this assumption seems to suggest that it is self-evident for readers with a Western background, it might be less obvious to readers with a different cultural background. As research on the cultural construction of the self shows, members of Eastern cultures tend to have a rather extended self-concept that includes family members, peers, and colleagues ( Markus & Kitayama, 2003 ) and experience something that Markus and Kitayama (2003 , 2010 ) have coined “conjoint agency.” If one considers culture as just one of the many social factors that shape human cognition ( Hommel & Colzato, 2010 , 2017a ), one would expect that other social factors have similar effects. For instance, there is evidence that Buddhists spontaneously relate their own action to the action of a co-actor more strongly than culture-matched atheists do ( Colzato, Zech, et al., 2012 ). Observations of this sort suggest that the sense of individual agency is a social construct (particularly popular in Western societies) rather than a basic ingredient of cognitive functioning that can simply be taken as a given. Along the same lines, Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov (2010, p. 385) have suggested that “In explaining why she puts in extra effort on her job, an American may note the money she receives, a French person may mention her honour, a Chinese person may point to mutual obligations, and a Dane may mention collegiality,” which according to the authors puts strong limitations on the commonsense “agency theory” that they characterize as “US-based.”

All these considerations suggest that the perception of ownership and agency are post-actional phenomena in the sense of Wegner (2003) . Wegner has suggested that goal-directed actions are driven by unconscious processes that do not only trigger the action in a motoric sense but that also generate expectations about the likely outcome. It is this expectation that can become conscious and that, if it matches the actual outcome of the action, generates the experience of intentionality and, so I would argue, the feeling of agency. Whether people do or do not have this experience plays no role for action control and the successful achievement of intended goals. However, it may very well play a role for post-actional activities, such as constructing a reason for the action for social justification, emphasizing particular aspects of the action over others to steer the attentional focus of other individuals, so to facilitate successful imitation or observational learning, and more ( Hommel, 2013 , 2017 ; Masicampo & Baumeister, 2013 ). It is interesting to note that all these functions have more to do with the concept of a narrative self than with that of a minimal self. Indeed, an increasing number of findings suggest that so-called implicit measures of the minimal self are less systematic and more difficult to predict than the common explicit measures, that is, responses to verbal inquiries into the experience of body ownership and agency (e.g., Dewey & Knoblich, 2014 ). As I would argue, such verbal inquiries constitute the basic ingredients of a social communication/justification situation that draws on the ability to explain one’s actions and to put them into a meaningful context, and it is these situations that our skill to construe a narrative self is made for. Outside of these kinds of social situations, the experience of owning the body that is performing an action and being the agent of it has hardly any obvious use. Hence, I would argue that a continuous self exists only if, and to the degree that we ask questions about it – selves are constructed on request.

Conclusions

The phenomenal aspect of the human self (the so-called minimal self) is likely to emerge through active, explorative interaction with one’s physical and social environment. Representations of oneself and of others do not seem to differ qualitatively from representations of other, non-social events. They consist of event files, integrated networks of codes that represent the perceptual aspects of the given individual, together with associated actions and affective responses. Event files are retrieved by similar events, and the contribution of each feature codes is weighted according to the relevance and salience of the underlying feature dimension. The degree of overlap between two given representations, such as between the representation of oneself and that of another person, depends on the number of shared features, on the weighting of these features in the present situation, and on the present metacontrol state – with persistence propagating representational segregation and flexibility promoting representational integration. While the basic assumptions of TEC and the discussed theoretical extensions stem from research on non-social events, there is no reason why the same theoretical framework should not work for the social domain as well. This opens new opportunities for the communication between the cognitive and the social sciences. The suggested framework provides a mechanistic basis for understanding phenomena in the social domain and at the same time allows the generation of new predictions based on insights into human cognitive functioning. Along the same lines, the representational assumptions of TEC are easy to translate into neuroscientific and technological concepts, which opens the previously rather philosophical treatment of the self to rigorous neuroscientific investigation and invites the creation of artificial selves in robots and other agents.

Open Questions

• 1. Does the perception of agency and ownership develop spontaneously or are the two concepts a social construct?
• 2. Do perceived agency and ownership develop independently or is the former a precondition of the latter?
• 3. Given the connection between object and person perception, does the cultural impact on the latter change the former systematically – as implied by Markus and Kitayama (2010) ?
• 4. Can systematic training of object perception or practices affecting metacontrol (like meditation) reduce or eliminate biases in person perception and improve social behavior?
• 5. How are minimal and narrative selves related?

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC-2015-AdG-694722) to the author.

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Article contents

Self and identity.

• Sanaz Talaifar Sanaz Talaifar Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
• , and  William Swann William Swann Department of Psychology, University of Texas
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.242
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Active and stored mental representations of the self include both global and specific qualities as well as conscious and nonconscious qualities. Semantic and episodic memory both contribute to a self that is not a unitary construct comprising only the individual as he or she is now, but also past and possible selves. Self-knowledge may overlap more or less with others’ views of the self. Furthermore, mental representations of the self vary whether they are positive or negative, important, certain, and stable. The origins of the self are also manifold and can be considered from developmental, biological, intrapsychic, and interpersonal perspectives. The self is connected to core motives (e.g., coherence, agency, and communion) and is manifested in the form of both personal identities and social identities. Finally, just as the self is a product of proximal and distal social forces, it is also an agent that actively shapes its environment.

• self-concept
• self-representation
• self-knowledge
• self-perception
• self-esteem
• personal identity
• social identity

Introduction

The concept of the self has beguiled—and frustrated—psychologists and philosophers alike for generations. One of the greatest challenges has been coming to terms with the nature of the self. Every individual has a self, yet no two selves are the same. Some aspects of the self create a sense of commonality with others whereas other aspects of the self set it apart. The self usually provides a sense of consistency, a sense that there is some connection between who a person was yesterday and who they are today. And yet, the self is continually changing both as an individual ages and he or she traverses different social situations. A further conundrum is that the self acts as both subject and object; it does the knowing about itself. With so many complexities, coupled with the fact that people can neither see nor touch the self, the construct may take on an air of mysticism akin to the concept of the soul (Epstein, 1973 ).

Perhaps the most pressing, and basic, question psychologists must answer regarding the self is “What is it?” For the man whom many regard as the father of modern psychology, William James, the self was a source of continuity that gave individuals a sense of “connectedness” and “unbrokenness” ( 1890 , p. 335). James distinguished between two components of the self: the “I” and the “me” ( 1910 ). The “I” is the self as agent, thinker, and knower, the executive function that experiences and reacts to the world, constructing mental representations and memories as it does so (Swann & Buhrmester, 2012 ). James was skeptical that the “I” was amenable to scientific study, which has been borne out by the fact that far more attention has been accorded to the “me.” The “me” is the individual one recognizes as the self, which for James included a material, social, and spiritual self. The material self refers to one’s physical body and one’s physical possessions. The social self refers to the various selves one may express and others may recognize depending on the social setting. The spiritual self refers to the enduring core of one’s being, including one’s values, personality, beliefs about the self, etc.

This article focuses on the “me” that will be referred to interchangeably as either the “self” or “identity.” We define the self as a multifaceted, dynamic, and temporally continuous set of mental self-representations. These representations are multifaceted in the sense that different situations may evoke different aspects of the self at different times. They are dynamic in that they are subject to change in the form of elaborations, corrections, and reevaluations (Diehl, Youngblade, Hay, & Chui, 2011 ). This is true when researchers think of the self as a sort of scientific theory in which new evidence about the self from the environment leads to adjustments to one’s self-theory (Epstein, 1973 ; Gopnick, 2003 ). It is also true when researchers consider the self as a narrative that can be rewritten and revised (McAdams, 1996 ). Finally, self-representations are temporally continuous because even though they change, most people have a sense of being the same person over time. Further, these self-representations, whether conscious or not, are essential to psychological functioning, as they organize people’s perceptions of their traits, preferences, memories, experiences, and group memberships. Importantly, representations of the self also guide an individual’s behavior.

Some psychologists (e.g., behaviorists and more recently Brubaker & Cooper, 2000 ) have questioned the need to implicate a construct as nebulous as the self to explain behavior. Certainly an individual can perform many complex actions without invoking his or her self-representations. Nevertheless, psychologists increasingly regard the self as one of the most important constructs in all of psychology. For example, the percentage of self-related studies published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , increased fivefold between 1972 and 2002 (Swann & Seyle, 2005 ) and has continued to grow to this day. The importance of the self becomes evident when one considers the consequences of a sense of self that is interrupted, damaged, or absent. Epstein ( 1973 ) offers a case in point with an example of a schizophrenic girl meeting her psychiatrist:

Ruth, a five year old, approached the psychiatrist with “Are you the bogey man? Are you going to fight my mother? Are you the same mother? Are you the same father? Are you going to be another mother?” and finally screaming in terror, “I am afraid I am going to be someone else.” [Bender, 1950 , p. 135]

To provide a more commonplace example, children do not display several emotions we consider uniquely human, such as empathy and embarrassment, until after they have developed a sense of self-awareness (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989 ). As Darwin has argued ( 1872 / 1965 ), emotions like embarrassment exist only after one has a developed a sense of self that can be the object of others’ attention.

The self’s importance also is evident when one considers that it is a pancultural phenomenon; all individuals have a sense of self regardless of where they are born. Though the content of self-representations may vary by cultural context, the existence of the self is universal. So too is the structure of the self. One of the most basic structural dimensions of the self involves whether the knowledge is active or stored.

Forms of Self-Knowledge

Active and stored self-knowledge.

Although i ndividuals accumulate immeasurable amounts of knowledge over their lifespans, at any given moment they can access only a portion of that knowledge. The aspects of self-knowledge held in consciousness make up “active self-knowledge.” Other terms for active self-knowledge are the working self-concept (Markus & Kunda, 1986 ), the spontaneous self-concept (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978 ), and the phenomenal self (Jones & Gerard, 1967 ). On the other hand, “stored self-knowledge” is information held in memory that one can access and retrieve but is not currently held in consciousness. Because different features of the self are active versus stored at different times depending on the demands of the situation, the self can be quite malleable without eliciting feelings of inconsistency or inauthenticity (Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002 ).

Semantic and Episodic Representations of Self-Knowledge

People possess both episodic and semantic representations of themselves (Klein & Loftus, 1993 ; Tulving, 1983 ). Episodic self-representations refer to “behavioral exemplars” or relatively brief “cartoons in the head” involving one’s past life and experiences. For philosopher John Locke, the self was built of episodic memory. For some researchers interested in memory and identity, episodic memory has been of particular interest because it is thought to involve re-experiencing events from one’s past, providing a person with content through which to construct a personal narrative (see, e.g., Eakin, 2008 ; Fivush & Haden, 2003 ; Klein, 2001 ; Klein & Gangi, 2010 ). Recall of these episodic instances happens together with the conscious awareness that the events actually occurred in one’s life (e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997 ).

