Mark Leary || The Self, Identity, and Removing the Mask

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give
you insights into the mind of brain, behavior, and creativity.
Each episode will feature a guest who will stimulate your
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and the world we live in. Hopefully we'll also provide
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(00:21):
Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today. I'm really
excited to have doctor Mark Leary on the podcast. Mark

(00:43):
is Professor of Psychology and neuroscience and director of the
Interdisciplinary Behavioral Research Center at Duke University. He's editor of
the Handbook of Self and Identity and author of the
Curse of This Self. Mark really excited to shot with
you today. Great to talk with you, Scott of my heroes.
I don't know why, but thank you intellectual inspirations. I

(01:08):
really have great respect for your work. You know a
bunch of questions I'd like to ask you, and I
want you to feel free to add any topics you'd
like to discuss. Okay, first, I want to start with
a really easy one, and that's what's the difference between
the self and identity. I thought i'd just jump it
to the deep end. Yeah, I mean self has been
defined in seventeen different ways in the literature. The way

(01:32):
I think of the self is just the cognitive apparatus
that allows us to be self aware and to think
about ourselves consciously. So the self, when you think of
it that way, it doesn't have any content. It's just
the mental apparatus that allows self awareness and self thought.
Identity has content. It's what you're thinking about yourself and
who you are and what you're like. So the fundamental

(01:52):
difference is it's the processes that allow you to think
about yourself versus what you happen to be thinking about yourself. Oh,
I see, So the self is a more general construct,
well not just general, but the self is what makes
the identity possible. That's the way I think about it.
That's not universally agreed on. People use the word self
in a lot of different ways. It's rather odd for

(02:14):
somebody who's so associated with the self and identity literature.
But I think we all to abolish use of the
word self and psychology in order to communicate more clearly.
But we clearly have something that needs to be defined,
you know, whether it's called the self where we call
it something else. We have something that other animals don't
have developed to this degree at all. That's correct, Absolutely correct. Yeah,

(02:39):
So I like that first of all, and not only identity.
Is if the self is the hardware and the identity
is the software, then we also have self esteem as
another form of software. Imagination maybe is a software. So
there are all these different apps that we can install
in the self. My question to you is are there
any good apps? Or should we just the ball is?

(03:00):
You know, do we need to just transcend the self
one hundred percent and call on a day like is
it okay to have an identity? That's a really interesting question.
Self awareness is absolutely essential for well being. We couldn't
get up in the morning and plan our day. We
couldn't decide whether we were good enough to try something.
We really couldn't interact with people as human beings if

(03:21):
we didn't have a concept of ourself. So you have
to have self awareness, you have to have at least
somewhat of an identity. But it gets us into trouble
because a lot of the thoughts we have about ourselves
get us into difficulties because they're too negative. We think
more about the future than we need to navigate life,
and so we worry about things we don't need to
be worrying about. And our identities can get us into trouble.

(03:43):
So sometimes we begin to relate to people in terms
of identities. I'm a certain kind of person and you're
a certain kind of person, when in fact, if those
identities didn't exist, we'd get along a lot better. We
divide ourselves from other people based on our identities, so
it's a mixed blessing. My book was called The Curse
of the Self. That was a little darker than it
needed to be. It's really a double led it's a
double edged sword or a mixed blessing. And I think

(04:05):
people need to be aware of the fact that their
self talk and their self awareness gets them in trouble. Yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. The curse might be
a little bit too dramatic. Consiia. I think that, like
if a turtle could talk, turtle probably would say, it's
jealous of us that we have a self. Absolutely true.
So are you aware of Abraham Tesser's work? Absolutely so,

(04:28):
oh great, he said, The self engenders quote a self
zoo of self defense mechanisms. I like that phrase. Yeah,
the end of that article on the self zoo. Correct.
I love that. Would you mind just elucidating maybe five
or six of the most prominent that's been studied in
social psychology of these mechanisms, Well, there are so many

(04:50):
because they are really cognitive mechanisms that simply have self
awareness of riding alongside them. That is, these cognitive mechanisms
that tests are thinks of is the self zoo are
more general mechanisms for decision making and navigating life. And
if you simply then connect that up with our ability
to think about ourselves, then you get a very large

(05:12):
variety of cognitive processes. So he talks about people's self
serving attributions, our tendency to perceive ourselves in desirable ways,
to explain our behavior in ways that make us feel
good about ourselves. He talks about denial of your negative characteristics.
Just about anything somebody could do to distort their view

(05:32):
of their self is included in Tesser's self Zoo. Okay,
so the bottom line, ear is that we have many,
many ways of protecting ourselves in a way that will
maintain a feel good We like to feel good. We
like to avoid pain. We like to feel good, we
like to avoid pain. Well, that's the way tests are interpreted.
It he interpreted all of these self defense mechanisms as

