So now we talk about humanism
more broadly as we move into some other theorists of personality.
Humanism itself is this really broad concept that was
a reaction against,
a reaction against psychoanalysis,
and a reaction against behaviorism because both of those schools of thought
really have a fairly pessimistic view about people, right?
Yeah, you know you're born into one circumstance or another. You go through your learning
situations if your behaviorist, or you go through your socializing situations and
parents and child relationships early on in life if you're psychoanalytic.
But then you come out as an adult and you think you have free will, but you don't
really.
It's kind of a pathological pessimistic deterministic type of philosophy
about human nature. The humanism that arose was
actually a direct reaction against these and eventually became
called the third force in psychology. It became so big and is predominant today.
If you've ever heard of positive psychology,
it's a remnant or an actual outgrowth of humanistic psychology.
The idea here is know what you are unique, but you do have free will.
You have choice. You have ability to make changes in your life.
You're not set on a deterministic path where you have no
control really over what you do and you don't do,
and that we need growth, and that human beings we can look at the clinical side
what's gone wrong with human beings,
but you flip it on its head and you see what goes right with human beings.
For all that goes wrong there's tons that goes right. You can look at the wars and the
famine and the poverty, but you can look at the people who try to alleviate wars and
famine and poverty,
right? You can look at ignorance, and you can also look at us going to the moon
and beyond we do some amazing things as human beings,
and they thought that was under emphasized in most psychology up to the
date,
and that idea that you have free will and that you need growth translates into
a
a model that allows you to change. You stress
inner-directedness, I can choose for myself,
and phenomenological reality. Phenomenological I've already been talking about
a little bit.
It's how you perceive reality. The photons are the photons, but whether I think
they're lite
yellow or lite green is my interpretation,
right? I can look at a person
and the action and one person will say, 'oh you need to have compassion for that
person', and other people go, 'no you need to be hard on that person.'
The facts being the same people interpret reality differently.
The facts are in fact debatable.
Reality is not something that's so objective that everybody agrees on it. We
actually
interpret reality; we create reality through our lenses,
our world views, our belief structures, our schema's,
our scripts all guide the way we perceive the world, and the perceptions we have
of the world guide our
actions in the world, and create many of the effects we just assume would occur
anyway.
Which might not have depending on how we viewed
and acted in it. So phenomenological reality is a big word,
but it's an important word. Your reality
and my reality are different. We all agree on certain constraints in reality.
We agree today is Wednesday around 1:05 p.m.
That's it's a beautiful day outside, but some people don't think it's a beautiful day
outside. They think it could be a little warmer or a little cooler, you see what I'm sayin'?
We could all go out there and read a thermometer and say it's X degrees
outside, but somebody's gonna go, "that's a little cool for me."
Somebody else will say, that's a little hot for me." What's the reality?
Well most people see it as whatever I think is right, and you're crazy.
If I say it's warm out today then it is warm out today cause that's how I
perceive it,
and if you go, "naw it's a little chilly." I'm going to say, "I don't know what's wrong with you
cause it's warm." But it depends, it's relative to your view.
Carl Rogers comes along. You want a mnemonic for Carl Rogers?
I say call him Mr. Rogers. Everybody know who Mr. Rogers is from PBS?
Yep, Mr. Rogers' neighborhood.
He believes in you. He doesn't even know you, but you're a unique
and valuable individual, and he cares about you.
That's Fred Rogers, but it's also Carl Rogers.
They are similar on that point. They believe in you,
and your inherent abilities to overcome difficulties in your world,
and they believe you have value at the core level.
So, we have a self-concept. Now
that's gonna be a similar theme. You have a self-concept
from a psychoanalytic point of view. You have a self-concept from a behaviorist point of view,
except the behaviors who are hard core
just didn't study your consciousness. They didn't deny you had one
They didn't deny you had thoughts. They didn't deny you had feelings.
They just denied you can study them objectively, right? So the idea that you
have a
opinion of yourself is a common thread through all these
theories, right? That you have some thoughts on who you are,
and what that means, and so your own collection of believes about your
uniqueness and behavior.
We have a self ideal. That's very similar to Freud's superego.
The superego is what causes guilt.
You want to see people who haven't developed superegos. They're the ones who fill the prisons.