Episodic self-knowledge may shed light on the individual’s traits or preferences and how he or she will or should act in the future, but some aspects of self-knowledge do not require recalling any specific experiences. Semantic self-knowledge involves memories at a higher level abstraction. These self-related memories are based on either facts (e.g., I am 39 years old) or traits and do not necessitate remembering a specific event or experience (Klein & Lax, 2010 ; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008 ). Thus, one may consider oneself intelligent (semantic self-knowledge) without recalling that he or she achieved stellar grades the previous term (episodic self-knowledge). In fact, Tulving ( 1972 ) suggested that the two types of knowledge may be structurally and functionally independent of each other. In support of this, case studies show that damage to the episodic self-knowledge system does not necessarily result in impairment of the semantic self-knowledge system. Evaluating semantic traits for self-descriptiveness is associated with activation in brain regions implicated in semantic, but not episodic, memory. In addition, priming a trait stored in semantic memory does not facilitate recall of corresponding episodic memories that exemplify the semantic self-knowledge (Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992 ). The tenuous relationship between episodic and semantic self-knowledge suggests that only a portion of semantic self-knowledge arises inductively from episodic self-knowledge (e.g., Kelley et al., 2002 ).

Recently some researchers have questioned the importance of memory’s role in creating a sense of identity. For example, at least when it comes to perceptions of others, people perceive a person’s identity to remain more intact after a neurodegenerative disease that affects their memory than one that affects their morality (Strohminger & Nichols, 2015 ).

Conscious and Nonconscious Self-Knowledge (Sometimes Confused With Explicit Versus Implicit)

Individuals may be conscious, or aware, of aspects of the self to varying degrees in different situations. Indeed sometimes it is adaptive to have self-awareness (Mandler, 1975 ) and other times it is not (Wegner, 2009 ). Nonconscious self-representations can influence behavior in that individuals may be unaware of the ways in which their self-representations affect their behavior (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ). Some researchers have even suggested that individuals can be unconscious of the contents of their self-representations (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2003 ). It is important to remember that consciousness refers primarily to the level of awareness of a self-representation, rather than the automaticity of a given representation (i.e., whether the representation is retrieved in an unaware, unintentional, efficient, and uncontrolled manner) (Bargh, 1994 ).

A key ambiguity in recent work on implicit self-esteem is defining its criterial attributes. One view contends that the nonconscious and conscious self reflect fundamentally distinct knowledge systems that arise from different learning experiences and have independent effects on thought, emotion, and behavior (Epstein, 1994 ). Another perspective views the self as a singular construct that may nevertheless show diverging responses on direct and indirect measures of self due to factors such as the opportunity and motivation to control behavioral responses (Fazio & Twoles-Schwen, 1999 ). While indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test do not require introspection and as a result may tap nonconscious representations, this is an assumption that should be supported with empirical evidence (Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006 ).

Issues of direct and indirect measurement are a key consideration in research on the implicit and explicit self. Indirect measures of self allow researchers to infer an individual’s judgment about the self as a result of the speed or nature of their responses to stimuli that may be more or less self-related (De Houwer & Moors, 2010 ). Some researchers have argued that indirect measures of self-esteem are advantageous because they circumvent self-presentational issues (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999 ), but other researchers have questioned such claims (Gawronski, LeBel, & Peters, 2007 ) because self-presentational strivings can be automatized (Paulhus, 1993 ).

Recent findings have raised additional questions regarding the validity of some key assumptions regarding research inspired by interest in implicit self-esteem (for a more optimistic take on implicit self-esteem, see Dehart, Pelham, & Tennen, 2006 ). Although near-zero correlations between individuals’ scores on direct and indirect measures of self (e.g., Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000 ) are often taken to mean that nonconscious and conscious self-representations are distinct, other factors, such as measurement error and lack of conceptual correspondence, can cause these low correlations (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Some researchers have also taken evidence of negligible associations between measures of implicit self-esteem and theoretically related outcomes to mean that such measures may not measure self-esteem at all (Buhrmester, Blanton, & Swann, 2011 ). A prudent strategy is thus to consider that indirect measures reflect an activation of associations between the self and other stimuli in memory and that these associations do not require conscious validation of the association as accurate or inaccurate (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Direct measures, on the other hand, do require validation processes (Strack & Deutsch, 2004 ; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ).

Global and Specific Self-Knowledge

Self-views vary in scope (Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1987 ). Global self-representations are generalized beliefs about the self (e.g., I am a worthwhile person) while specific self-representations pertain to a narrow domain (e.g., I am a nimble tennis player). Self-views can fall anywhere on a continuum between these two extremes. Generalized self-esteem may be thought of as a global self-representation at the top of a hierarchy with individual self-concepts nested underneath in specific domains such as academic, physical, and social (Marsh, 1986 ). Individual self-concepts, measured separately, combine statistically to form a superordinate global self-esteem factor (Marsh & Hattie, 1996 ). When trying to predict behavior it is important not to use a specific self-representation to predict a global behavior or a global self-representation to predict a specific behavior (e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005 ; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007 ; Trzesniewski et al., 2006 ).

Actual, Possible, Ideal, and Ought Selves

The self does not just include who a person is in the present but also includes past and future iterations of the self. In addition, people tend to hold “ought” or “ideal” beliefs about the self. The former includes one’s beliefs about who they should be according to their own and others’ standards while the latter includes beliefs about who they would like to be (Higgins, 1987 ). In a related vein, possible selves are the future-oriented positive or negative aspects of the self-concept, selves that one hopes to become or fears becoming (Markus & Nurius, 1986 ). Some research has even shown that distance between one’s feared self and actual self is a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than proximity between one’s ideal self and actual self (Ogilvie, 1987 ). Possible selves vary in how far in the future they are, how detailed they are, and how likely they are to become an actual self (Oyserman & James, 2008 ). Many researchers have studied the content of possible selves, which can be as idiosyncratic as a person’s imagination is. The method used to measure possible selves (close-ended versus open-ended questions) will affect which possible selves are revealed (Lee & Oyserman, 2009 ). The content of possible selves is also socially and contextually grounded. For example, as a person ages, career-focused possible selves become less important while health-related possible selves become increasingly important (Cross & Markus, 1991 ; Frazier, Hooker, Johnson, & Kaus, 2000 ).

Researchers have been interested in not just the content but the function of possible selves. Thinking about successful possible selves is mood enhancing (King, 2001 ) because it is a reminder that the current self can be improved. In addition, possible selves may play a role in self-regulation. By linking present and future selves, they may promote desired possible selves and avoid feared possible selves. Possible selves may be in competition with each other and with a person’s actual self. For example, someone may envision one possible self as an artist and another possible self as an airline pilot, and each of these possible selves might require the person to take different actions in the present moment. Goal striving requires employing limited resources and attention, so working toward one possible self may require shifting attention and resources away from another possible self (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006 ). Possible selves may have other implications as well. For example, Alesina and La Ferrara ( 2005 ) show how expected future income affects a person’s preferences for economic redistribution in the present.

Accuracy of Self-Knowledge and Feelings of Authenticity

Most individuals have had at least one encounter with an individual whose self-perception seemed at odds with “reality.” Perhaps it is a friend who believes himself to be a skilled singer but cannot understand why everyone within earshot grimaces when he starts singing. Or the boss who believes herself to be an inspiring leader but cannot motivate her workers. One potential explanation for inaccurate self-views is a disjunction between episodic and semantic memories; the image of grimacing listeners (episodic memory) may be quite independent of the conviction that one is a skilled singer (semantic memory). Of course, if self-knowledge is too disjunctive with reality it ceases to be adaptive; self-views must be moderately accurate to be useful in allowing people to predict and navigate their worlds. That said, some researchers have questioned the desirability of accurate self-views. For example, Taylor and Brown ( 1988 ) have argued that positive illusions about the self promote mental health. Similarly, Von Hippel and Trivers ( 2011 ) have argued that certain kinds of optimistic biases about the self are adaptive because they allow people to display more confidence than is warranted, consequently allowing them to reap the social rewards of that confidence.

Studying the accuracy of self-knowledge is challenging because objective criteria are often scarce. Put another way, there are only two vantage points from which to assess a person: self-perception and the other’s perception of the self. This is true even of supposedly “objective” measures of the self. An IQ test is still a measure of intelligence from the vantage point of the people who developed the test. Both vantage points can be subject to error. For example, self-perceptions may be biased to protect one’s self-image or due to self-comparison to an inappropriate referent. Others’ perceptions may be biased because of a lack of cross-situational information about the person in question or lack of insight into that person’s motives. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of each vantage point, self-reports may be better for assessing some traits (e.g., those low in observability, like neuroticism) while informant reports may be better for others (such as traits high in observability, like extraversion) (Vazire, 2010 ).

Furthermore, self-perceptions and others’ perceptions of the self may overlap to varying degrees. The “Johari window” provides a useful way of thinking about this (Luft & Ingham, 1955 ). The window’s first quadrant consists of things one knows about oneself that others also know about the self (arena). The second quadrant includes knowledge one has about the self that others do not have (façade). The third quadrant consists of knowledge one does not have about the self but others do have (blindspot). The fourth quadrant consists of information about the self that is not known to oneself or to others (unknown).

Which of these quadrants contains the “true self”? If I believe myself to be kind, but others do not, who is right? Which is a reflection of the “real me”? One set of attempts to answer this question has focused on perceptions of authenticity. The authentic self (Johnson & Boyd, 1995 ) is alternatively termed the “true self” (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014 ), “real self” (Rogers, 1961 ), “intrinsic self” (Schimel, Arndt, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2001 ), “essential self” (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014 ), or “deep self” (Sripada, 2010 ). Recent research has addressed both what aspects of the self other people describe as belonging to a person’s true self and how individuals judge their own authenticity.

Though authenticity has long been the subject of philosophical thought, only recently have researchers begun addressing the topic empirically, and definitional ambiguities abound (Knoll, Meyer, Kroemer, & Schroeder-Abe, 2015 ). Some studies use unidimensional measures that equate authenticity to feeling close to one’s true self (e.g., Harter, Waters, & Whitesell, 1997 ). A more elaborate and philosophically grounded approach proposes four necessary factors for trait authenticity: awareness (the extent of one’s self-knowledge, motivation to expand it, and ability to trust in it), unbiased processing (the relative absence of interpretative distortions in processing self-relevant information), behavior (acting consistently with one’s needs, preferences, and values), and relational orientation (valuing and achieving openness in close relationships) (Kernis, 2003 ). Authenticity is related to feelings of self-alienation (Gino, Norton, & Ariely, 2010 ). Being authentic is also sometimes thought to be equivalent to low self-monitoring (Snyder & Gangestad, 1982 )— someone who does not alter his or her behavior to accommodate changing social situations (Grant, 2016 ). Authenticity and self-monitoring, however, are orthogonal constructs; being sensitive to environmental cues can be compatible with acting in line with one’s true self.

