Throughout history, the vast majority of people around the globe have believed they have, however defined, a “soul.” While the question of whether the soul exists cannot be answered by science, what we can study are the causes and consequences of various beliefs about the soul and its prospects of surviving the death of the body. Why are soul and afterlife beliefs so common in human history? Are there adaptive advantages to assuming souls exist? Are there brain structures that have been shaped by environmental pressures that provide the foundation of body/mind dualism that is such a prominent feature of many religions? How do these beliefs shape the worldviews of different cultures and our collective lives? What is the role of competing afterlife beliefs in religion, science, politics, and war? This course explores several facets of this relatively unexplored but profoundly important aspect of human thought and behavior. The course consists mainly of 70 to 80 minute lectures, typically broken up into 3 segments, recorded from a course offered by Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences. These videos include slides and some embedded video clips. Most lectures are accompanied by slides used during the lecture, also including recommended reading assignment which may provide additional opportunities to reflect on your studies. Due to the lengthiness of this class and natural progression, the online course has been separated into 3 units, this is Unit 2.
The Undesired Self Part A
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Del curso dictado por Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences - Unit 2: Belief Systems
143 calificaciones
Rutgers the State University of New Jersey
143 calificaciones
De la lección
The Undesired Self
Conoce a los instructores
Prof. Daniel M. OgilvieProfessor of Psychology
Psychology
Prof. Leonard W. HamiltonProfessor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
This lecture is called Dreaded States and Desired Outcomes.
And it's a case for the role of
the Undesired-Self In self-evaluation.
I'm going to ease you into why that concept is useful,
and then the lecture will get a little bit complicated.
I'm going to give you some information about the role of the undesired self,
and some research that pertains to that.
And then we're going to go off to, I'm going to go off into a little
bit different direction on Terror Management theory.
There's a little break there, and then if you're patient,
and you've followed what I've said so
far, then you're going to see at the very end how to put the pieces together.
Okay. Now I also call this,
I'm going to be in trouble today because it's going to be hard for
me to hold this and do the kinds of things I'd like to do.
The other microphone would have been better, but
the problem is you couldn't hear it.
So here we go.
I also call this the Indices of Psychological Survival.
Remember psychological survival?
It's a concept that I mentioned a couple times in this course.
In fact it's in this course and the process of teaching this course that I got
clear about the idea of psychological survival.
And I make a distinction between that and physical survival.
We are designed to survive.
Because over millions of years we have a brainstem and
a midbrain that automatically keeps things going, keeps us alive, unless it doesn't,
unless there's a failure, or unless you get old, and it begins to deteriorate.
But human beings, we've taken on another burden.
And that's the burden of psychological survival.
And we'll be talking a bit about that as the day goes on.
And I'll probably be talking a bit about that for the rest of my life,
because I think it's a very important idea.
Okay we start with the ideal self.
It was a very prominent concept beginning with Freud, and
earlier than Freud, and then certainly later than Freud.
Freud talked about the ideal self as the ego-ideal.
It's an internalized notion of how would we like to be and who we would like to be.
It was Freudian-Freudian in the sense that for
males in the throes in the Oedipal dilemma who
wanted to kill their father to get him out of the way in order to marry the mother,
they realized that that was a risky thing to do.
So, instead of killing the father, they identify with the father,
become like him, with the prospect of marrying someone like the mother.
You got the general idea that we're not going to probe more deeply in it.
Same with the little girls.
They envy that mother because she has some kind of particular access to the father.
So maybe if they kill the mother, then they will have access to the father.
But that doesn't work out too well.
So they, too, internalize the mother and try to become like the mother.
It's the push from the past.
It's in there, and it's pushing you to be a certain way, to live a certain way,
to look a certain way, and have the mannerisms that emulate the mind.
Another theorist objected to that.
His name was Alfred Adler.
He said, no Freud, I think you got it wrong.
What people do in life, instead of being pushed by these internalized
images, they're pulled by their goals.
So the ideal self represents a goal.
Now it is like we have a rope with an anchor on it,
and you spin the anchor around, and you throw it there,
and you pull your way towards that goal.
This makes sense to you.
I am sure it does.
We have a, you can write your autobiography from the point
of your birth to now, but Abner argued that we do more than that.
We project ourselves in the future and continue to write a script
of what our life is going to be like or
what we would like to be like or maybe even fear that we'll be liked, so
that we can avoid that.
