The thing that you know better than anything else is yourself, right?
It's the only thing that you spend every waking moment with, right?
It's the only thing that has been every waking moment.
So if you ask people, how well do they know themselves?
90% of people or more would say, I know myself pretty well.
But the question I wanna discuss with you today,
the thing that I'm really interested in is what is the self?
What are we talking about when we say we know ourselves?
What is the self?
So I want you to do me a favor and wiggle your fingers a little bit.
Okay, great.
Thanks.
So here's the question.
Who did that?
Who wiggle those fingers?
Right, so if you're like most people, you feel like there's a little person in
your head, maybe a couple inches behind your eyes, looking out, looking at me,
deciding what you're gonna do next, right?
That's how it feels for most people.
But you know that's not true.
You know there's no little person in there, running around in your head.
So, well, assume there's no little person in there running around in your head.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> But there's still something in there,
there's a feeling of the self, right?
So I wanna think about what that is.
So if you're like most students and you are all students here,
you believe in science.
So a lot of people, scientists think about the self as the brain.
I am my physical self, right?
I exist in my brain.
I'm on neural patterns and networks and blood and muscle and hair.
But that doesn't feel quite right.
Because the person that you are right now physically is not the person you
were 40 years ago, 30 years ago or 10 years ago or 10 minutes ago, right?
We're changing all the time like our hair is growing, our skin is shedding skin,
our neurons actually changing.
Everything about our physical self is changing, but you don't feel like you're
changing as your physical self changes, if you're like most people.
Imagine you have a terrible accident and you lose a limb, right?
You lose an arm, right?
That would be horrible.
You'd get over it eventually because that's what humans do.
But you wouldn't wake up the next day and say I don't know who I am, right?
You will still have a sense of I am me, right?
Arm or not, right, I'm me after an accident, but I'm still me.
So we don't really think our self is our physical person.
What I'm gonna ask you to consider is the self is not in here,
the self is out there in your relationships.
That your self is really a social thing, that your self exists in the relationships
you have, in the interactions that you have with other people.
So a way to think about that is if you're a parent, right, or
you're a partner, think about what it means to be a parent.
You cannot be a parent without your children.
Your sense of yourself as a parent exists in the relationship with your children.
That's what it means to be a parent, right?
And that's true for all of our identities, right?
Who we are is defined in large part by our relationships,
our selves exist in our relationships, okay?
So this might sound a little metaphysical and out there.
I am an empirical social psychologist.
So let me give you a study to describe this in a slightly different way.
So, I don't know maybe 20 years ago now, there was a study done of Asian American
women, and so they had these women come in and they gave them a math test.
But before they gave them that test,
they asked them to state their gender or their ethnicity, okay?
And what happens is all of these women wanna do well on this math test.
What happens is they do better on the math test when they state their ethnicity than
when they state their gender.
This is an empirical study, you can look at the data and you just see they do
better on this math test when you ask them their ethnicity and then their gender.
What is going on there?
Why is that the case?
So what I'm gonna suggest is what's going on in that study is,
we are shifting their selves.
They are different selves when they think about their ethnicity than they will think
about their gender.
Why is that?
Because they're thinking about different relationships, right?
When they're thinking about their ethnicity,
they're thinking about their relationships that define them as Asian American.
When they think about their gender,
they're thinking about relationships that define them as women.
And those different selves are performing differently in this math test.
Where does that self come from?
Why would those different selves perform differently on a math test?
Where do they come from?
Those different selves come from us.
We are constructing those different selves as we help tell them what it
means to be Asian American.
We tell them in our interactions, what it means to be women, right?
So now think about that in your life.
Think about relationships or social identities.
What does it mean to be a man or woman?
How do you know? Where does that come from?
How do you know how to behave as a man or woman?
And it's not just gender or ethnicity,
you are all here because you are connected to Stanford, right?
Think about all the relationships that construct your sense of self as
a Stanford alumni, right?
Think about the memories you have of this place and
how they're connected to people that you engaged with.
Also think about how you're sharing those memories of people you might have
brought with you.
If you brought your friends, your kids with you and you're telling them
about your experiences as a Stanford alum, what it was to be here.
You are constructing yourself in your interaction with those people
as you describe your experiences.
As you engage with each other about your experiences, you are creating yourself and
recreating yourself as a Stanford alumni.
Now, why does this matter?
Why should you care about this?
Well, one, when we're constructing ourselves in these interactions,
we're also constructing other people.
Like in this example of the Asian American women, we're constructing what it means to
be Asian American, to be women in all the interactions we have with other people.
When you're interacting with someone else, you're not two islands,
you're not just inside your body, you and they're inside their body them,
you are in the interaction constructing each other, right?
So that changes how we think about other people.
What are our responsibilities to people if we think we are constructing them as
we interact with them, right?
What does that mean about how we should think about other people,
how should we think about interactions?
So here's why that matters in a deeper level.
Think of some of the biggest challenges that we face right now in the world.
How are we gonna deal with climate change?
How do we respond globally to a pandemic?
How do we think about the politics,
the polarization that we have in our politics right now?
When you think about some of the biggest problems facing humanity,
those problems are at root about how we interact with each other.
What do we owe each other in a broader sense, right?
What would it mean to behave as if I am responsible for
the self that I'm engaging with?
I'm responsible for you, the other people I engage with are constructing me.
And I think sometimes we lose sight of how intense those interactions are.
So think about the pandemic, As a virus in China,
and now it's affected all of our lives.
We're sitting inside with the masks on.
Every person that's been infected has had a contact.
So they've been infected.
But what's also happening is every contact is not just a chance to infect.
You can also think of every social contact as a chance to ennoble the other person,
right?
What would it mean if we thought in those terms?
Think about how quickly the virus has spread and now instead of a pathogen.
Think about every interaction as a chance to ennoble the person that you
engage with.
I think if we thought about the world in that way,
we would live in a much different place.
So what I'm gonna ask of you is as you go out into the world, as you enjoy the rest
of your time here at Stanford and reminisce and engage with each other.
That you reflect on what it means to be responsible for
the self of the person you're interacting with.
And understand and reflect on what they're doing and how they're engaging with you.
And I hope that that actually increases your sense of connection with each other
and increases your enjoyment of the time you have here.
Thanks >> [APPLAUSE]