(05:54):
ways to simply feel good about yourself and maintain self
the team. They are certainly that we'd rather feel good
about ourselves than bad about ourselves. But I think a
lot of these defense mechanisms are really more interpersonal. They're
really oriented toward other people trying to get them to
perceive us in particular ways that get us what we
want out of social life than just ways of fooling

(06:16):
ourselves in our own minds. Deep down, most of us
sort of know what our shortcomings are. We know that
we really goofed off and failed because we goofed off,
but we don't want other people to know it. So
a lot of these biases are more social than they
are in our own minds. Yeah, and so that's really
a key piece of this puzzle that you've brought to
the table with your work, prominently your work on sociometric theory,

(06:39):
which I'm a fan. I'll say I'm a fan of
your revised sociometric theory. If I may be honest, I
think it's more encompassing. Well, any idea, when you come
up with any idea, it's pretty half baked in its
initial presentation, So you're right, it's been massaged and improved
over the years, and you know, I don't know how
it really stands, and it's revised version. But yeah, I

(07:01):
don't know if any apologies for the fact that you
make things better when you realize they're weak and have holes. Well,
let me make clear to my listeners. You know it
should not be underestimated what you've brought to the table here.
So you know, Abraham Asa talked about the need for belonging,
you also talked about the need for esteem. In a
lot of ways, you've kind of linked those two together,
and maybe it's still important to talk about them as

(07:23):
separate needs. But nevertheless, it does seem to be the
case that our self esteem tracks various specific interpersonal things.
So our self esteem rises or falls depending on our
interpersonal conditions, probably, you'd argue, more so than our own
freely fluctuating internal milob Yes, I think so. For the

(07:46):
first part of my career, I stayed away from the
topic of self esteem like it was the plague, because
I didn't understand it at all. I didn't understand what
the mechanism was that simply made people to want to
feel good about themselves for no particular reason. As you said,
we want to feel good rather than bad. So I
understand that. But if you posit a need for self

(08:07):
esteem as a fundamental human need, it must have to
do something really important or it wouldn't have evolved as
a need. So that's what we got to thinking about.
What does self esteem do? These changes that we feel
about ourselves that go up and down as we've walked
through life, what's their function? And the sociometer theory of
self esteem suggests that it's really the internal mechanism that

(08:29):
monitors how we're doing with other people, the degree to
which they value having relationships with us and thus are
going to give us certain kinds of affordances that we
would like to have. So, for me, self esteem is
primarily a monitor of how well social life is going
for us, and when it's going badly, our negative feelings
about ourselves get our attention, and then they motivate us

(08:50):
to take steps to try to improve whatever the problem is.
So you're right, As a social psychologist, I see everything
in terms of social relationships and anything we're doing just
in our own it doesn't serve any behavioral function or
get anything for us. Yeah, we do that, but that
can't be the fundamental thing that drives human behavior or
else we just sit in our room all of the
time and just think happy thoughts. We don't do that. Well.

(09:13):
You know, I appreciate that I have a bunch of
fault thinks of that. So one is I want to
make I also want to make clear I really like
this phrase relational value that you talk about, especially in
a revised version. So there's different ways that we can
be of value to others. So there's two fundamental sub
needs of esteem, I would argue, well, and then Mitch

(09:35):
Prinstein recently has positive them as two forms of popularity.
But I think that it maps exactly onto yours as well.
The need for liking and the need for status. Those
are two big ways that humans have relational value to others,
and therefore both can be sources of self esteem. We

(09:55):
primarily draw our self esteem on both sources. How I'm
trying to think of really dramatic exceptions. You know, what
about serial killers? Why do they have such high self esteem?
When killing someone really will not increase your liking and
probably won't increase your solid status, except for among others
your two or three other serial killer friends. I think

(10:17):
when we go to really extreme cases like serial killers,
we're dealing with pathologies that sort of make the normal
principles that control human behavior somewhat moot. So if you
lack empathy entirely, for example, for other people, you don't
recognize that empathy for other people is going to gain
you relational value. You're going to have better relationships with
other people the more empathy you have. But if you're

(10:39):
a sociopath and have no empathy, then that's just kind
about the window and you're not actually a functioning, normal
human being anymore. I like the distinction between the liking
and the status. We wrote a chapter a couple of
years ago where we draw a distinction between what we
call relational value, which has to do with the degree
to which other people value their relationships with you as

(11:01):
a person, and instrumental social value, which is more related
to status that has to do with the actual value
you bring to groups by virtue of your competencies and
perhaps your leadership or your resources. And as you said,
those are two different things. It's one thing to be
liked and to have value as a person in a relationship,

(11:22):
and it's another thing for other people to value having
you around because you give them something that they want.
They don't care about you as a person, but if
you're the best member on the team, they want you
to be on the team, Or if you have money
to devote to the cause, they want you to be involved,
or if you have competencies that help the hunting party.
But those seem to be two very different ways to
have value. And I wouldn't be surprised at all that