Although some have argued that the ability to behave in a way that contradicts one’s feelings and mental states is a developmental accomplishment (Harter, Marold, Whitesell, & Cobbs, 1996 ), feelings of authenticity have been associated with many positive outcomes such as positive self-esteem, positive affect, and well-being (Goldman & Kernis, 2002 ; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, & Joseph, 2008 ). One interesting line of research examines the interaction of authenticity, power, and well-being. Power can increase feelings of authenticity in social interactions (Kraus, Chen, & Keltner, 2011 ), and that increased authenticity in turn can result in higher well-being (Kifer, Heller, Peruvonic, & Galinsky, 2013 ). Another line of research examines the relationship between beliefs about authenticity (at least in the West) and morality. Gino, Kouchaki, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) suggest that dishonesty and inauthenticity share a similar source: dishonesty involves being untrue to others while inauthenticity involves being untrue to the self.

Metacognitive Aspects of Self

Valence and importance of self-views.

Self-knowledge may be positively or negatively valenced. Having more positive self-views and fewer negative ones are associated with having higher self-esteem (Brown, 1986 ). Both bottom-up and top-down theories have been used to explain this association. The bottom-up approach posits that the valence of specific self-knowledge drives the valence of one’s global self-views (e.g., Marsh, 1990 ). In this view, someone who has more positive self-views in specific domains (e.g., I am intelligent and attractive) should be more likely to develop high self-esteem overall (e.g., I am worthwhile). In contrast, the top-down perspective holds that the valence of global self-views drive the valence of specific self-views such that someone who thinks they are a worthwhile person is more likely to view him or herself as attractive and intelligent (e.g., Brown, Dutton, & Cook, 2001 ). The reasoning is grounded in the view that global self-esteem develops quite early in life and thus determines the later development of domain-specific self-views.

A domain-specific self-view can vary not only in its valence but also in its importance. Domain-specific self-views that one believes are important are more likely to affect global self-esteem than those self-views that one considers unimportant (Pelham, 1995 ; Pelham & Swann, 1989 ). As James wrote, “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 310). Of course not all self-views matter to the same extent for all people. A professor of Greek studies is likely to place a great deal of importance on his knowledge of Greek. Furthermore, changes to features that are perceived to be more causally central than others are believed to be more disruptive to identity (Chen, Urminsky, & Bartels, 2016 ). Individuals try to protect their important self-views by, for example, surrounding themselves with people and environments who confirm those important self-views (Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ) or distancing themselves from close friends who outperform them in these areas (Tesser, 1988 ).

Certainty and Clarity of Self-Views

Individuals may feel more or less certain about some self-views as compared to others. And just as they are motivated to protect important self-views, people are also motivated to protect the self-views of which they are certain. People are more likely to seek (Pelham, 1991 ) and receive (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ) feedback consistent with self-views that are highly certain than those about which they feel less certain. They also actively resist challenges to highly certain self-views (Swann & Ely, 1984 ).

Another construct related to certainty is self-concept clarity. Not only are people with high self-concept clarity confident and certain of their self-views, they also are clear, internally consistent, and stable in their convictions about who they are (Campbell et al., 1996 ). The causes of low self-concept clarity have been theorized to be due to a discrepancy between one’s current self-views and the social feedback one has received in childhood (Streamer & Seery, 2015 ). Both high self-concept certainty and self-concept clarity are associated with higher self-esteem (Campbell, 1990 ).

Stability of Self-Views

The self is constantly accommodating, assimilating, and immunizing itself against new self-relevant information (Diehl et al., 2011 ). In the end, the self may remain stable (i.e., spatio-temporally continuous; Parfit, 1971 ) in at least two ways. First, the self may be stable in one’s absolute position on a scale. Second, there may be stability in one’s rank ordering within a group of related others (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006 ).

The question of the self’s stability can only be answered in the context of a specified time horizon. For example, like personality traits, self-views may not be particularly good predictors of behavior at a given time slice (perhaps an indication of the self’s instability) but are good predictors of behavior over the long term (Epstein, 1979 ). Similarly, more than others, some people experience frequent, transient changes in state self-esteem (Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993 ). Furthermore, there is a difference between how people perceive the stability of their self-views and the actual stability of their self-knowledge. Though previous research has explored the benefits of perceived self-esteem stability (e.g., Kernis, Paradise, Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000 ; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989 ), a recent program of research on fixed versus growth mindsets explores the benefits of the malleability of self-views in a variety of domains (Dweck, 1999 , 2006 ). For example, teaching adolescents to have a more malleable (i.e., incremental) theory of personality that “people change” led them to react less negatively to an immediate experience of social adversity, have lower overall stress and physical illness eight months later, and better academic performance over the school year (Yeager et al., 2014 ). Thus, believing that the self can be unstable can have positive effects in that one negative social interaction, or an instance of poor performance is not an indication that the self will always be that way, and this may, in turn, increase effort and persistence.

Organization of Self-Views

Though we have already touched on some aspects of the organization of self (e.g., specific self-views nested within global self-views), it is important to consider other aspects of organization including the fact that some self-views may be more assimilated within each other. Integration refers to the tendency to store both positive and negative self-views together, and is thought to promote resilience in the face of stress or adversity (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2007 ). Compartmentalization refers to the tendency to store positive and negative self-views separately. But both integration and compartmentalization can have positive and negative consequences and can interact with other metacognitive aspects of the self, like importance. For example, compartmentalization has been associated with higher self-esteem and less depression among people for whom positive components of the self are important (Showers, 1992 ). On the other hand, for those whose negative self-views are important, compartmentalization has been associated with lower self-esteem and higher depression.

Origins and Development of the Self

Developmental approaches.

Psychologists have long been interested in when and how infants develop a sense of self. One very basic question is whether selfhood in infancy is comparable to selfhood in adulthood. The answer depends on definitions of selfhood. For example, some researchers have measured and defined selfhood in infants as the ability to self-regulate and self-organize, which even animals can do. This definition bears little resemblance to selfhood in adulthood. Nativist and constructivist debates within developmental psychology (and language development in particular) that grapple with the problem of the origins of knowledge also have implications for understanding origins of the self. A nativist account (e.g., Chomsky, 1975 ) that considers the human mind to be innately constrained to formulate a very small set of representations would suggest that the mind is designed to develop a self. Information from the environment may form specific self-representations, but a nativist account would posit that the structure of the self is intrinsic. A constructivist account would reject the notion that there are not enough environmental stimuli to explain the development of a construct like the self unless one invokes a specific innate cognitive structure. Rather, constructivists might suggest that a child develops a theory of self in the same way scientific theories are developed (Gopnik, 2003 ).

Because infants and children cannot self-report their mental states as adults can, psychologists must use other methods to study the self in childhood. One method involves studying the development of children’s use of the personal pronouns “me,” “mine,” and “I” (Harter, 1983 ; Hobson, 1990 ). Another method that is used cross-culturally, mirror self-recognition (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979 ; Lewis & Ramsay, 2004 ), has been associated with brain maturation (Lewis, 2003 ) and myelination of the left temporal region (Carmody & Lewis, 2006 , 2010 ; Lewis & Carmody, 2008 ). Pretend play, which occurs between 15 and 24 months, is an indication that the self is developing because it requires the toddler’s ability to understand its own and others’ mental states (Lewis, 2011 ). The development of self-esteem has also historically been difficult to study due to a lack of self-esteem measures that can be used across the lifespan. Recently, psychologists have developed a lifespan self-esteem scale (Harris, Donnellan, & Trzesniewski, 2017 ) suitable for measuring global self-esteem from ages 5 to 93.

The development of theory of mind, the understanding that others have minds separate from one’s own, is also closely related to the development of the self. For example, people cannot make social comparisons until they have developed the required cognitive abilities, usually by middle childhood (Harter, 1999 ; Ruble, Boggiano, Feldman, & Loebl, 1980 ). Finally, developmental psychology is also useful in understanding the self beyond childhood and into adolescence and beyond. Adolescence is a time where goals of autonomy from parents and other adults become particularly salient (Bryan et al., 2016 ), adolescents experiment with different identities to see which fit best, and many long-term goals and personal aspirations are established (Crone & Dahl, 2012 ).

Biological Approaches

Biological approaches to understanding the origins of the self consider neurological, genetic, and hormonal underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are likely evolutionarily driven (Penke, Denissen, & Miller, 2007 ). Neuroscientists have debated the extent to which self-knowledge is “special,” or processed differently than other kinds of knowledge. What is clear is that no brain region by itself is responsible for our sense of self, but different aspects of the self-knowledge may be associated with different brain regions. Furthermore, the same region that is implicated in self-related processing can also be implicated in other types of processing (Ochsner et al., 2005 ; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006 ). Specifically, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) have been associated with self-related processing (Northoff Heinzel, De Greck, Bermpohl, Dobrowolny, & Panksepp, 2006 ). But meta-analyses have found that the mPFC and PCC are recruited during the processing of both self-specific and familiar stimuli more generally (e.g., familiar others) (Qin & Northoff, 2011 ).

Twin studies of personality traits can shed light on the genetic bases of self. For example, genes account for about 40% to 60% of the population variance in self-reports of the Big Five personality factors (for a review, see Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001 ). Self-esteem levels also seem to be heritable, with 30–50% of population variance accounted for by genes (Kamakura, Ando, & Ono, 2007 ; Kendler, Gardner, & Prescott, 1998 ).

Finally, hormones are unlikely to be a cause of the self but may affect the expression of the self. For example, testosterone and cortisol levels interact with personality traits to predict different levels of aggression (Tackett et al., 2015 ). Differences in levels of and in utero exposure to certain hormones also affect gender identity (Berenbaum & Beltz, 2011 ; Reiner & Gearhart, 2004 ).

Intrapsychic Approaches

Internal processes, including self-perception and introspection, also influence the development of the self. One of the most obvious ways to develop knowledge about the self (especially when existing self-knowledge is weak) is to observe one’s own behavior across different situations and then make inferences about the aspects of the self that may have caused those behaviors (Bem, 1972 ). And just as judgments about others’ attributes are less certain when multiple possible causes exist for a given behavior, the same is true of one’s own behaviors and the amount of information they yield about the self (Kelley, 1971 ).

Conversely, introspection involves understanding the self from the inside outward rather than from the outside in. Though surprisingly little thought (only 8%) is expended on self-reflection (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982 ), people buttress self-knowledge through introspection. For example, contemporary psychoanalysis can increase self-knowledge, even though an increase in self-knowledge on its own is unlikely to have therapeutic effects (Reppen, 2013 ). Writing is one form of introspection that does have psychological and physical therapeutic benefits (Pennebaker, 1997 ). Research shows that brief writing exercises can result in fewer physician visits (e.g., Francis & Pennebaker, 1992 ), and depressive episodes (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988 ), better immune function (e.g., Esterling, Kiecolt-Glaser, Bodnar, & Glaser, 1994 ), and higher grade point average (e.g., Cameron & Nicholls, 1998 ) and many other positive outcomes.

