Chapter Two: Gender

Chapter Two: Gender

1. Self Concept: Relatively stable perceptions we have about ourselves.

   • Self-Esteem: Our evaluations of our self worth, and self-esteem effects the way we communicate with others.
   • A couple of things that define me are my belief systems, such as my religion and a strong belief in feminism and democracy.
   • Personality: Characteristics that defines a persons temperament, thought process, and social behavior.
     • 40% of our personality traits are inherited.

2. External Influence on the Self-Concept

   • Reflected Appraisal: describes how we develop an image of ourselves from the way we think others see us.
   • Social Comparison: Evaluating ourselves in terms of how we compare ourselves with others.
     • I find myself doing this a lot with social media, like Instagram. It makes me wish I could look like the people I see sometimes.

3. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and Communication

   • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: occurs when a persons expectation of an outcome and subsequent behavior make the outcome more likely to happen
     • When I had my job interview at Sephora, I was very calm and collected and afterwards I was confident that I got the job - and I did!

4. Perceiving Others

   • The stimuli in our environment affect the way we perceive the people and things around us. We pick and choose what to focus on and communicate with.
     • Perpetual Schemata: The way we order the information we've received from other people to decide how we perceive them.
       • Physical Constructs, role constructs, interaction constructs, and psychological constructs.
   • Cultural and Social Influences
     • Gender: socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a society considers appropriate for men and women.
       • I feel like in today's day and age, a lot of gender roles have been broken, making our world developed to today's society and expectations.
     • Stereotyping: exaggerated beliefs associated with a categorizing system.
       • There are three distinctions b/n stereotyping and generalizing: Categorizing others on the basis of easily recognized but not necessarily significant characteristics, assigning a set of characteristics to most or all members of a group, and applying generalizations to one specific person.
     • Empathy has three dimensions: perspective taking, emotional dimension, and concern for the welfare of the other person.
       • Sympathy: compassion for another person's situation.
       • Perception checking: a description of the behavior you noticed, at least two different interpretations of the behavior, clarification about behavior.

5. Communication and Identity Management

   • Perceived self: the person you believe to be during moments of self reflection.
     • Presenting self: the way we want to appear to others.
       • I'm constantly wondering what people think of me, which is probably a habit I need to break.