Cause they what? They let their id impulses run wild. What they want when they want it;
laws be damned; people's needs be damned, and
that's just a Freudian interpretation of that. I think it's a lot more nuanced
than. That's something you can't even really
put any kind of empirical yardstick on so that's a little less
useful to me, but everybody's got an idea
of what they would be if they were at their best. If you were the best student you could
be you have a sense of what that would be.
If you were the best boyfriend or girlfriend you could be, or husband or wife, or
partner you could be
you have a sense of what that would be like. If you were the best parent you could
be
you have a sense that you can be like that, but nobody can be perfect.
So we fall short of our ideals right, and that can cause
consternation, worry, or anxiety depending on how
far apart you are from yourself ideal
and your actual self. The thing you are every day. What you do.
As a parent there's times where you would like to think that you're really
you know fair treating, and egalitarian, and calm, and collected,
and you have a bad day; you wind up screaming at a kid who doesn't really deserve to be screamed at,
and you're like, "aahhhhh!"
At the end of it, if you're being honest about it you say, "maybe that was an
overreaction on my part."
So that makes me in-congruent with the parent I'd like to be,
right? I'd like to be the more fair-minded less over reactive
parent, but you know the reality is, is sometimes I'm
not as open minded and over-reactive. So I had this
congruence incongruence thing going on. So if I am honest with myself
I don't have to necessarily beat myself up about the disparity,
but I would, as we'll see with cognitive dissonance, have to work towards being
a better parent or skew my ideal self
to something that is more in line with what is happening in reality.
Self-esteem is something you definitely want to know for your test,
and what I want you to be able to do is what most people can't do in the
world.
I want you to know the difference between self-efficacy
and self esteem. They are not the same thing.
People hear those words and they're like, "well it's self something with 'e' right they got to be the
same,"
but it ain't the same. Self efficacy
is specific beliefs about your abilities to do things.
Self-esteem is about your worth as an individual. Your self-worth. What you
think about yourself,
and that is very different. They might be related in some ways,
but what we see is conditions of worth, and again here's a
common thread: growing up we get feedback from our world.
We look at the stages of development whether we're talking about social
stages of development, cognitive stages of development,
moral stages of development. You remember Kohlberg's theories of moral development I
hope,
and what you see there is a phone that
won't shut off. Stop phone.
It's my alarm. There we go, thank you phone. Sorry about that.
Trying to stay on topic, right? Try to stay on track so I don't go too long, and
lead you all astray for what you need to know. But you get feedback.
Kohlberg's theory of moral development gives you feedback,
right? What happens in one of the first stages? Punishment reward.
That translates into whether somebody themselves as a good boy, good girl,
bad boy, bad girl right, and then you move up into social contract where you start
understanding laws and authority, rules, and you either become anti authority or pro authority.
You fall in line or somewhere probably in the middle
depending on the situation, right? Normal curve,
normal distribution. And then you've got a sense of who you are.
Well from Rogers' point of view, your self esteem starts when you're a little kid.
What Mr. Rogers does on Mr. Rogers neighborhood is
reach out through the television to any little kid who's watching,
and affirms them. It says you're a good person,
you have creativity, you have abilities,
you should look to good things, and feel good about yourself, right?
It's very affirming, but that might not be what's happening in their actual world,
right? Depending on the family environment they happen to be born into
they might get very good positive feedback.
Talking about, "oh you're such good kid; we love you so much; you're a
wonderful child," and so on and so forth.
All positive all the time, and they'd feel really good about who they are.
But they might get born into a situation where, "you little shit I don't have
time for this; you need to stop acting that way
and quit being like that; why don't you be more like your brother, he's better than you,"
and you get negative conditions of worth, right?
Where you get a message over and over that you're not worthy.
That you're not good, right? What happens over time is
you see people internalize these ideas
that they get from the outside; they become inside concepts,
and they tend to be congruent. I watched a,
don't know if I gave you this example before, but I talked to some
parents at a soccer game years ago who said, "oh our little kid he's just mean; he's mean as a snake; he
throws things; he hits his brothers; he gets all pissed off all the time,"
and they're talking about this kid in a really
very concrete negative terms about how mean and bad he is,
and then I saw the kid at a soccer game one time and he was over
at the chain link fence going, "grrrrr."