Experiencing the “subjective self” is yet another way that individuals gain self-knowledge. Unlike introspection, experiencing the subjective self involves outward engagement, a full engagement in the moment that draws attention away from the self (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ). Being attentive to one’s emotions and thoughts in the moment can reveal much about one’s preferences and values. Apparently, people rely more on their subjective experiences than on their overt behaviors when constructing self-knowledge (Andersen, 1984 ; Andersen & Ross, 1984 ).

Interpersonal Approaches

At the risk of stating the obvious, humans are social animals and thus the self is rarely cut off from others. In fact, many individuals would rather give themselves a mild electric shock than be alone with their thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014 ). The myth of finding oneself by eschewing society is dubious, and one of the most famous proponents of this tradition, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, actually regularly entertained visitors during his supposed seclusion at Walden (Schulz, 2015 ). As early as infancy, the reactions of others can lay the foundation for one’s self-views. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969 ; Hazan & Shaver, 1994 ) holds that children’s earliest interactions with their caregivers lead them to formulate schemas about their lovability and worth. This occurs outside of the infant’s awareness, and the schemas are based on the consistency and responsiveness of the care they receive. Highly consistent responsiveness to the infant’s needs provide the basis for the infant to develop feelings of self-worth (i.e., high global self-esteem) later in life. Though the mechanisms by which this occur are still being investigated, it may be that self-schemas developed during infancy provide the lens through which people interpret others’ reactions to them (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987 ). Note, however, that early attachment relationships are in no way deterministic: 30–45% of people change their attachment style (i.e., their pattern of relating to others) across time (e.g., Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003 ).

Early attachment relationships provide a working model for how an individual expects to be treated, which is associated with perceptions of self-worth. But others’ appraisals of the self are also a more direct source of self-knowledge. An extremely influential line of thought from sociology, symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902 ; Mead, 1934 ), emphasized the component of the self that James referred to as the social self. He wrote, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 294). The symbolic interactionists proposed that people come to know themselves not through introspection but rather through others’ reactions and perceptions of them. This “looking glass self” sees itself as others do (Yeung & Martin, 2003 ). People’s inferences about how others view them become internalized and guide their behavior. Thus the self is created socially and is sustained cyclically.

Research shows, however, that reflected appraisals may not tell the whole story. While it is clear that people’s self-views correlate strongly with how they believe others see them, self-views are not necessarily perfectly correlated with how people actually view them (Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979 ). Further, people’s self-views may inform how they believe others see them rather than the other way around (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993 ). Lastly, individuals are better at knowing how people see them in general rather than knowing how specific others view them (Kenny & Albright, 1987 ).

Though others’ perceptions of the self are not an individual’s only source of self-knowledge, they are an important source, and in more than one way. For example, others’ provide a reference point for “social comparison.” According to Festinger’s social comparison theory ( 1954 ), people compare their own traits, preferences, abilities, and emotions to those of similar others, making both upward and downward comparisons. These comparisons tend to happen spontaneously and effortlessly. The direction of the comparison influences how one views and feels about the self. For example, comparing the self to someone worse off boosts self-esteem (e.g., Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995 ; Marsh & Parker, 1984 ). In addition to increasing self-knowledge, social comparisons are also motivating. For instance, those undergoing difficult or painful life events can cope better when they make downward comparisons (Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985 ). When motivated to improve the self in a given domain, however, people may make upward comparisons to idealized others (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999 ). Sometimes individuals make comparisons to inappropriate others, but they have the ability (with mental effort) to undo the changes made to the self-concept as a result of this comparison (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995 ).

Others can influence the self not only through interactions and comparisons but also when an individual becomes very close to a significant other. In this case, according to self-expansion theory (Aron & Aron, 1996 ), as intimacy increases, people experience cognitive overlap between the self and the significant other. People can acquire novel self-knowledge as they subsume attributes of the close other into the self.

Finally, the origins and development of the self are interpersonally influenced to the extent that our identities are dependent on the social roles we occupy (e.g., as mother, student, friend, professional, etc.). This will be covered in greater detail in the section on “The Social Self.” Here it is important simply to recognize that as the social roles of an individual inevitably change over time, so too does their identity.

Cultural Approaches

Markus and Kitayama’s seminal paper ( 1991 ) on differences in expression of the self in Eastern and Western cultures spawned an incredible amount of work investigating the importance of culture on self-construals. Building on the foundational work of Triandis ( 1989 ) and others, this work proposed that people in Western cultures see themselves as autonomous individuals who value independence and uniqueness more so than connectedness and harmony with others. In contrast to this individualism, people in the East were thought to be more collectivist, valuing interdependence and fitting in. However, the theoretical relationship between self-construals and the continuous individualism-collectivism variable have been treated in several different ways in the literature. Some have described individualism and collectivism as the origins of differences in self-construals (e.g., Gudykunst et al., 1996 ; Kim, Aune, Hunter, Kim, & Kim, 2001 ; Singelis & Brown, 1995 ). Others have considered self-construals as synonymous with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002 ; Taras et al., 2014 ) or have used individualism-collectivism at the individual level as an analog of the variable at the cultural level (Smith, 2011 ).

However, in contrast to perspectives that treat individualism and collectivism as a unidimensional variable (e.g., Singelis, 1994 ), individualism and collectivism have also been theorized to be multifaceted “cultural syndromes” that include normative beliefs, values, and practices, as well as self-construals (Brewer & Chen, 2007 ; Triandis, 1993 ). In this view, there are many ways of being independent or collectivistic depending on the domain of functioning under consideration. For example, a person may be independent or interdependent when defining the self, experiencing the self, making decisions, looking after the self, moving between contexts, communicating with others, or dealing with conflicting interests (Vignoles et al., 2016 ). These domains of functioning are orthogonal such that being interdependent in one domain does not require being interdependent in another. This multidimensional picture of individual differences in individualism and collectivism is actually more similar to Markus and Kitayama’s ( 1991 ) initial treatment aiming to emphasize cultural diversity and contradicts the prevalent unidimensional approach to cultural differences that followed.

Recent research has pointed out other shortcomings of this dichotomous approach. There is a great deal of heterogeneity among the world’s cultures, so simplifying all culture to “Eastern” and “Western” or collectivistic versus individualistic types may be invalid. Vignoles and colleagues’ ( 2016 ) study of 16 nations supports this. They found that neither a contrast between Western and non-Western, nor between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, sufficiently captured the complexity of cross-cultural differences in selfhood. They conclude that “it is not useful to characterize any culture as ‘independent’ or ‘interdependent’ in a general sense” and rather advocate for research that identifies what kinds of independence and interdependence may be present in different contexts ( 2016 , p. 991). In addition, there is a great deal of within culture heterogeneity in self-construals For example, even within an individualistic, Western culture like the United States, working-class people and ethnic minorities tend to be more interdependent (Markus, 2017 ), tempering the geographically based generalizations one might draw about self-construals.

Another line of recent research on the self in cultural context that has explored self-construals beyond the East-West dichotomy is the study of multiculturalism and individuals who are a member of multiple cultural groups (Benet-Martinez & Hong, 2014 ). People may relate to each of the cultures to which they belong in different ways, and this may in turn have important effects. For example, categorization, which involves viewing one cultural identity as dominant over the others, is associated positively with well-being but negatively with personal growth (Yampolsky, Amiot, & de la Sablonnière, 2013 ). Integration involves cohesively connecting multiple cultures within the self while compartmentalization requires keeping one’s various cultures isolated because they are seen to be in opposition. Each of these strategies has different consequences.

Finally, the influence of religion remains significant in many parts of the world (Georgas, van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004 ; Inglehart & Baker, 2000 ), and so religion is also an important source of differences in self-construal. These religious traditions provide answers to the question of how the self should relate to others. For example, Buddhism emphasizes the interdependence of all things and thus agency does not necessarily reside in individual actors. Moreover, for Buddhists the boundaries between the self and the other are insignificant, and in fact the self is thought to be impermanent (see Garfield, Nichols, Rai, Nichols, & Strohminger, 2015 ).

Motivational Properties of the Self

Need for communion, agency, and coherence.

Understanding what motivates people is one of social psychology’s core questions, and a variety of motives have been proposed. Three motives that are particularly important to self-processes are the need for communion (belonging and interpersonal connectedness), the need for agency (autonomy and competence), and the need for coherence (patterns and regularities). The needs for communion and agency are the foundations of many aspects of social behavior (Baumeister & Leary, 1995 ; Wiggins & Broughton, 1991 ). Among attitude researchers, constructs similar to communion and agency (i.e., warmth and competence) represent the two basic dimensions of attitudes (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2007 ; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005 ). Of even more relevance to the self, communion and agency correspond with the dual forms of self-esteem (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976 ; Gecas, 1971 ). That is, self-esteem can be broken down into two components: self-liking and self-competence (Tafarodi & Swann, 2001 ). Self-competence is an evaluation of one’s ability to bring about a desired outcome while the need for communion is an evaluation of one’s goodness, worth, and lovability. Each of these dimensions of self-esteem predicts unique outcomes (e.g., Bosson & Swann, 1999 ; Tafarodi & Vu, 1997 ).

Those who do not fulfill their communion needs have poorer physical outcomes such as relatively poor physical health, weakened immune functioning, and higher mortality rates (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988 ; Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996 ). As far as psychological outcomes, people who lack positive connections with others also experience greater loneliness (Archibald, Bartholomew, & Marx, 1995 ; Newcomb & Bentler, 1986 ), while those with rich social networks report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999 ). People’s sense of autonomy also contributes to psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989 ) and encourages people to strive for high performance in domains they care about. Autonomy strivings can also be beneficial in that they contribute to people’s need for self-growth (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001 ; Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995 ).

Finally, a great deal of support exists for the notion that people have a fundamental need for psychological coherence or the need for regularity, predictability, meaning, and control (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006 ). Coherence is a distinct from consistency because it refers specifically to the consistency between a person’s enduring self-views and the other aspects of their psychological universe (English, Chen, & Swann, 2008 ). The coherence motive may be even more basic than the needs for communion and agency (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Popper, 1963 ). That is, self-views serve as the lenses through which people perceive reality, and incoherence degrades the vision of reality that these lenses offer.

When people feel that their self-knowledge base is incoherent, they may not know how to act, and guiding action is thought to be the primary purpose of thinking in the first place (James, 1890 / 1950 ).

Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification Motives

Drawing on Prescott Lecky’s ( 1945 ) proposition that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence, self-verification theory posits that people desire to be seen as they see themselves, even if their self-views are negative. Self-views can guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. In addition, people act on the preference for self-confirmatory evaluations ensuring that their experiences reinforce their self-views. For example, just as those who see themselves as likable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them positively, so too do people who see themselves as dislikable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them negatively (e.g., Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989 ). The theory suggests that people both enter and leave relationships that fail to satisfy their self-verification strivings (Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994 ), even divorcing people who they believe have overly positive appraisals of them (for a review, see Kwang & Swann, 2010 ). People may also communicate their identities visually through “identity cues” that enable others to understand and react accordingly to that identity (Gosling, 2008 ). People seek verification of their specific as well as global (self-views). They are especially inclined to seek self-verifying evaluations for self-views that are certain or important (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ).