So let me kind of symbolize what I've just been saying.
It's the ideal self.
This is the ideal self.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
we cast it into the future.
We cast it in the future.
[BLANK AUDIO] I used to have students stand here and put that on.
I said screw that.
[LAUGH] And so we pull,
pull ourselves to our ideal selves.
This is symbolizing the ideal self.
Now the problem with this is oh, I'm running out of cord.
I'm going to bring this a little bit closer.
Once we get to the ideal self, see I told we had a problem.
And put it on, we got a problem.
And the problem is you need to have a tension,
tension between the ideal self and the real self.
You say, well, where's your real, this is the real self.
This is your ideal self.
So, when you get too close to the ideal self, what you do is,
you throw it a little bit further away.
So, you now have another goal.
And now you have another goal.
Because if you've achieved your ideal self, then what are you going to do?
You know, you've gotta have that tension.
So the way Abner describes it, and
I think it's very interesting, is that when we get close to our goals,
then we design and put forth new goals.
All right, but that's not all.
There are a lot of theorists that had this concept.
Two more were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
And they both use the term self-actualization.
Very close to the soul.
Soul, self-actualization, that we want to, we're driven to,
biologically we're prepared to expand ourselves and
be who we really are big time.
Rogers said one of the problems with that is we can turn
our self evaluation over to other people, have other people evaluate ourselves.
And then, we then develop a false self,
we want to get back to our true original self and actualize that.
All right.
See what's next.
You're familiar with this thing, this, we are achieving society.
You notice that.
Hard work.
And it surrounds us in all kinds of ways, including songs.
Here's the Man From LaMancha.
Great.
To dream the impossible dream.
To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow.
To run where the brave dare not go.
Never mind.
To right the unrightable wrong.
To love pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary.
To reach the unreachable star.
This is my quest.
That's your quest, that's your quest!
This isn't working.
>> [LAUGH] >> To follow that start,
no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.
To fight the right, without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.
Yeah, I could do more than that, but I'm not going to.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Oh, don't get me started.
>> [LAUGH] >> Now, how do we do that?
How are we thought to quest?
Well, we work.
This is a song that I grew up with.
Sunday evening church.
Work, for the night is coming.
Work for the morning hours.
Work while the dew is sparkling.
Work mid some [SOUND] flowers.
>> [LAUGH] >> Work for the day grows brighter.
Work during the glowing sun.
Work for the night is coming when man's work is done.
Achieving society folks.
You know what this is all about.
Get to work, get your homework done.
Don't you have any ambition?
Okay.
Onward Christian soldiers.
Marching as to war.
You know, I don't know who they're going to fight with.
It could be the Muslims or the Jews.
Or it could be nature.
But it's important to keep on marching.
Keep on going.
Keep on going. Keep on going.
All right, enough fun.
Carl Rogers harnessed this concept of the ideal self and
talked about the real/ideal self discrepancy.
That's interesting, when you get, right now I'm
pretty far from my ideal self depicted by that.
And what I want to do, according to Rogers,
is to get closer and closer to the ideal self.
And, as I said, when you get right on top of it, you kick it and
establish some new goals.
Well, that's okay to talk about in a theoretical level,
but what distinguishes the psychology from philosophy and
kind of speculation is you need to have research.
Show me!
What's the evidence that there is a discrepancy
between the real and the ideal self?
And so Rogers designed, this is back a long time
ago in the '50s, the following method.
And he called it the Cue Sort method.
So what a person is given is 100 cards and
each card has something written on it like friendly,
disciplined, lonely, ambitious,
outgoing, reserved, hardworking,
gregarious, content, etc.
Now, the task is to make a display of these cards from the most like me,
most like the real me, least like the real me.
Nine steps.
So, a few cards at one end might be countered by a few cards at the other end.
Let's say the person puts outgoing, fun loving,
to most like me, and at the other end, reserved, and shy.
But the trick here is to put the cards in a normal bell shaped distribution.
So the other cards, like ambitious, content,
kind-hearted, they may go somewhere in between.
The rule is you have nine stacks of cards in a normal distribution with
the ends being the most like me and most unlike me.
You got it?
Just a distribution.
All right?
Then the researcher very, very carefully puts those into piles, into one pile.
And then says, well, guess what, we're not over yet, we're not done.
Here's another stack of cards, the same labels on them,
the same trait labels, and now wants you to organize them,
distribute them again in that nine piles.
