Self-Concept
Self-image, self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-worth — the working model the mind holds of itself.
31 entries
All behaviors in Self-Concept
Contingent Self-Esteem
Self-esteem that rises and falls with success in specific external domains — academic performance, others' approval, appearance, virtue, competition. The more domains worth is contingent on, the more volatile the self becomes. A textbook case of borrowed completion: the deposit is always provisional, the residue accumulates as anxiety, and the loop must be re-run on every test.
Defensive Self-Esteem
Fragile high self-esteem held in place through active defence — dismissing critics, attacking sources of negative feedback, recruiting allies — because the worth it protects has no internal source to rest on.
Deflated Self-Concept
A self-concept significantly below objective reality — underestimating capacities, dismissing accomplishments, treating one's importance as negligible. Uncalibrated downward, often anticipatory-protective, and self-reinforcing through the residue it accumulates.
Feared Self
The vivid image of who you fear becoming — lonely, broke, sick, irrelevant, like a parent you flinched from, like a former version of yourself. The Meaning System's avoidance engine, load-bearing when specific and paired, corrosive when vague and unpaired.
Ideal Self
The image of the person one wants to be — virtues, capacities, achievements, recognition. A directional pull from the Meaning System when calibrated to actual capacity and held loosely; a fixed comparison-target that generates daily residue when borrowed from elsewhere or held as absolute.
Inflated Self-Concept
A self-concept significantly above objective reality — exaggerated capacities, accomplishments, importance, or attractiveness — held in place not by accurate feedback but by environments curated to confirm it. Distinguished from calibrated confidence by what happens when reality pushes back.
Ought Self
The internal image of who you believe you should be — duties, obligations, moral requirements — usually inherited from family, culture, or role before you had any say in it, and often quietly substituting for the self you would have chosen.
Possible Selves
Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's 1986 framework: the catalog of selves one imagines becoming (hoped-for) and not becoming (feared). The cognitive structures through which present action is wired to future motivation.
Self-Acceptance
The internal posture of acknowledging — without endorsing or condemning — who you currently are, including the parts that are difficult, flawed, or still in process. Distinct from self-esteem (evaluative) and self-compassion (responsive to suffering); acceptance is the floor both stand on.
Self-Clarity
Jennifer Campbell's construct (1990, 1996) for the extent to which beliefs about oneself are clearly defined, internally consistent, and stable across time — read in MDT as the Meaning System's 'I know who I am' readout that lowers the Effort cost of every identity-relevant decision.
Self-Compassion
Kristin Neff's three-component construct — self-kindness, common humanity, mindfulness — that treats one's own suffering with the warmth one would extend to a struggling friend. The highest-density alternative to self-esteem when self-esteem fails.
Self-Concept Complexity
Patricia Linville's construct: the number of distinct, non-overlapping aspects in one's self-concept. The identity-portfolio version of risk-diversification — each independent domain is its own Meaning-deposit channel, and a setback in one does not collapse the whole.
Self-Concept Confusion
The sustained inability to answer 'who am I?' with even provisional confidence — multiple incompatible self-models running without integration, producing emotional volatility, relational mirroring, and chronic decision difficulty.
Self-Concept Integration
The process of weaving disparate self-aspects — professional and personal, public and private, present and past, capable and wounded — into a coherent whole that holds together across contexts. The end-state of healthy identity development, distinct from rigid uniformity and from fragmentation.
Self-Concept Stability
The temporal consistency of self-concept — how much who-you-take-yourself-to-be holds across days, weeks, and contexts. The healthy form is a stable core with peripheral content that updates with experience; the pathological forms are rigidity (refusing all update) and drift (nothing holds).
Self-Discrepancy
E. Tory Higgins's 1987 theory of the gap between the actual-self and the ideal-self or ought-self — and how that gap, read through Meaning Density Theory, is the structural source of Meaning-System residue.
Self-Efficacy
Albert Bandura's domain-specific belief in your capacity to execute the behaviours required to produce a specific outcome — the felt-effort term of the density equation, built only by accumulated mastery experiences, not by self-talk alone.
Self-Esteem
The overall evaluative judgment of one's own worth — read by Meaning Density Theory as the Meaning System's current readout, high-density when it harvests from congruent action, low-density when it borrows completion from achievement, approval, or self-enhancement.
Self-Esteem Fragility
The pattern where self-esteem reads high under stable conditions but collapses, distorts, or strikes outward under threat — fragility is the volatility, not the baseline.
Self-Image
The mental picture you hold of yourself — body, capacities, personality, role, history — built from accumulated experiences and internalised feedback, and read by the Meaning System as the stored model of who you are.
Self-Loathing
The intense, sustained negative self-attitude — visceral disgust or hatred toward oneself, not merely critical evaluation. Sticky, self-reproducing, and structurally distinct from low self-esteem or healthy self-criticism.
Self-Rejection
The active stance of disowning, denying, or wishing-away parts of one's own self — emotion, body, history, capacity, identity-feature. Distinct from self-criticism: rejection refuses the part exists; criticism evaluates one that does.
Self-Schema
Hazel Markus's 1977 cognitive construct: organized domain-specific knowledge structures about the self that filter incoming evidence — pre-paying the Effort of self-retrieval at the cost of compounding identity-residue when the schema stops updating.
Self-Worth
The deepest layer of the Meaning System's self-evaluation: the felt sense that one's existence has inherent legitimacy, distinct from self-esteem and prior to it. Either gifted in childhood or earned in adulthood; never produced by performance.
Stable Self-Esteem
Self-esteem rooted in internal sources — values lived, character expressed, relational love received, capacity met — and therefore relatively steady across success and failure events. The opposite of contingent self-esteem.
The Self-Assessment Motive
The drive to seek accurate information about oneself, even when that information is unflattering. Trope's third self-motive, weakest of the three, and the calibration-function of the Meaning System.
The Self-Enhancement Motive
The drive to view oneself more positively than the evidence warrants — the Meaning System's positivity-bias function. Calibrated, it protects mood and motivation against everyday setbacks; substituted, it filters out the feedback that would let the self-concept settle into something real.
The Self-Improvement Motive
The drive to enhance the self — to become more capable, more virtuous, more whole. Distinct from self-enhancement, which inflates the current self-view; improvement aims at actual change. High-density when paired with self-acceptance; low-density when rooted in self-rejection.
The Self-Reference Effect on Memory
The robust finding that information processed in relation to the self is remembered significantly better than information processed semantically or perceptually alone — and the MDT reading of why the memory system organises around identity, and what happens when the identity it organises around is borrowed.
The Self-Verification Motive
The drive to confirm one's existing self-concept — even when it is negative — by seeking feedback, partners, and environments that match the self-view already held. A coherence function of the Meaning System that can run in service of growth or in service of staying the same.
Working Self-Concept
Hazel Markus's 1986 construct: the subset of self-concept activated at any given moment, shaped by context. Not the whole self — the slice currently online. Which self is loaded determines what behaviour is available.