For the 70% of individuals with globally positive self-views (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1995 ), self-verification may look like self-enhancement strivings (Brown, 1986 ) in that it will compel people to seek and prefer positive feedback about the self. In fact, even people with negative self-views tend to self-enhance when they do not have the cognitive resources available to reflect on their self-views and compare it to the feedback available (Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ). In addition, people have a tendency to self-enhance before they self-verify (Swann et al., 1990 ). Other evidence for self-enhancement includes the tendency for people to view themselves as better than average, though this may be most likely for ambiguous traits that can describe a wide variety of behaviors because the evidence that people use to make self-evaluations is idiosyncratic (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ).

It is important to remember in discussions of self-verification and self-enhancement that people do not seek to see themselves as they actually are but rather as they see themselves . As mentioned in the section on accuracy, this self-view may overlap to varying degrees with “reality” or others’ perceptions of the self.

The Social Self

Identity negotiation.

People’s self-views influence the kinds of relationships they will engage in, and people can take on numerous identities depending on the situation and relationship. Identity negotiation theory (Swann & Bosson, 2008 ) suggests that relationship partners establish “who is who” via ongoing, mutual, and reciprocal interactions. Once people establish a “working consensus” for what roles each person will take in the relationship (e.g., Swann & Bosson, 2008 ), their agreed-upon expectations help disconnected individuals collaborate toward common obligations and goals, with some commitment to each other. Identity negotiation processes help define relationships and serve as a foundation for organized social activity. The identities that people negotiate tend to align with their chronic self-views. People follow these identity-negotiating processes, albeit largely unintentionally, during each of several successive stages of social interaction. Identities only survive to the extent that they are nourished and confirmed by the social environment, so negotiating identities in relationships is one way an individual ensures the survival of their self-views.

Personal and Social Self-Knowledge

Researchers have historically distinguished between two types of identity: personal and social. Personal identity refers to those features of the self that distinguish us from others while social identity refers to features of the self that are a source of commonality with others, such as group memberships. Once formed, social identities have a powerful influence on thought and behavior (Tajfel, 1981 ; Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). Social category memberships can influence a person’s self-definition as much or more than idiosyncratic personal attributes (Ray, Mackie, Rydell, & Smith, 2008 ). One version of social identity theory posits that people enter groups that they view as both positive and distinctive to bolster their self-views (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1988 ). Evidence shows that people display a strong ingroup bias, or tendency to favor their own group relative to outgroups (e.g., Brewer & Kramer, 1985 ; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971 ). This bias, along with the outgroup homogeneity effect whereby people see outgroup members as more similar than ingroup members (Linville & Jones, 1980 ) facilitates people’s ability to dehumanize members of outgroups. Dehumanization, perceiving a person as lacking in human qualities, then allows for the justification and maintenance of intergroup prejudice and conflict (Cortes, Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005 ; Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 ).

Self-categorization theory, in contrast to emphasizing motivation as in social identity theory, stresses the perceptual processes that lead humans to categorize the world into “us” and “them” (Turner, 1985 ; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987 ). Other approaches argue that social identities reduce uncertainty (e.g., Hogg, 2007 , 2012 ), make the world more coherent (e.g., Ellemers & Van Knippenberg, 1997 ), or protect people from the fear of death (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002 ). Though these approaches emphasize cognitive aspects of group membership, group-related emotions are also an important component of social identity. For instance, intergroup emotions theory proposes that a person’s emotional reactions toward other social groups can change in response to situationally induced shifts in self-categorization (Mackie, Maitner, & Smith, 2009 ).

Whatever the nature of the motive that causes people to identify with groups, although group memberships are critical for survival, they can also place people in grave danger when they motivate extreme action on behalf of the group. Research on identity fusion, which occurs when the boundaries between one’s personal and social identities become porous, shows how strong alignment with a group can lead to fighting and dying for that group at great personal cost (Whitehouse, McQuinn, Buhrmester, & Swann, 2014 ). This occurs when people come to view members of their social group as family (Swann et al., 2014 ).

Some research has investigated how personal and social identities are cognitively structured (Reid & Deaux, 1996 ). The segregation model of identity assumes that social and personal attributes are distinct (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991 ) while the integration model suggests that identities and attributes coexist in a limited set of cognitive structures. Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, and Cotting ( 1999 ) suggest that what constitutes social versus personal identity should not be determined by the attribute itself but rather the function it is serving (i.e., connecting the self to other people or distinguishing the self from other people). Similarly, optimal distinctiveness theory (Brewer, 1991 ) argues that individuals have an inherent drive to identity with groups but an equally important drive to maintain their individuality. To cope, they strive to find a balance between these opposing forces by finding an identity that supports both the individual’s need for autonomy and affiliation.

For most people, gender and ethnicity are important social identities, and there is variation in the strength of people’s identification with these groups (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992 ). In terms of how gender affects the expression of the self, girls are often socialized to prioritize the qualities that align them to others, while boys are taught to prioritize the qualities that distinguish and differentiate them from others (e.g., Spence, Deaux, & Helmreich, 1985 ). Moreover, women’s self-esteem tends to be connected more to their relational qualities, while men’s self-esteem is linked to their independent qualities (Josephs, Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992 ).

Though society has made great strides in allowing men and women to embrace identities of their own choosing (e.g., Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2004 ), traditional social expectations about what it means to be a man or a women persist. For example, gender stereotypes have remained constant over the past thirty years even as women have made significant professional and political gains (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016 ). These stereotypes remain entrenched for men as well. England ( 2010 ) argues that for the gender revolution to be complete, not only should traditionally male professions and domains be open to women but traditionally female domains should be increasingly occupied by men. This would help move society closer to attaining gender equality while signaling that traditionally female-dominated roles are equally valued.

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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

The me-file: an event-coding approach to self-representation.

• 1 Cognitive Psychology Unit, Institute for Psychological Research & Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
• 2 Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany
• 3 Department of Psychology, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China

Numerous authors have taken it for granted that people represent themselves or even have something like “a self”, but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. How do people represent themselves? Here I propose that they do so not any differently from how they represent other individuals, events, and objects: by binding codes representing the sensory consequences of being oneself into a Me-File, that is, into an event file integrating all the codes resulting from the behaving me. This amounts to a Humean bundle-self theory of selfhood, and I will explain how recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding, a general theory of human perception and action control, provide all the necessary ingredients for specifying the mechanisms underlying such a theory. The Me-File concept is likely to provide a useful mechanistic basis for more specific and more theoretically productive experimentation, as well as for the construction of artificial agents with human-like selves.

Introduction

Like many other concepts used in academic psychology, the concept of the “self” is rather uncritically taken to refer to something residing in the human mind or brain or both that creates some degree of unity of either the phenomenal experience that we have with or about us or the stories that we are telling about us. Nowhere does one find the concept to be questioned or justified, apparently because both authors and readers consider the existence of a self self-evident (pun partly intended). The reason for this uncritical acceptance is likely to be its philosophical heritage: the only toolbox that philosophers traditionally have available to acquire their data is themselves and their phenomenal experience, so that it does not come as a surprise that the only thing that Descartes was unable to doubt was (the phenomenal experience of) the doubting self. However, less subjective methods did not provide strong support for our intuition that our phenomenal experience plays an important role in our thinking and acting, as it turned out to be too slow and too error-prone to represent a promising causal factor in human perception and action ( Nisbett and Wilson, 1977 ; Wegner, 2002 ; Hommel, 2013 ). Moreover, the mere fact that a concept exists in our language cannot be taken as existence proof for a dedicated psychological mechanism responsible for generating the behavior this concept refers to ( Danziger, 1997 ). More specifically, while there is nothing wrong with categorizing all information that receptors provide about the agent carrying them as “belonging to or constituting a self,” the mere fact that this information can be consciously perceived does not yet require any mechanism creating any unity. Along the same lines, the fact that people tend to play the main role in their narratives does not require any dedicated mechanism that makes sure that they do—it may simply be the fact that they happen to be the one they are the most familiar with.

These considerations raise the suspicion that the self-concept carries quite a bit of unnecessary baggage that reflects the natural bias that a limitation of one's empirical toolbox to self-experience brings with it, rather than straightforward functional considerations calling for a dedicated self-mechanism. They also raise the suspicion that many theorists are not yet decided whether they consider the self in its various disguises an explanandum that their theory aims to explain or an explanans that provides this explanation. In fact, many theories try to explain the self as explanandum by referring to some not further explained internal self-system that has no other purpose than generating the explanandum—a clear case of pseudo-explanation ( Hommel, 2020 ). In the following, my aim will be to drop this baggage and develop a purely functional theoretical approach to what we call the self. That is, my aim will be to explain the behavior that theorists consider reflections of a self without referring to a dedicated system producing that behavior. In fact, I will try to do without inventing any new mechanisms to account for such behavior and restrict myself to the Theory of Event Coding (TEC; Hommel et al., 2001 ; Hommel, 2019a ) as my theoretical toolbox.

TEC was conceived as a generic theory of the representations and processes underlying human perception and action. It assumes that perceived and produced events (i.e., action plans) are represented by bindings of codes representing the features of these events, so-called event files ( Hommel, 2004 ). First versions addressed perception and action in very simple tasks involving stimuli with very few features, like red circles and green rectangles, and not overly complex actions, like pressing left and right keys. However, more recent versions addressed more complex tasks and situations ( Hommel, 2019a ) and questions of self- and other-representation ( Hommel, 2018 ) by means of the same mechanistic principles. Indeed, the representational assumptions of TEC are fully consistent with theoretical frameworks targeting more social processes, including self-representation ( Greenwald et al., 2002 ), which is why I consider the mechanistic toolbox of TEC fully sufficient for understanding self-representation, despite the theory's non-social origin.

Online and Offline Self

Psychological approaches to the self commonly accept the philosophical distinction between minimal and narrative self. And indeed, it makes intuitive sense to distinguish between Hume's 1739 idea of a personal self consisting of nothing but the perceptual information that an agent has available about herself, so that she in some sense “ceases to exist” when falling asleep, and the idea of an agent who actively sculpts the image of herself by telling self-relevant stories ( Gergen and Gergen, 1997 ; Gallagher, 2000 ). However, this distinction is heavily confounded with various other factors: the timeframe (second by second versus minutes or years), the medium (perception versus communication), the audience (oneself versus oneself vis-à-vis others), and the reliance on earlier experience, so that it remains unclear whether the distinction between minimal and narrative self actually refers to different concepts, different mechanisms, different kinds of experience, or something else. From a purely functional viewpoint, it seems more reasonable, so I suggest, to distinguish between online and offline self.