(11:44):
self esteem is tracking both of those things. We've tended
to focus on the relational part of that rather than
the instrumental value that you belong to the groups of
which you're a member. Okay, this is great. I really
want to nerd out with you today and I almost
apologized my listeners ahead of time. I hope that they
find this stimulating. But I think we can make some

(12:05):
more finer grain distinctions because you know, within the extra
version demain, it seems like both of those things could
be solely within the extra version demean in a sense
that you know extraversion can be distinguished between two facets, assertiveness,
which seems to really be tied to instrumental social value interests,
and the second one is affiliation or you know, affiliation

(12:27):
slash positive social interaction, a drive for positive social interactions,
and that can be tied to your relational value one.
But then there's another dimension of personality that I think
is different, and that's within the agreeableness to mean, and
that's compassion. So affiliation is not the same thing as
compassion and wanting to connect. So actually, let's talk about

(12:48):
three different fundamental needs. There's the wanting to connect and
wanting to be liked I think is different, and then
wanting to have status. I think probably all three are
roots to self esteem. So all three and it seems
like when we look at the narcissism construct, and I'm
working on a theory right now that narcissism that the

(13:10):
two main forms of vulnerable and grandiose can actually be
mapped on to the need for liking. An addiction to
the need for liking and an addiction to the need
for status is the basic idea. And I'm really excited
to like raise that idea to you here in public
in front of fifty thousand people who are listening, you know, like,
does that make sense? I have never thought of it
that way, but I can see that vulnerable narcissists are

(13:32):
more concerned about relationships and being accepted and being liked,
and grandiose narcissists would be more likely to want to
have status and respect and to dominate people. I think
that's absolutely right. One difficulty when you get to narcissism,
even though I think that's perfectly right. Narcissism again is
one of these sort of aberrations to require a high

(13:54):
level of self awareness. So during the course of evolution,
as these mechanisms were evolving to help monitor our social relationships,
I don't know whether narcissism was relevant at that point
like it is today, because you have to have a
high level of cognitive self awareness, which is a much
more recent evolutionary development. So anytime there's something that human

(14:15):
beings do that probably they weren't doing for six million
years of human evolution, then I think all kinds of
other things come in play, and that may be built
upon the basic Goald mechanisms that happened to monitor our
social relationships and be accepted and to have value. But
then there's all kinds of other funny stuff going on,
But I think the essence of what you're saying is
right on. Yeah, I like what you're seeing too. Now,

(14:38):
are there narcissistic turtles? Are there narcissistic apes? Do we? Actually?
You know? Do we? I mean when I say apes,
I mean you know, I mean a specific kind of
you know, non human You know, do we see narcissism
in other species? There's no way to know, because we
can't measure their sense of grandiosity and to know whether
their self us are inflated because they brought we don't

(15:00):
have self used. We also don't have a sense of
their sense of entitlements, which of course is an important
part of narcissism. So I just don't think it applies
unless you have highly, highly cognitively evolved animals that can
have a very complex self concept in which they're evaluating
themselves positively. They have a sense they deserve more than

(15:20):
others do and that they have a right to exploit
other people to get what they want. You know, in animals,
you see dominant numbers of any species that run over
the others and control everything, But you don't have the
sense that comes out of a grandiose self view that
is so interesting. Like a shark, you know, a shark
who particularly likes to eat other fish. We wouldn't call

(15:42):
it a grandiose narcis We would just call it just
a more of a shark. Yes, yeah, and maybe a
particularly dominant shark. They don't have a self concept and
narcism is not really that's cool. So the way, yeah,
the way I'm thinking of it, and the reason why
I use the word addiction is I actually think it.
You know, it ties it to the rest of all humanity.
We have a tendency to take certain people and say

(16:04):
and make it very divisive and say, oh, well, you're
such a narcissist. I'm not, you know. It's like, well,
you know, there's a little bit of that in all
of us, you know. So when I say addiction, I
mean power and status is inherently rewarding in our human species.
It's built into all of our brains to some degree
to be rewarding. Now, doctor Kellner's research has shown that

(16:24):
the more power you get, the more of an asshole
you become, or the more you seek power. He would say,
and I think that Gradio's narcissism in a lot of ways.
Is it's this fundamental system, the need for power and
status or a hierarchy that has kind of been hijacked
in a way that it's just you just can't you
can never get enough of it. And then, in terms
of vulnerable narcissism, the need for a liking system has

(16:47):
been hijacked in some way, either through you know, childhood
emotional abuse or you know, usually you get more of
the abuse in childhood with the vulnerable than the grandiose,
but that still hijacked this system of like you're always
on the lookout first signs of potential rejection. But to me,
these are abnormal alterations of a basic human personality dimension.

