Sitting up late talking with
friends, you may spend a lot of time thinking about who you would like to be
ideally. You focus on the people you
would help, the good you could do for society, and your dreams. In your day-to-day life, though, you spend a
lot of time just doing what has to be done to get ahead.
So, are we just lying to ourselves
and others when we have these idealistic conversations?
In a paper in the May, 2014 issue
of the Journal of Personalty and Social Psychology,
Jeremy Frimer, Nicola Schaefer, and Harrison Oakes suggest that each of us has
two distinct conceptions of self.
First, there is the actor.
The actor is your public-facing self.
The one that you bring out when other people are watching. The actor often has some focus on being prosocial, that is doing things that are
for society’s benefit.
Second, there is the agent.
The agent is your doing self.
When you pursue your daily goals, you typically act more selfishly in
your own interests.
As evidence for this split between
actor and agent, participants from the United States (which is a relatively
individualistic society) and India (which is a relatively collectivist society)
were asked to perform one of two tasks.
One task involved rating the
importance of a variety of selfish and prosocial goals. This task was designed to get people to think
about themselves as actors. The other
task involved having people describe four of their own most important
goals. This task was designed to get
people to think of themselves as agents.
After this initial task, everyone
rated how strongly their own goals were about helping themselves and how much
they were about helping others.
Participants who were asked to
think about a variety of prosocial and selfish goals rated that their own goals
were equally strongly about helping themselves and others. Those who were asked to list only their own
goals rated that their goals were more strongly focused on themselves than
others. This pattern held both for
Americans and Indians, suggesting that the agent is fairly selfish across
across cultures.
A second study demonstrated that
when people are primed to think about the variety of goals they might pursue,
they act more like someone who is told to role-play a prosocial person, while
those who are primed to think about their own goals act like someone told to
role-play a selfish person.
One final study found that when
people were primed to think of themselves as actors, they felt their goals were
more idealistic, but when people were primed to think of themselves as agents,
they felt their goals were more realistic.
This split between two
self-concepts may explain why people often act differently when they believe
that others are watching them. We want
our public-facing self to act consistently with our ideals. Each of us wants to be seen as the kind of
person who does things to help society. But, when left to our own devices, the
pressures of life often push us to do what is in our own self-interest.
This work has interesting
implications for how to get people to do more public service. Lots of charities and nonprofits need
volunteers to help them carry out their work.
People who do volunteer work also report feeling better about themselves
after doing it. Yet, few people actually
volunteer their time. Perhaps prompting
people to think about themselves as actors rather than agents could help to
promote more engagement with volunteer organizations.