Online Self

The online self refers to the here and now, to the flow of information from receptors to more integrative processing levels that inform action control, and vice versa. According to TEC, a person would represent herself just like any other event: by a binding of codes representing the features making up the event, oneself in this particular case. This comprises of all perceivable features regarding oneself in principle, features referring to how one looks, sounds, and smells, but also how one moves and feels—which reflects the ideomotor heritage of TEC, according to which actions and emotions are also grounded in self-perception. Which features belong to this “personal” event may not always be obvious. For instance, infants need quite a while before they develop a good understanding of which objects and events do or do not belong to themselves, and active exploration of their own body and their immediate surrounding plays an important role in this development (for a review, see Verschoor and Hommel, 2017 ). Even adults can be surprisingly flexible in their self-perception, as indicated by the notorious rubber-hand illusion ( Botvinick and Cohen, 1998 ): when participants are confronted with a rubber hand lying in front of them, simultaneously stroking the rubber hand and the participant's real hand results in the illusion that the rubber hand becomes part of the participant's own body.

These observations suggest that people are not born with a fixed representation of themselves but continuously re-create their self-representation based on the currently available perceptual information. To determine whether perceived features are actually related to themselves or to their physical or social environment, people seem to use the same cues that are known from object perception. For instance, people are more likely to perceive rubber or virtual hands as part of their own body if these artificially effectors are spatially close to their body, if they can be seen as a continuation of their own effectors, and if artificial and real effectors move in synchrony (e.g., Ma and Hommel, 2015 ). In object and non-social event perception, these kinds of cues are known as the Gestalt laws of spatial and temporal proximity, good Gestalt/continuation, and common fate ( Todorovic, 2008 ), which supports the idea that representing oneself follows the same principles as representing other events. Another well-known principle governing self-perception is the relationship between intended and actual action effects ( Hommel, 2015 ): the event with the closest relationship (i.e., the one that keeps generating action effects that I intend) is probably me ( Verschoor and Hommel, 2017 ). This relationship is an important ingredient of any control system, ranging from central heating to human intentional action ( Frith et al., 2000 ), and presumably the crucial information for judging personal agency ( Blakemore et al., 2002 ).

While the online self can be informed by and interact with stored information (the activated bits of the offline self), it is mainly a reflection of the incoming, currently available information that active agents generate themselves. Accordingly, the binding of the codes that represent the features that specify the active agent—the structure that I will call the Me-file—can be considered to represent the self as envisioned by Hume's bundle-theory, that is, as a direct perceptual reflection of how we currently embody ourselves. Note that this reflection does not distinguish between cognitive, motivational, and affective (or any other kind of) information. As elaborated elsewhere ( Hommel, 2019b ), such labels refer to different functions of representations and mechanisms but do not necessarily indicate that the underlying representations and mechanisms themselves are separable and specific. For instance, Barrett (2017) has argued that perceived emotion and affect are not generated by dedicated affective mechanisms but derived from general mechanisms with basic survival functions, so that it makes little sense to consider the mechanisms as cognitive, motivational, or affective. Along these lines, the online Me-file of a jogging colleague might look like in the left panel of Figure 1 , where going for a jog provides her with feedback about her being busy with running, with being athletic, with being short and female, but also with being happy—among many other features that online feedback might inform about.

Figure 1 . Online and offline Me-files including currently activated (in green, see left panel) and currently inactive (in gray, see right panel) feature codes characterizing the agent.

Offline Self

If Hume is right in claiming that people in some sense cease to exist when going asleep, and if this scenario is taken to reflect the fact that we more or less switch off online self-perception during the night, it is easy to see that the online self cannot be all that we have. Obviously, people do not start from scratch in perceiving themselves when waking up, which means that we are able to store perceived information about ourselves in a more durable format—the offline self. As suggested by self-perception theorists like Bem (1972) and Laird (2007) , people learn about themselves just like they learn about others: by perceiving their behavior and looking for regularities. I thus do not have privileged information about me being a friendly or aggressive person, say, but I may assume being one if I perceive myself to repeatedly compliment other people or punch them in the face, respectively. Repeatedly making such observations and representing them in my online self is likely to leave traces behind, traces that survive the switching off of my online self during sleep and that provide me with a warm-start the next morning. Accordingly, Greenwald et al. (2002) have suggested that people keep networks of feature codes that refer to one's perceived personal characteristics, like being athletic, intelligent, a professor, grandmother, female, and short, as indicated in the right panel of Figure 1 . In contrast to the online self, which is restricted to those feature codes that are currently activated (for reasons discussed in the next section), the offline self refers to the total of all available feature codes that have been involved in self-representation to a degree that they have been bound into a network that represent something like the potential self. In other words, the offline self refers to the knowledge that a person has acquired about herself, about the features that she knows to have in principle.

Current Self

It is important to emphasize that the terms online self and the offline self do not imply different systems but refer to different levels of activation of feature codes. Cowan (1995) has suggested that short-term memory might be considered the activated part of long-term memory. Hence, whereas long-term memory contains all codes that a person has acquired over the years, only some of these codes are active at any time, irrespective of whether they have been exogenously or endogenously activated, and the total of the currently active codes constitute short-term memory. The same applies to self-representation. The offline self is the total of all feature codes that have become part of the network of codes that the person has learned to represent features of her and that she has used to represent herself in the past. According to TEC, being exposed to a situation, being engaged in a task, and being busy with particular themes increases the intentional weighting ( Hommel et al., 2001 ; Memelink and Hommel, 2013 ) of feature dimensions that the agent considers relevant (based on past experience and current expectations) for making the right choices under these situational circumstances. This means that feature values that are coded on these dimensions are activated more strongly and have a higher impact to impact decision-making and action-selection. If, thus, a participant is asked to press a left versus right key in response to red and green stimuli, respectively, the intentional weighting for color and location will be high, given that these dimensions define the task-relevant aspects of stimuli and responses. Indeed, even preparing for simple tasks like pointing, grasping, and tapping is sufficient to sensitize the agent for attending to and prioritizing stimuli falling onto dimensions that are important for these actions, like location, shape, and rhythm ( Schubotz and von Cramon, 2003 ; Fagioli et al., 2007 ).

With respect to self-representation, this means that the way we currently represent ourselves is selective and strongly affected by our current concerns and interests, the tasks we carry out, and the situational implications they have. Our current self would thus be a mixture of codes that represent currently perceived features of ourselves (the online self), in particular of features related to dimensions that we currently consider relevant, and those feature codes of our offline self that are active for other reasons, perhaps because they are relevant for another task we pursue or intend to pursue in the near future, or because of our current concerns ( Klinger and Cox, 2011 )—thoughts we are busy with, or because of other needs, like hunger or a need for affiliation ( McClelland, 1988 ; Hommel, 2021 ). This implies that we are not always the same and do not perceive ourselves as the same under all circumstances. Entering particular social bubbles, like when visiting or family or meeting old friends, is likely to implement different sets of intentional weighting, which in turn will emphasize particular features in our self-perception and deemphasize others. With respect to our example described above, participating in a running competition would increase the intentional weighting for features related to being sporty and fast, so that self-perception would focus on information that is likely to activate the feature codes for being athletic and running, but probably not feature codes for being a professor or a wife.

Theoretical Implications

In essence, my claim is that people represent themselves like any other event, so that no special theoretical claims need to be made, no novel mechanisms need to be introduced, and no additional assumptions need to be defended, to account for our ability to represent ourselves. And yet, my minimalist account has interesting theoretical implications that can account for numerous empirical observations that have either not been sufficiently well explained so far or that have been explained with specialized, and thus not overly parsimonious theoretical frameworks. In the following, I will briefly touch some of these implications and phenomena they relate to.

My account does not assume any dedicated mechanism responsible for perceiving body ownership, as when being confronted with a body extension, be it a tool or an artificial hand. Instead, it assumes that people judge the degree to which an artificial hand belongs to their body in exactly the same way as they judge the relationship between a dog and its tail: if the tail is close to the dog, if it wiggles only when the dog moves as well, and if it tends to appear and disappear together with the dog, people will perceive the tail as part of the dog. The same applies to a rubber or virtual hand: if it is close to me, if it moves when I move, and if it accompanies me wherever I go, I'm likely to consider it as part of me and my body. Obviously, the informational basis for judging the relationship between oneself and a candidate body part is different from judging the relationship between someone else and a candidate body part: visual information tends to be more comprehensive when observing other agents, whereas interoceptive (kinesthetic, proprioceptive) and tactile information will commonly be available only when perceiving oneself. This may mean that the outcomes of such judgments rely on different kinds of information and may be difficult to compare. Nevertheless, this does not imply any difference in the way the available information is integrated and analyzed, which means that the basic mechanisms and their principles do not differ. It is certainly true that this account does not yet address all theoretical questions. Most importantly, why is it these Gestalt criteria (spatial/temporal proximity, good Gestalt/continuity, and common fate) that people tend to use when judging relationships between events? Are these simply the most reliable indicators or are there cultural or educational factors involved? Tackling such questions is an important challenge for future research, but it is not a question that would be specific for self-representation.

Judgments of body ownership and agency tend to be dissociable in the highly artificial rubber-hand scenarios but are strongly correlated in studies with more natural relationships between real body movements and movements of artificial extensions ( Ma et al., 2019 ). This suggests that the informational basis for judging agency and judging body ownership overlaps to a substantial degree. However, there is substantial evidence for a special role of the relationship between personal intentions and related expectations of action outcomes on the one hand and the actual outcomes on the other for judging agency ( Hommel, 2015 ). There is theoretical consensus that information about this relationship can be directly derived from mechanisms underlying action control. Voluntary action is assumed to be selected based on expected action outcomes, which is almost true by definition: given that voluntary action is defined as aiming at particular outcomes, representations of outcomes must play some role in selecting the movements that eventually achieve these outcomes ( Hommel, 2009 ). Moreover, adaptive action control requires insight into the degree to which a particular action has or has not generated the intended action effects, and this insight is commonly derived from comparing expected outcomes with actual outcomes ( Frith et al., 2000 ). It is the result of this comparison that is assumed to contribute to judgments of agency ( Blakemore et al., 2002 ; Chambon and Haggard, 2013 ; Hommel, 2015 ), which again means that accounting for agency does not need any dedicated mechanism beyond what has to be assumed for voluntary action control anyway.

Sticky Intentions

Various authors have pointed out that committing oneself to a goal or intention makes it particularly sticky ( Hollenbeck and Klein, 1987 ). Lewin (1936) suggested that committing oneself to a goal creates a kind of tension in one's cognitive system that seeks for relaxation very much like a biological drive seeks for reduction. Along the same lines, Klinger (2013) suggests that self-commitment turns mere motivation into goal-striving which, among other things, keeps the respective goal active until the intended outcome has been achieved. Commitment to the goal was also considered crucial to engage in actual goal-striving by Locke and colleagues (e.g., Locke et al., 1988 ) or Gollwitzer and Oettingen (2011) , and there is indeed massive evidence suggesting that self-reported commitment to the goal is the central predictor of successful performance, especially in difficult tasks ( Hollenbeck and Klein, 1987 ; Klein et al., 1999 ). Along the same lines, Goschke and Kuhl (1993) and others demonstrated that concepts that are connected to actual goals are much easier to remember than concepts that are not (intention memory). The authors suggested that this might be due to some special kind of energy that keeps goal-related representations more active than others—but what this special energy (or Lewin's cognitive tension) might consist of remains a mystery.