(17:07):
I like that a great deal. I think that's spot on,
and they're not only aberrations, but it's like the grandiose
and the vulnerable narcissists are stuck in a rut. You're
absolutely right, there's parts of both of those things in
all of us. There's times in which, in a given
particular situation, we feel too entitled, we're a bit narcissistic,
or we feel like a vulnerable narcissist. The problem with

(17:29):
both of those kinds of people is that's their main
way of interacting with the world and dealing with other people.
And you can't go through life being that way all
the time without getting yourself into trouble. That's right, And
you get yourself in trouble indifferent ways, depending on the
flavor of narcisms, of vul narcissm, you get to take
in trouble with yourself, whereas grandiose narcissists tend to get

(17:51):
in trouble with others more. That's right, internalizing vers externalizing. Yeah,
that's right. Yeah, but both are troubled to someone or
some self, whether it's your own self or so. Grannia's
narcissists are very good deflecting. They're like master ninjas of
deflecting everything that onto others. It's like the elf of

(18:11):
the room. Here is the discussion of our president of
the United States. Do you see any problem with our
current Now I know that we're not supposed to be diagnosing.
The President of the APA has said that that's not
professional practice. But my question actually is a little bit different.
Do you think that there's any problems there with our
current president? Is when it comes to the self aspects,

(18:32):
the aberrations of the self. And it's funny every interview
that I've had with anyone for the last six months
has somehow gotten around to that question given the things
that I study. And yeah, I'm not a clinic a psychologist,
and I'm not going to diagnose. But as you said,
this is not just a clinical diagnosis. I mean there's
a continuum of narcissistic tendencies. And I think what I've

(18:54):
started doing, rather than taking a stand and being accused
of diagnosing, is simply to describe for people what the
primary characteristics of a narcissist are. And once you hear those,
everybody would go with Sure, the President has a great
number of narcissistic tendencies in terms of having an inflated
self view, a sense of entitlement, disregard for other people's

(19:16):
well being at times, tension seeking, a big requirement for
respect and loyalty, and then the dismissal of anybody who
doesn't see him as positively as he sees himself. And again,
I'm not going to make that as any kind of
a clinical diagnosis because I'm not a clinician. I'll just
simply say, if you look at the descriptors of narcissism,
and say does the president tend to score highly on

(19:38):
these You'd say, well, yes he does. Okay, that was
a very fair answer. And I think there's a lot
of even orders of the president who when they looked
at the list of characteristics, they would say, well, yeah,
he does score high on these things. Although they might
you know, they might say well I like him, and
I support him and I wish him. Well, it would

(19:58):
be hard to say that he does not have narcissistic characteristics, right. Well,
people with narcissistic high levels of narcissistic characteristics tend to
be proud of those characteristics. It's not like they deny them.
I did a pay article on swear I had. At
the end, I said, the number one test whether or
not you're a narcissist is do you think you're a narcissist? Like,
are you a narcissist? Yes or no? If you say yes,

(20:20):
you know you're probably a narcissist. You know, there are
a lot of people who are scared of being a
narcis They're like, oh my god, I'm so scared of it.
Am I really? Am I really? And well they might
be a vulnerable narcissist. But I was going to say,
they're probably not, you know, because they have they still
have the self awareness to care about it. Whereas you
do tend to find, especially particularly grandiose narcissism with gradios narcissism,

(20:41):
that they reinterpret all those characteristics as positive things like bravery. Oh,
it's valiance, it's bravery. I tell the truth, I say
what no one else wants to say I, etcetera, etcetera.
While you're leaving all this pain in your wake with
other people, you know, you still interpret every thing. And
so I think grandiose narcissism is actually it involves all

(21:03):
these mechanisms that allow you, like completely distort your image,
other people's image, distort reality, to bend to this grandiose
self that you have absolutely kind of scary to me,
it is in the extreme view, it is scary. And
it took me a while to realize that the problem
is not that the person sees themselves self to positively.
I mean, because if you kept that in your own head,

(21:25):
you could be an internal narcissist and it wouldn't matter
to anybody. It's the sense of entitlement and disregard for
other people that goes along with seeing yourself so positively
that creates the problem. I really like that you know
this model, this framework that you have of relational via
versus what was the other one called when the instrumental
social value. It's such a good will you send me

(21:47):
that paper when we get off. When we up, I
thought I've read everything you've written, so I'm surprised that
there's something I didn't read. But this is in that
Handbook of Status that came out a couple of years
there's a Handbook of Status. Yes, yes, that's a thing,
or the Psychology of Social Status. It's an edited book. Wow, Chang,
Tracy and Anderson. I'm sure that's the beach reading for me. Okay,

