Self-Concept

Self-concept is another area of social cognition, relating to how we come to learn that we are a separate person with our own perspectives and thoughts. Understanding that you are a person separate from other people has been studied by Western researchers in a very well-known  experiment called “the rouge test.”

Video: Rouge Test (duration: 1:40)
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(Bolt, 2006).

Developing self-concept is obviously necessary before we start thinking about the thoughts of others, so it is important to understand how and when this can happen.

We first encountered the notion of self-concept when I referred to Ahn’s (2023) work in Korean preschools in Chapter 2. Ahn suggested that there was a conflict in the conception of self-concept between Western and Korean cultures, such that enacting the Reggio Emilia curriculum became difficult when such cultural differences were not laid bare (more on this in Chapter 8, when we consider models of learning).

Ahn conceptualized the Western notion of “the self” in terms of independence and individuation; this contrasts the Korean model, rooted in Confucianism, collective group membership, and humility.

This East Asian pattern was also seen in Chinese culture by Wang’s (2006) study of mother-child memory conversations by Chinese, Chinese-American, and European-American mothers reminiscing with their three- year-old children. The study looked at the mothers’ reminiscing style and how this seemed to be reflected in the young children’s talk about their self-conception. The American mothers were more elaborate than both the Chinese and Chinese-American mothers, and their children were “more focused on their attributes and agency in understanding themselves” (p. 1804) than either of the Chinese groups.

Similarly, Sahin-Acar and Leichtman (2015) also examined mother-child memory conversations. In their article, they summarize multiple studies from East Asia that attest to this difference in self-concept development from Western children. That is, American adults have reported more elaborate narratives when sharing memories than their Asian peers.The authors propose that this difference is related to different goals. The goals of the Americans appear to relate to uniquenesses in personal histories that speak to identity development and differentiating oneself from. In contrast, the East Asian goals tend to focus more on sharing and “emphasizing social roles” (p. 69).

The authors wished to explore the impact that parent-child conversations could have on formations of self-concept, and they were interested in looking at Turkey as another example of a collectivist society (similar to East Asian societies). They went a step further in their research by comparing within-country regional differences between East and West Turkey. They analyzed the conversations of Turkish mothers with their four-year-old children in these two regions in Turkey, alongside American mothers with their four-year-old children.

In addition to seeing how the mothers shared their autobiographical stories, they also determined how much they tended to individuate in their tellings:

• American mothers showed the most elaborate narratives of their lives and individuated the most.
• More traditional Eastern Turkish mothers repeated more, talked less, and individuated far less.
• Western Turkish mothers fell somewhere in between these two groups.

Sahin-Acar and Leichtman’s study (2015) demonstrates that our own concept of self impacts how we interact with young children, which, in turn, may model how to think about oneself.

Cultural patterns speak to very different emphases in developing self-concepts and lifelong perceptions of self and how one fits in with a social group or structure. They form the foundation for how a child is able to construct roles and appropriate behaviour.

So, while these fundamental understandings of self are indeed cognitive and social, they are also deeply cultural. We must carefully understand this in our work with children’s thinking and learning.