From a Me-file perspective, the consideration of two well-established mechanistic features of our cognitive system is sufficient to account for sticky intentions. First, preparing for a task allows people to create lasting associations between task-relevant representations. Hence, if, for instance, participants are instructed to carry out action X in response to stimulus A and action Y in response to stimulus B, they seem to create bindings between the representations of A and X and between the representations B and Y even before the very first trial, as witnessed by the observation that, after the instruction has been given, stimuli acquire the power to automatically activate the response they have been assigned to ( Meiran et al., 2017 ). Second, given that every movement of ours provides perceptual feedback about us, our online self is always active, at least as long as we are awake, and so is our current self of which the online self is a part. If so, each feature code that is part of the current self must also be consistently primed to at least some degree, depending on the degree of intentional weighting. Connecting these two considerations suggests that the act that phenomenologically consists in committing to a goal or intention reflects the mechanistic process of merging the representation of this goal/intention with the Me-file (similar to the assumption of Salancik, 1977 , that commitment represents a kind of binding between an individual and her actions). As elaborated elsewhere, goals are likely to be represented by criteria that constrain the selection of event files in such a way that goal-consistent actions become more likely to be selected ( Hommel and Wiers, 2017 ; Hommel, 2021 ). Accordingly, committing to a goal would integrate corresponding selection criteria into the Me-file. As the Me-file tends to be active most of the time, so would the goal criteria, which would explain why not yet achieved goals are sticky—without referring to any metaphorical tension or mysterious energy.

Self-Symbols

The consideration that associating information with the Me-file could make that information more accessible and increase its impact on selection might also account for a not yet fully understood observation of Sui, Humphreys, and colleagues (e.g., Sui et al., 2012 ; Sui and Humphreys, 2015 ). These authors presented participants with arbitrary symbols and asked them to associate these symbols with either themselves, a close relative, or a stranger, before presenting the symbols in simple cognitive tasks. It turned out that the self-related symbol was responded to faster and recall better in various kinds of tasks, suggesting that the simple fact that a symbol was taken to refer to the participant was sufficient to make that symbol enjoy highly prioritized processing. Considering that the instruction to associate a symbol with oneself might consist in integrating that symbol into one's more or less consistently active Me-file would easily account for the reported observations.

Resting State

The idea of a chronically active Me-file would also fit with the observation that cortical midline regions involved in resting-state or default-mode activity (i.e., the typical neural activity shown in the absence of a particular task) show strong spatial overlap with regions that are recruited during self-referential processing ( D'Argembeau et al., 2005 ; Qin and Northoff, 2011 ). The typical instruction in resting-state studies asks participants to engage in no particular task or thought. To the degree that participants follow this instruction, all that remains will be sensory feedback about themselves, which in turn will activate codes that are contained in the Me-file and contribute to the chronically high level of activation of that file. If so, it is easy to understand why this activates areas that are also active during intentional self-referential processing.

Social Discrimination

Recent political discussions often focus on aspects of social discrimination, be they related to the proper representation or treatment of people with a particular gender, skin color, political or religious orientation, or sexual preference. There are basically two ideas of how discrimination related to any of these features might be overcome: by reducing/eliminating possible or actual attention to the underlying feature dimension (e.g., as implied by the so-called color-blindness theory: Ansell, 2013 ) or by increasing attention to this dimension (e.g., as claimed by the Woke movement: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke). It might be interesting to mention that my approach suggests concrete hypotheses regarding the processes that these two strategies would evoke and which consequences they would have. Having the goal of attending to skin color would be likely to create a strong association between the codes representing that feature and one's Me-file. This would render skin color an important feature to represent oneself and others, and be likely to make skin color a feature dimension that overshadows other possible dimensions, like those coding for gender, achievement, sociality, and more. Given that discrimination can be positive or negative, depending on one's experience and values, this does not allow predicting the exact consequences. But my approach would predict that Woke principles should increase and stabilize both the absolute and the relative (as compared to other feature dimensions) importance of the targeted feature dimension in perception (of oneself and others), decision-making, and action—which provides a continuous basis for discriminative behavior.

Individual Differences

The Me-file approach to self-representation provides a novel perspective on inter- and intra-individual differences in self-perception and the impact of self-perception on behavior (or vice versa). As discussed in the previous section, different physical and social contexts are likely to moderate the intentional weighting of both perceptual dimensions and particular context-specific themes. For instance, going to the gym or participating in a sports event in a sense “reduces” the self-perceiving individual to her physical, performance-relevant attributes and abilities, downplaying other aspects, like gender, race, wealth, and academic background, whereas visiting a library will highlight very different attributes and abilities. Spending time with one's peer groups will increase the weight of other perceptual dimensions and themes than spending time with one's parents, which in turn is not unlikely to change one's behavior and the way one perceives oneself. One of the many interesting aspects of these considerations refers to retirement. As discussed by Hommel and Kibele (2016) , an important aspect of cognitive aging (i.e., the decline of cognitive abilities with increasing age) is likely to do with what might be called the embodiment of (non-)agency: Retirement is commonly accompanied by a sudden and rather extensive reduction of one's action repertoire and of the opportunities to experience oneself as being an agent that makes active use of this repertoire. The Me-file approach suggests that this must lead to a drastic reduction of the complexity of self-representation, as the individual no longer perceives herself as an active agent in the physical and social world in quite a number of situations—the kind and number of which depends on the particular job one retires from. Hence, not only is the retired individual prevented from actively exercising the cognitive skills the previous job required, but she is also unlearning to perceive herself as someone who does these things: a kind of acquired non-agency. If so, forced retirement might be considered a societal act that undermines personal motivation and self-respect. Other implications refer to upbringing and education. If, as the Me-file suggests, action is such an important ingredient of self-representation, explorative, active learning would not only be mandated for possible educational reasons but also for the building of active self's, that is, for identities that include the agentive aspect of individuals.

My aim was to present a mechanistically transparent basis for theorizing about the human self. I have used TEC as my theoretical toolbox and argued that no dedicated special assumptions or principles need to be added to account for self-representation. More specifically, I suggest that representing oneself follows the exact same principles as representing others or representing things, even though the type and the amount of information that is available for the resulting representations is likely to differ—for obvious and theoretically not overly relevant reasons, like the fact that some sensory channels provide more information about oneself than about others. I have also suggested that what philosophical approaches have considered the key ingredients of the human self—body ownership and agency—do not require any special theorizing or any dedicated system or mechanism. In fact, reports about body ownership and agency are likely to be based on the same principles that underlie the judgment of relatedness and causality regarding non-personal events, like the motions of billiard balls and, in the case of agency, on comparisons between intended and actual action effects, as available from action-control processes. Hence, what we call the self may not be special at all, and not require any special theorizing. Given that humans are both subjects and objects of research on the self, this may be intellectually disappointing, especially when viewing the issue from the object perspective. However, it does allow us to create mechanistically transparent models that do not require any special modules or systems to account for the selfness aspect of representing ourselves. In particular, the approach allows implementing various aspects of human-like selfhood into various kinds of artificial agents, and even constructing agents that spontaneously acquire their self through sensorimotor experience with their own embodiment.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

This research was supported by a grant from the German Research Community (DFG; HO 1430/12-1) and a 100 Talent Grant of the Province of Shandong, China.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: self representation, agency, body ownership, Theory of Event Coding (TEC), minimal self

Citation: Hommel B (2021) The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation. Front. Psychol. 12:698778. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.698778

Received: 22 April 2021; Accepted: 30 June 2021; Published: 30 July 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Hommel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Bernhard Hommel, bh@bhommel.onmicrosoft.com

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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21 Self-Representationalist Theories of Consciousness

Tom McClelland is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge. He works in various topics in philosophy of mind, including mental action, cognitive phenomenology, perceptual content, and the explanatory gap. He also dabbles in philosophy of film.

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Self-Representationalists hold that conscious mental states are conscious in virtue of suitably representing themselves, and that awareness of a mental state is achieved by representing oneself as being in that state. Where Higher-Order Representationalists claim that awareness of a mental state is conferred by a distinct mental state that represents it, Self-Representationalists instead argue that conscious mental states represent themselves. This chapter explores why Self-Representationalists make this move away from Higher-Order Representationalists and describes the internal divisions among Self-Representationalist theories. These divisions concern: whether conscious states have distinguishable components corresponding to their lower-order and higher-order content; whether the higher-order component of a conscious state (if such there is) is itself represented by that state. The challenges faced by Self-Representationalist include: the threat of collapsing into a Higher-Order Representationalist theory; the worry that the proposed self-representing states resist naturalization; and the danger of failing to accommodate the intimate contact we have with our own conscious states.

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Authentic Self-Representation

• First Online: 12 October 2022

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In this chapter, I reframe practices of self-representation as a form of autoethnography, in which users attempt to re-map the self into a variety of cultural contexts and settings. This process is one of sense and meaning making for the individual, creating a narrative that forms the basis for their presentation practice. Self-representation is also positioned as an embodied practice, in that it contains a recognisable trace of the person posting it, resonant with their narrative identity. However, due to the temporal nature of authenticity, once it is recognised it then disappears. This is why the self is a continual work-in-progress: it is a quest to experience the deconstructive effect of the authentic, which is kinaesthetically embodied by the consumers of the social media artefact when they recognise it as authentic.

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Self-Representational Theories of Consciousness

• Higher-Order Thought Theories of Consciousness ( 278 )
• Higher-Order Perception Theories of Consciousness ( 14 )
• Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness, Misc ( 46 )
• Self-Consciousness ( 1,992 | 208)

Impression Management: Erving Goffman Theory

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

• Impression management refers to the goal-directed conscious or unconscious attempt to influence the perceptions of other people about a person, object, or event by regulating and controlling information in social interaction.
• Generally, people undertake impression management to achieve goals that require they have a desired public image. This activity is called self-presentation.
• In sociology and social psychology, self-presentation is the conscious or unconscious process through which people try to control the impressions other people form of them.
• The goal is for one to present themselves the way in which they would like to be thought of by the individual or group they are interacting with. This form of management generally applies to the first impression.
• Erving Goffman popularized the concept of perception management in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , where he argues that impression management not only influences how one is treated by other people but is an essential part of social interaction.

Impression Management in Sociology

Impression management, also known as self-presentation, refers to the ways that people attempt to control how they are perceived by others (Goffman, 1959).

By conveying particular impressions about their abilities, attitudes, motives, status, emotional reactions, and other characteristics, people can influence others to respond to them in desirable ways.

Impression management is a common way for people to influence one another in order to obtain various goals.

While earlier theorists (e.g., Burke, 1950; Hart & Burk, 1972) offered perspectives on the person as a performer, Goffman (1959) was the first to develop a specific theory concerning self-presentation.