(22:11):
so you said that was edited by Change Chang, Tracy
and Tracy. Now they have done I'm glad you've actually
mentioned their names because they've done some really cool work
on hubristic versus authentic pride, and I think that that
relates a lot to our discussions we're talking about here today.
So hubristic pride, I think we could tie to this
grandiose narcissism a bit. Now, authentic pride is something different,

(22:35):
and some could argue I'm a fan of the late Kernis,
who passed away way too soon, and I really like
his idea of optimal self esteem. I think there might
be a link here between optimal self esteem and authentic pride.
Do you agree? I had not thought about that, but
I can see that that it is okay to feel

(22:57):
good about yourself for something that's socially valued, and that's
sort of optimal self esteem, and that's authentic pride. Yes,
I did something well and I feel good about it.
It's not a thing wrong with that. Where it goes
off the cliff is when you when you take that
one good thing you did that won the game or
I had not the award or whatever it is, and

(23:19):
you generalize that into believing not only are you good
at that thing, but you're a special person overall. That's
when it becomes ubristic pride. That's when it begins to
bleed into narcissism. That's when your self esteem is more
inflated that it should be. And you know, I think
some people begin to feel badly about being proud of
their accomplishments. But there's nothing wrong with being feeling good
about the things that you do. That's nature's way of

(23:40):
telling you to keep on doing good. Then you're valued
by other people so momentary they call authentic pride. I
never liked that term because that implied there's some kind
of inauthentic pride. But what they mean there is it's
pride about an actual accomplishment, not just a general sense
that you're as a human being. Yeah, I've seen the
phrase you sometimes I like, and that's genuine pride. Even

(24:03):
then makes it sound like there's some disingenuine ride heuristic
pride is genuine and just misplaced overgeneralized. I see what
you're saying. Yeah, so Trump is is actually authentic. He's
an authentic jerk. That's a good I mean, if you
think about we're working on some work on authenticity right now.

(24:25):
That sort of makes that point, you know. The gumnistic
psychologists say that we all should always be authentic, and
it's an important virtue to be an authentic person. But
we each have negative characteristics. So the question is should
I behave authentically with the awful parts of myself? I
would say no, that you don't want a world in

(24:45):
which everybody's being authentic. That would be terrible to act
consistently with your darker nature and your negative attitudes and
your base motives. No, you have to override that you
don't want to be authentic. That's hilarious. I'm as you
probably can tell them. Big fan of the humanistic psychologists.
I mentioned MASL earlier in this in this podcast, and
I think that, you know, sometimes they were too overly optimistic,

(25:07):
particular Carl Rogers. You know, he really saw the best,
and I think that's actually to his credit. You know,
he really saw the best in all his patients, but
he really maybe downplayed evil a little bit too much,
as in saying, you know, it's evil is a thing
in some people and at certain times, under certain circumstances.
You know, it's something maybe something we're all capable of,

(25:29):
but it is something that that does exist. You know,
it's a very minority, but it does. But this question
of authenticity is really interesting to me, and I definitely
don't No one has all the answers for this stuff.
But I created and I've been validating a scale I
called the Whole Person's Scale, where I literally take some
of these humanistic ideas and I just put it into

(25:51):
the scale, Like I am, a fully functioning human is
one of the items on the scale of another item
is I feel whole and then I feel empty is
the reverse coded version of it. But another item on
there is I accept all sides of myself, even my
dark aspects. So there's there's this, I think, something that's
very valuable from these human psychologists, this acceptance aspect. Now,

(26:12):
acceptance doesn't mean, Carl Rogers said, you know, the first
step to changing yourself is accepting yourself. So maybe it's
still good for in terms in your search for authenticity
to really, you know, not do what grandiose narcisists do,
which is deflect everything or you know, and not to
have experiential avoidance as the act approach would talk about.

(26:34):
But maybe a good first step is to becoming a
full person really is to accept this kind of these
gnalledge sides of yourself and say, yeah, that's part of
my that's who I am as well. But this is
another interesting question. Can you accept this stuff but not
integrate it and not make it part of yourself. The
thing is we have more of a choice than people

(26:55):
realize in terms of what we want to integrate into ourselves,
even though it might be a part of our constitution. Right, Well, yes,
but I see I would say it a little differently.
I think that people have to accept all parts of
themselves and have to be honest to themselves about their
good and their best best aspects, and those bad aspects

(27:15):
are integrated into their view of their self. They may
want to change them, they can work on them. So
in that sense, they're sort of authentic in their own mind.
They're not denying anything. They know they're good and they're bad.
Where the authenticity is the thing breaks down for me
is that we should not act on all parts of ourselves.
Some people who endorse authenticity would say, you always want
to behave consistently with who you really are, your actual traits,