I mean just going off on the fence, and
they're like, "look, see how mean he is," and I'm like, "why don't you stop him
from doing that shit?" Why don't you not go, "you're so mean; you're so bad; you're
always in trouble," and
stop him from being mean and bad,
and give him affirming. There's a difference here.
People think this is just, oh man you give everybody a trophy for everything.
That won't work because people know when they're being patronized, right?
Kids know when they're being patronized. The idea here is you separate the worth of the human
being
from the behavior. The behavior may be totally unacceptable,
but that's how we talk about it. We talk about it as the behavior.
So I say, "I love you, but that does not stand you cannot do that,
and if you do that these are the consequences," right that's the
authoritative parent who's now laying out boundaries, laying out rules,
giving explanations, and holding the boundaries.
But at the same time kids make mistakes; we all make mistakes,
but when they screw up they don't go, "you're such a little shit; I can't
believe you act like this all the time."
They go, "that behavior is not going to be acceptable; that behavior is going to be
punished;
that behavior is going to be modified," verses, "you
are a bad child; you are a bad kid."
There's a very different message there, right? I can affirm
the person, and then disapprove of the behavior,
and if I can do that then what I'm gonna do as a parent,
overtime, is create unconditional positive regard.
I give complete emotional support and approval,
separating behavior from the person; it facilitates high self-esteem.
You don't want false high self-esteem that's just narcissism,
right? You want people to feel good about who they are.
If they feel good about who they are they're more likely to succeed on a
number of things in life, but you can't just give them
it's not permissiveness; it's not do whatever you want you're always a good
kid even if you do bad things,
right? It's affirming the person.
I tell both my kids I say, "you know what you go to jail as adults
I'm not bailing ya' out, unless I thought your framed in which case if I thought you were framed,
honestly think you're framed I'll bail you out, but if you go because you did something
then the consequence stands.
and I'm not going to remove a consequence, right I'll come and visit ya';
I'll tell you that I love ya' because I still care about you as a person,
but the behavior has a consequence, but down the road you know what if you
become a bank robber
I'm not taking responsibility for that; I did what I could as a parent but you know what
if you become president of these United States I'm not taking credit for that
either,
right?" You did what you did cause you made choices; the choices had consequences they
can lead down positive paths
or they can lead down negative paths, but if a person feels better about who they are
to begin with, and that's not an
an inflated sense of self worth but is one based in reality about being cared
for
etc. independent of mistakes that we all make;
then they're more likely to persevere through obstacles and challenges in life
and suceed on their own terms because I don't know what terms of success are for
other people.
They have to be self defined, right? I can say you should do this issue do that
but it doesn't make it so, and it turns out that self-esteem
is measurable. Self efficacy is measurable.
Unlike Oedipus complex, right? Unlike anal retentive personality, and things like
that you could translate that into maybe
a Type A personality, but the way Freud expounded his theories they didn't
really lend themselves to measurement.
But self efficacy, I can measure my beliefs and whether I can do math or not.
I can measure my beliefs in whether I play basketball or not.
I can measure my beliefs in whether I can quit smoking or not,
and whether I feel good about myself or not
I can measure that too, with reliability and validity.
If you remember what we talked about with the intelligent tests; reliability,
validity, and standardization, and norms still apply,
but what we see is when we got pre teens
boys and girls feel pretty much equally good about themselves,
fascinating. Once we enter the teens
what happens? Both plummet,
but girls plummet far farther than than guys plummet,
and it stays roughly parallel. You get into your early twenties;
go through your thirties you may be raising a family, you may be engaged in a
career,
and you get this rise in self esteem.
Thinking about yourself; how good you are as a person,
and what you see is females are always thinking less of themselves than males,
and we get this peak when? At retirement age.
You've been through all the shit life has to throw at you, right? You been through it,
and you succeeded,
and now you're sitting on top of the world looking down.
Men still higher and then what happens? Health declines, right?
Mortality starts getting salient, and you start realizing how close the end is cause
you lived a long time, and for the first time ever since
grade school you see that women actually have higher self-esteem than men.
That's the sociological phenomenon, and we can change it if you want to. Ya'lll
have a great day.