In his well-known work, Goffman created the foundation and the defining principles of what is commonly referred to as impression management.

In explicitly laying out a purpose for his work, Goffman (1959) proposes to “consider the ways in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kind of things he may or may not do while sustaining his performance before them.” (p. xi)

Social Interaction

Goffman viewed impression management not only as a means of influencing how one is treated by other people but also as an essential part of social interaction.

He communicates this view through the conceit of theatre. Actors give different performances in front of different audiences, and the actors and the audience cooperate in negotiating and maintaining the definition of a situation.

To Goffman, the self was not a fixed thing that resides within individuals but a social process. For social interactions to go smoothly, every interactant needs to project a public identity that guides others’ behaviors (Goffman, 1959, 1963; Leary, 2001; Tseelon, 1992).

Goffman defines that when people enter the presence of others, they communicate information by verbal intentional methods and by non-verbal unintentional methods.

According to Goffman, individuals participate in social interactions through performing a “line” or “a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself” (1967, p. 5).

Such lines are created and maintained by both the performer and the audience. By enacting a line effectively, a person gains positive social value or “face.”

The verbal intentional methods allow us to establish who we are and what we wish to communicate directly. We must use these methods for the majority of the actual communication of data.

Goffman is mostly interested in the non-verbal clues given off which are less easily manipulated. When these clues are manipulated the receiver generally still has the upper hand in determining how realistic the clues that are given off are.

People use these clues to determine how to treat a person and if the intentional verbal responses given off are actually honest. It is also known that most people give off clues that help to represent them in a positive light, which tends to be compensated for by the receiver.

Impression Management Techniques

• Suppressing emotions : Maintaining self-control (which we will identify with such practices as speaking briefly and modestly).
• Conforming to Situational Norms : The performer follows agreed-upon rules for behavior in the organization.
• Flattering Others : The performer compliments the perceiver. This tactic works best when flattery is not extreme and when it involves a dimension important to the perceiver.
• Being Consistent : The performer’s beliefs and behaviors are consistent. There is agreement between the performer’s verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Self-Presentation Examples

Self-presentation can affect the emotional experience . For example, people can become socially anxious when they are motivated to make a desired impression on others but doubt that they can do so successfully (Leary, 2001).

In one paper on self-presentation and emotional experience, Schlenker and Leary (1982) argue that, in contrast to the drive models of anxiety, the cognitive state of the individual mediates both arousal and behavior.

The researchers examine the traditional inverted-U anxiety-performance curve (popularly known as the Yerkes-Dodson law) in this light.

The researchers propose that people are interpersonally secure when they do not have the goal of creating a particular impression on others.

They are not immediately concerned about others’ evaluative reactions in a social setting where they are attempting to create a particular impression and believe that they will be successful in doing so.

Meanwhile, people are anxious when they are uncertain about how to go about creating a certain impression (such as when they do not know what sort of attributes the other person is likely to be impressed with), think that they will not be able to project the types of images that will produce preferred reactions from others.

Such people think that they will not be able to project the desired image strongly enough or believe that some event will happen that will repudiate their self-presentations, causing reputational damage (Schlenker and Leary, 1982).

Psychologists have also studied impression management in the context of mental and physical health .

In one such study, Braginsky et al. (1969) showed that those hospitalized with schizophrenia modify the severity of their “disordered” behavior depending on whether making a more or less “disordered” impression would be most beneficial to them (Leary, 2001).

Additional research on university students shows that people may exaggerate or even fabricate reports of psychological distress when doing so for their social goals.

Hypochondria appears to have self-presentational features where people convey impressions of illness and injury, when doing so helps to drive desired outcomes such as eliciting support or avoiding responsibilities (Leary, 2001).

People can also engage in dangerous behaviors for self-presentation reasons such as suntanning, unsafe sex, and fast driving. People may also refuse needed medical treatment if seeking this medical treatment compromises public image (Leary et al., 1994).

Key Components

There are several determinants of impression management, and people have many reasons to monitor and regulate how others perceive them.

For example, social relationships such as friendship, group membership, romantic relationships, desirable jobs, status, and influence rely partly on other people perceiving the individual as being a particular kind of person or having certain traits.

Because people’s goals depend on them making desired impressions over undesired impressions, people are concerned with the impressions other people form of them.

Although people appear to monitor how they come across ongoingly, the degree to which they are motivated to impression manage and the types of impressions they try to foster varies by situation and individuals (Leary, 2001).

Leary and Kowalski (1990) say that there are two processes that constitute impression management, each of which operate according to different principles and are affected by different situations and dispositional aspects. The first of these processes is impression motivation, and the second is impression construction.

Impression Motivation

There are three main factors that affect how much people are motivated to impression-manage in a situation (Leary and Kowalski, 1990):

(1) How much people believe their public images are relevant to them attaining their desired goals.

When people believe that their public image is relevant to them achieving their goals, they are generally more motivated to control how others perceive them (Leary, 2001).

Conversely, when the impressions of other people have few implications on one’s outcomes, that person’s motivation to impression-manage will be lower.

This is why people are more likely to impression manage in their interactions with powerful, high-status people than those who are less powerful and have lower status (Leary, 2001).

(2) How valuable the goals are: people are also more likely to impress and manage the more valuable the goals for which their public impressions are relevant (Leary, 2001).

(3) how much of a discrepancy there is between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them..

People are more highly motivated to impression-manage when there is a difference between how they want to be perceived and how they believe others perceive them.

For example, public scandals and embarrassing events that convey undesirable impressions can cause people to make self-presentational efforts to repair what they see as their damaged reputations (Leary, 2001).

Impression Construction

Features of the social situations that people find themselves in, as well as their own personalities, determine the nature of the impressions that they try to convey.

In particular, Leary and Kowalski (1990) name five sets of factors that are especially important in impression construction (Leary, 2001).

Two of these factors include how people’s relationships with themselves (self-concept and desired identity), and three involve how people relate to others (role constraints, target value, and current or potential social image) (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Self-concept

The impressions that people try to create are influenced not only by social context but also by one’s own self-concept .

People usually want others to see them as “how they really are” (Leary, 2001), but this is in tension with the fact that people must deliberately manage their impressions in order to be viewed accurately by others (Goffman, 1959).

People’s self-concepts can also constrain the images they try to convey.

People often believe that it is unethical to present impressions of themselves different from how they really are and generally doubt that they would successfully be able to sustain a public image inconsistent with their actual characteristics (Leary, 2001).

This risk of failure in portraying a deceptive image and the accompanying social sanctions deter people from presenting impressions discrepant from how they see themselves (Gergen, 1968; Jones and Pittman, 1982; Schlenker, 1980).

People can differ in how congruent their self-presentations are with their self-perceptions.

People who are high in public self-consciousness have less congruency between their private and public selves than those lower in public self-consciousness (Tunnell, 1984; Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Desired identity

People’s desired and undesired selves – how they wish to be and not be on an internal level – also influence the images that they try to project.

Schlenker (1985) defines a desirable identity image as what a person “would like to be and thinks he or she really can be, at least at his or her best.”

People have a tendency to manage their impressions so that their images coincide with their desired selves and stay away from images that coincide with their undesired selves (Ogilivie, 1987; Schlenker, 1985; Leary, 2001).

This happens when people publicly claim attributes consistent with their desired identity and openly reject identities that they do not want to be associated with.

For example, someone who abhors bigots may take every step possible to not appear bigoted, and Gergen and Taylor (1969) showed that high-status navel cadets did not conform to low-status navel cadets because they did not want to see themselves as conformists (Leary and Kowalski, 1990).

Target value

people tailor their self-presentations to the values of the individuals whose perceptions they are concerned with.

This may lead to people sometimes fabricating identities that they think others will value.

However, more commonly, people selectively present truthful aspects of themselves that they believe coincide with the values of the person they are targeting the impression to and withhold information that they think others will value negatively (Leary, 2001).

Role constraints

the content of people’s self-presentations is affected by the roles that they take on and the norms of their social context.

In general, people want to convey impressions consistent with their roles and norms .

Many roles even carry self-presentational requirements around the kinds of impressions that the people who hold the roles should and should not convey (Leary, 2001).

Current or potential social image

People’s public image choices are also influenced by how they think they are perceived by others. As in impression motivation, self-presentational behaviors can often be aimed at dispelling undesired impressions that others hold about an individual.

When people believe that others have or are likely to develop an undesirable impression of them, they will typically try to refute that negative impression by showing that they are different from how others believe them to be.

When they are not able to refute this negative impression, they may project desirable impressions in other aspects of their identity (Leary, 2001).

Implications

In the presence of others, few of the behaviors that people make are unaffected by their desire to maintain certain impressions. Even when not explicitly trying to create a particular impression of themselves, people are constrained by concerns about their public image.

Generally, this manifests with people trying not to create undesired impressions in virtually all areas of social life (Leary, 2001).

Tedeschi et al. (1971) argued that phenomena that psychologists previously attributed to peoples’ need to have cognitive consistency actually reflected efforts to maintain an impression of consistency in others’ eyes.

Studies have supported Tedeschi and their colleagues’ suggestion that phenomena previously attributed to cognitive dissonance were actually affected by self-presentational processes (Schlenker, 1980).

Psychologists have applied self-presentation to their study of phenomena as far-ranging as conformity, aggression, prosocial behavior, leadership, negotiation, social influence, gender, stigmatization, and close relationships (Baumeister, 1982; Leary, 1995; Schlenker, 1980; Tedeschi, 1981).

Each of these studies shows that people’s efforts to make impressions on others affect these phenomena, and, ultimately, that concerns self-presentation in private social life.

For example, research shows that people are more likely to be pro-socially helpful when their helpfulness is publicized and behave more prosocially when they desire to repair a damaged social image by being helpful (Leary, 2001).

In a similar vein, many instances of aggressive behavior can be explained as self-presentational efforts to show that someone is willing to hurt others in order to get their way.

This can go as far as gender roles, for which evidence shows that men and women behave differently due to the kind of impressions that are socially expected of men and women.

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• Schlenker, B. R. (1980). Impression management (Vol. 222). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Schlenker, B. R. (1985). Identity and self-identification. In B. R. Schlenker (Ed.), The self and social life (pp. 65-99). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization model. Psychological bulletin, 92(3), 641.

Tedeschi, J. T, Smith, R. B., Ill, & Brown, R. C., Jr. (1974). A reinterpretation of research on aggression. Psychological Bulletin, 81, 540- 563.

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Further Information

• Solomon, J. F., Solomon, A., Joseph, N. L., & Norton, S. D. (2013). Impression management, myth creation and fabrication in private social and environmental reporting: Insights from Erving Goffman. Accounting, organizations and society, 38(3), 195-213.
• Gardner, W. L., & Martinko, M. J. (1988). Impression management in organizations. Journal of management, 14(2), 321-338.
• Scheff, T. J. (2005). Looking‐Glass self: Goffman as symbolic interactionist. Symbolic interaction, 28(2), 147-166.