(27:38):
and be consistent with that, And I would say, no,
you've you've got to resist acting consistently with the parts
of yourself you're bad. That means you have to know
they're there and you have to accept them as part
of you, and you want to change them, will work
on them and not be bad. That's great, But just
don't be authentically all the time if it's going to
hurt other people. Well, this is It's interesting because I

(28:03):
think it's good to make a distinction between part well,
you said parts of yourselves. There's parts of your biology
and then but that doesn't have to be part of yourself. Well,
we're back into where we started at the very beginning
about what we mean by self there, so let's use
the word somehow view of yourself or your identity. I

(28:24):
would say that my bad parts of myself are part
of my identity to the extent that i'd recognize that
they are really me. Because we all know people who
do bad things and say, well, that wasn't really me,
I can say, yes, it was you. It really was.
Now you might want to change that, but it is you.
Accepted at you, and then work on it. It doesn't
make sense to say, well, you know, I abused my partner,

(28:46):
but that wasn't really me. That's not really what I'm like. Yes,
it is what you're like, so accept it and then
work on it. Yeah. No, I tell you here you
how can we link this to the evolutionary psychologist emerging
view of sells as modules. You know, I'm not completely
convinced by that by that approach, but I wanted to
bring it up here to see how it links to

(29:08):
your own work and if you've thought about it, like
Rick Robert Kurzman, as some does, has written a book
like everyone else is a hypocrite. But you yes, I
like that book a lot. Well, I like the book too.
I think that it downplays the role of the of
the executive, of the central executive, Like I think that
approach ignores that we do have something called the lateral
prefrontal cortex. You know that they can inhibit some of

(29:29):
these things. We're not just like these automatons they could
just walk around like, oh, I actively this sub self
automatically because I see this stimulus. Oh I like, we're
not like these ADHD modules. Yeah, well, I really the
word sub self always throws me because it sounds like it's,
you know, a part of yourself and in those senses
that it's part of you as a functioning organism. Well, yeah,

(29:52):
I guess it is. But I think that the point
that he makes is that there are a lot of
things going on in the brain that are three our reactions,
our behaviors, and our thoughts and our emotion that we
are not consciously aware of. I mean, and everybody would
met there's a lot of non conscious things happening, and
they're not necessarily integrated it's not that we don't have

(30:12):
an executive that control conscious parts of ourselves. Things that
we're conscious of we can control. But I think his
argument is there's a lot of stuff that's just excluding
out of us and behaviorally that we can't easily control
because we can't catch it in action because it's happening
so non consciously. And I'm sort of persuaded by that

(30:33):
that there's just a lot of things and they're not
necessarily well integrated. He talks about them like apps on
the phone, where your weather app and your map's app
and your news app, when they use some of the
same architecture, but they don't have to be consistent with
each other or coordinated all, and they're just performing different functions. Now,
that doesn't mean there's not conscious parts of ourselves that
we regulate very deliberately, but there's a lot of non

(30:55):
conscious things going on as well. Well. That is certainly true.
But it's also is true that we can actively and
willfully try to have a harmonia self well, but only
self that's harmonious in terms of the things that you're
actually conscious of. That's right, that's right. So if I
have some non conscious reactions I'm not aware of that

(31:15):
make me determine that I get angry in certain kinds
of situations. And I know I'm getting angry in those situations,
but I don't have any idea why. It's much more
difficult for me to integrate whatever that process is within
my harmonious view of my conscious view of myself. So
I don't disagree. It's just it's awfully hard to pull

(31:36):
the content of things in that you're not consciously aware of. Yeah, well,
I guess sometimes trouble with your definition of self and
understanding then what is not self? Well, again, that goes
back to definition of self. If you go back to
my original thing, we're just talking about a cognitive apparatus
that has no content. And so maybe the way I
better say it is that there's an awful lot of
things affecting your behavior that you have no conscious awareness of.

(31:59):
They're not part of your mental self, they are part
of you biologically. There's all kinds of crazy things happening
in our brains. But I'm not willing to say that
everything that's happening in our brain is part of ourself
good except except in the most because in that case,
then all animals do have selves. New babies have selves,
and we don't want to go there. The self has
to deal with conscious processes or it becomes meaningless psychology.

(32:24):
That's the only definition of self. Like I said, there's
seven different definitions, so there's are conscious. This is important.
So these things that Kurtzman's talking about, these modules, that
they're not self. Most of them are not. So they
when they become conscious, they might be part of self,
but they're not self. Well, that's really important because people,

(32:46):
some embolish colleges that Kendrick have used the phrase set.
They have called those things those modules sub cells. Yes,
that's why I'm trying to clarify this because I think
there's confusion in the field between the stuff. Okay, I
like your distinction between conscious and unconscious. We could still
so I acknowledge. I do fully acknowledge there are these
all these apps running in the background. Robert Wright was