So what I just gave you was the real self sort.
Now I want you to distribute them according to your ideal self.
All right? So, say okay,
thank you, and they do it again.
And they're collected, and then you run a correlation.
How closely does the real self correlate with the ideal self?
Now you don't need to understand all the details of that.
I went through it pretty quickly.
But it has to do with sorting cards in terms of the real self, and
sorting another deck of same cards for the ideal self, and them comparing them.
The positions of the cards are statistically correlated with each other,
leading to what is called real/ideal self-discrepancy score.
Okay.
Now you've got some hard evidence,
Of the distance between the real and the ideal self.
It may not be the best way to do it, but it's one way to do it.
And Rogers was the first one there to do something and
the rest of the field loved it.
What happens here is a high positive correlation.
Get this, a high positive correlation means that the real self
is close to the ideal self, according to the sorter,
who doesn't know exactly why they're doing what they're doing.
So, a high positive correlation like 0.90 means there's a strong overlap.
Whereas a lower correlation indicates that
there's some distance to go between the real and the ideal self.
All right?
And I have never seen a correlation that's negative.
The negative would be it's really, really far away.
The real self is far away from the ideal stuff.
Usually it's positive.
It obviously can't go over 1.0 because
correlations only go from plus one to minus one.
He demonstrated the utility of this measure.
The researcher, he was a clinical psychologist,
and he had a patient named Mrs. Oak.
She was the first one to do this, and at the beginning of therapy,
her real and ideal self were fairly far apart.
Then in the middle,
they got closer together, and then in the end they were a good deal closer together.
And then a year after therapy, they still were fairly close together.
So it became for him, a measure of therapeutic outcome.
And he felt pretty good about that and published it.
But then other psychologists and social psychologists picked up on this measure.
And hundreds and hundreds of studies were conducted using
this real ideal self discrepancy variable, which became one of the primary
psychological variables to be used in research.
So, you can see if you're desperate for publication, you're have a bunch of
people, and you have them do this or some other task that would lead.
This became more complicated than people were willing to use, so
they came up with other measures for that.
And they correlated with life satisfaction,
success in their drug rehab program, etc.
So, they were off and
running because Rogers provided them with a method to measure something.
So, that was a very prominent
measure when I was going to graduate school.
I thought about it and I thought about it,
and I thought, there's something missing.
Do we really lead our lives somewhere
between being close or far from our ideal selves?
In fact, I was giving a lecture, and this is probably in the early 80s,
in a Theories of Personality course, one that I used to teach regularly.
And it was over at Lucy Stone Hall.
And we had just covered a conditioning and learning part of a person I psychology.
It's not really terribly relevant to person I psychology, and
students were bored to death.
I said, okay, we're going to have a good time this time.
Were going to talk about the ideal self, and I'm going to warm up the audience and
have them talking about what their dreams are.
Now fortunately, for we have the capacity to project ourselves in the future.
If we didn't have that, this would be crazy.
But no, we project ourselves in the future.
You do it all the time, particularly now now during registration period.
Oh my God, what am I going to take?
Because it's a step stone for your goals.
But at any rate, that lecture, that rainy November day,
it was really cold, it was sleeting, it was raining.
It was time when the umbrellas get inverted, and the class
was not the slightest bit interested in participating in what I thought would be
a wonderful session of people talking about their dreams for the future.
Nothing.
And I almost wrapped it up and say, hey guys, this isn't working.
We're going to take the rest of the class off.
But I didn't.
So somehow, out of the depths came this idea that
what's missing is the undesired self.
Me at my worst.
And they said, well actually you're doing that.
If you're far from your ideal self,
you're getting close to what I eventually called the undesired self.
No, no really.
because it turns out, that we evaluate ourselves in two different dimensions.
We do it in multiple dimensions, but there are two dimensions.
And they may be orthogonal.
So, at least it's possible to be close to your ideal self,
and fairly close to your undesired self at the same time.
Okay, I interviewed this one guy who had been in drug treatment.
I said how close are you to your worst, he said I'm very close to my worst
because every neuron that's still in my body is just craving a fix.
What about your ideal?
I'm close to my ideal self because I think I'm going to master this problem.
Understand?
So you can be close in some respects to your ideal self and
also close to your undesired self as well.
I'm going to let you come up with other examples of this.
So, that's what popped to mind on a cold and rainy November day.
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