In the movie Batman
Begins, Bruce Wayne is chastised by his friend Rachel Dawes. He claims to be a good person deep down, even
though he is acting foolishly. She tells
him that his actions define who he is.
Later, as Batman, Bruce saves Rachel an attack. She asks who he is, and he says “It’s not who
I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.”
This line can be read in two ways. One is that the best way for other people to
measure your character is by what you have done. The second is that people’s actions have a
big influence on people’s self concept—that
is who they think they are.
This issue was explored in a paper in the June, 2012 issue
of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology by Travis Carter and Tom Gilovich. The work jumps off from research by Gilovich
and his colleagues that I have described in previous
blog entries showing that people enjoy things they have purchased more when
those purchases provide experiences than when they are just material
goods.
Carter and Gilovich were interested in whether people felt
that people’s experiences played a larger role in their self-concepts than the
material products they have purchased.
In one study, they had people think about five significant
purchases of material goods they had made and five significant purchases of
experiences. A material good might be a
television or a piece of furniture. An
experience might be a meal or a vacation.
After thinking about these purchases, people were asked to summarize
their life story, writing out what made them who they are. They asked people to incorporate some of the
purchases in their story. Overall,
people included about twice as many experiences in their stories than material
purchases.
This study suggests that people feel that their own
self-concept is influenced more strongly by what they have done than by what
they own. Another series of studies in
this paper explores perceptions of self by others.
In one experiment in this series, people were asked whether
someone else would have a better sense of their true self if they knew about
the experiences they had purchased or about the material goods they had
purchased. People rated that others
would know them best from their purchases of experiences.
In another experiment, people were asked whether they would
know someone else better from their purchases of material goods or from their
purchases of experiences. Again, people
rated that they would know someone else better from their experiences than from
their material purchases.
It is important to note, of course, that many purchases that
we make have both the character of material goods and experiences. Someone might buy a car in order to own the
physical object, but they also might buy it in order to have the experience of
driving it. The authors recognize this
issue. In another experiment, they had
people think about the purchase of a 3D television. They were asked to think either about the
material characteristics of the TV or the experience of watching it. People who thought about the experience rated
that it would play a larger role in their self-concept than those who thought
about the material aspects of the TV.
Putting all of this together, then, it appears that Rachel
Dawes was perceptive. We do tend to
think of ourselves in terms of the experiences we have had. We also judge other people by the things they
have done. That is an important reason
why we are happier when we spend our money on experiences than on things.