(33:08):
on my podcast recently and he was discussing his new book,
Why Buddhism Is True. And I don't know if you've
read his book yet, but you would love it. I
see the Buddha behind you on the bookshelf there, but
you really would love it. He does a really masterful
job of integrating evolutionary psychology and those ideas with what

(33:29):
Buddhism can offer you, what meditation can offer you. It
offers you this opportunity to not be so ruled by
all these evolutionary drives and instincts that have evolved in
another time and place far a long time ago, to
maybe serve different purposes and to be adapted for different
reasons than they are helpful today. So yeah, and I

(33:51):
would think I think that's true. And I also think
that as people learn to meditate, they are as controlled
with all of their random self thought a sort of
leading them in crazy directions. They begin to recognize how
scattered and out of control their mind is, and that
they're following thoughts that don't have any validity. So it
kind of worked at both ends of the continuum. Some
of the most basic motives and values that evolved in

(34:13):
the past. Become aware of those things arising up even
though you don't want them to. But it also makes
you aware of all of these highly conceptualized self use
plans and ideas and worries that are controlling your behavior.
That if you're not quiet in your own mind and
watch them. You're not even going to be aware of them.
You can't then control them in a harmonious way. Yeah.

(34:34):
I like that you're talking about, Like rumination can be
very detrimental. And my colleagues have been taking in eu
scientific approach and of distinguishing between the brain air's associated rumination,
the braina air a sysial with more creative imagination. I
would hate for the creative imagination to go away if
we got rid of the self, because it would go

(34:55):
away if we get so I don't think we want
to get rid of the self completely. Oh no, you
said it's a curse. Well, I said it's a that's
like you come up with a revised one here in
the podcast. Is self aware. All of the achievements of
human civilization that we consider uniquely human required self awareness.

(35:20):
Whether we're talking about health care, or religion or philosophy, government,
all of that requires self awareness. If you ask the question,
why are human beings so different than all other animals?
The other animals are living in a state of nature,
just like they've lived for millions of years, and we've
created this crazy environment around this. All of that is
traceable to our ability to think consciously about ourselves and

(35:42):
to make plans and to coordinate and to consider options.
So no, we don't want to get rid of the self.
We wouldn't have air conditioning, and I live in the South,
and we wouldn't have flush toilets, so we wouldn't have cars,
and I don't want to go live in a tree.
I'm really glad that you said that we need self awareness.
I'm really glad that thank you. Who So, my mentor
in grad school, Jerome Singer, has this idea called positive

(36:05):
constructive daydreaming, which is very conducive to creativity and flourishing.
So you need the self for that. It was self
aworder self awareness. So good. I like this. So self
esteem is one particularly evolved function of the self. Can
I phrase it that way? It's one. Maybe imagination is

(36:26):
another evolved function, but self esteem is a particularly evalve
function that you're already really evolved to track, you know,
interpersonal value of I would even say it a little
differently because my hunch is that the beginnings of the
evolution of self esteem were before we had a conscious

(36:46):
ability to think about ourselves. Because I get the sense
that animals have positive and negative feelings when they're accepted
and rejected. For social animal, they have emotional responses and
behavioral reactions when they're being in versus excluded by other
members of their species. So I think that basic mechanism

(37:06):
for monitoring your social relationships was already there, But then
once we became self aware, came able to think about
ourselves consciously, then it became what we think of it
self esteem. Today, I can actually think about my good
and bad parts by these people are rejected or why
I failed, and it affected my views of class. But
the basic mechanism, I think we're there before that. That

(37:27):
is so interesting because the need for belonging we share
that with other animals. And can we say that the
need for esteem we shared with other animals to some
rudimentary degree, like sure, like hierarchy and some sort of
social status. You see that with alpha you know, chimps
and stuff. So that's goind to exist as well, right, Yeah,
the status side and the inclusion side. I mean, even

(37:49):
if it's a status thing, I still have to be
able to get along with the other members of my troop.
If I'm a chimpanzee, they can't kick me out because
they kicked me out, I'm not going to make it
so I have to behave myself and play by all
of the rules of the group. Even when status is
not involved. Acceptance and belonging is still going to be
important for social animals. Don't drive me out of the pack. Gotcha,

(38:11):
that's really interesting. I read in the Need for Belonging
article you wrote with Roy Baummeinster, which is one of
my I mean, it's one of the most highly cited
papers of all time. So for me to just say
I like that paper would be the understatement of the century.
And I want to add it is It's been cited
a tremendous amount, and I think about two thirds of
the citations were unnecessary. And what I mean by that

(38:34):
is people will say human beings have a desire for
social acceptance and belonging, and then they cite baum Meister
and Leary nineteen ninety five, which strikes me a little
bit like a biologist saying mammals have a need for
oxygen and then citing somebody. It's so obvious. Yeah, I know,
And to be fair to Maslow, if someone's just citing

(38:54):
that sentence, they probably should say Maslow or Andler. Yeah, yeah,
Alfred Adler Okay, good. I really like you brought up
because Maslow read adwear a lot and was influenced by
him a lot, and also AdWords ideas about power. Can
we talk about some of AdWords ideas about power? We can?
I don't know anything about them, but okay, then I'll

(39:17):
table that. But yeah, so that's really interesting if they're
citing you know, more fleshed out theory and data. I
think your paper it's very very worthy of citing, and
it really brought to the foreground in the field of
this for research, stimulate research on this topic. I'd like
to talk about something related to all this that you've
also studied that I'm fascinated with, and that's self presentation strategies.

(39:41):
And let's pick one. Imposter syndrome. Now, you've kind of
found that it's not all what it may seem to
be in the sense that people who have imposter syndrome impositive,
it might not be exactly the way they present it
to be. That's correct, because most people when they talk
about the impostor syndrome, they describe it people who are
afraid of being found out to be as incompetent as

(40:05):
they believe they are. They think other people have overestimated
their abilities, and so they say they walk around feeling
like an impostor. The irony is that these people who
supposedly are afraid to be found out to be lacking,
readily admit to other people, I'm not as good as
you think I am. Well, that doesn't gel. I mean,
if people are afraid of being found out as an impostor,

(40:27):
you don't walk around and say to other people, I'm
not as good as you think I am. So what
we found is the possibility that the thing that we
normally think of as the apostor syndrome is a self
presentational strategy. It's an effort to lower other people's expectations
of you so that they won't be disappointed, so that
you won't let them down, so they won't expect too much,

(40:49):
so you won't fail in a sense, because if I
don't have any expectation of you, then you know, no
matter what you do, I'm not going to conspect the failure.
So it's more complicated. I'm not saying there are not
people who walk around out feeling like an impostor and
don't tell anybody that's true. But in the literature they
don't distinguish that from people who walk around saying I
feel like so much of an impostor I'm not as

(41:10):
good as you think I am. So there's a self presentation. Yeah,
and people attracts low self esteem. Yes, So again we
bring in the interpersonal It's still consistent with this theory.
It's part of this overarching framework that you know, if
you don't expect to be of much relational value to others,

(41:32):
you may be more likely to have higher imposter syndrome.
And in fact, I ran that study, so I wanted
to share this with you for the first time on
the Psychology podcast. I was very curious whether vulnerable narcisism
would track imposter syndrome. And I found a correlation of
point seven to eight. Oh my goodness between the two

(41:54):
not the same thing. Then yeah, well, well I don't
know if there's a see because I also found a
very strong croistwein vulnerable narcissism and authenticity measures, you know,
the twelve item authenticity scale measure. So self alienation is
one of the facets of the authenticity scale. So there's

(42:15):
something going on here with you know, the system of
things where you're very very unsure self a very you
know uncertain, A very uncertain self tracks a lot of
things of self presentation strategies, including imposter syndrome. Do you
know of any other self present strategies like imposter syndrome that?

(42:35):
What are some other in that class? Well, people typically
talk about different strategies in terms of what's the image
that you're trying to project. The strategy of exemplification, for example,
would be wanting to be seen as somebody who's sort
of upstanding and responsible and moral and conscientious. So it's
an effort to it's an effort to be seen as

(42:56):
a conscientious, upstanding person. Self promotion as a strateg is
an effort to go through life being seen as competent.
In ratiation, I don't like that term for this, but
the strategy of ingratiation is going through life trying to
be seen as a likable person. So on almost any
dimension you can think of, there are times in which
people want to be perceived in that particular way, including

(43:17):
in negative ways. Sometimes you want to be perceived as
helpless so other people will help you, or as intimidating
so that people leave you alone. So I mean, so
much of life, so much of the consequences and outcomes
we receive in life have to do with how we're
perceived by other people, So we manage our oppression get
what want. So this seems like vulnerable narcisism is more
tied to ingratiation, I would argue, and self handicapping is

(43:43):
another one I just thought of that I think is
probably more vulnerable. But then grandiose is more the image
projection of you know. So, I think that there's these
two main classes of self presentage strategies. Ones that inflate
the maintain and inflated image of self and those that
maybe not maintain a negative Well, I don't think anyone

(44:05):
wants to maintain a lower image of themselves, but they
want to. What they really want to do is avoid
They're trying to avoid something they're trying to avoid, like success.
In a way, it's almost like vulnerable narcissists are are
ashamed or have shame for being great, even though they
want to be great sometimes and sometimes it's to avoid responsibility.

(44:27):
Sometimes it's a dependency coming through where I want other
people to be there for me and to support me
and to help me, so that there's a certain amount
of supplication that's involved. That's so interesting. Well, you said, like,
what's the image you're trying to project? And I'm trying
to for me, it's very clear with grandiose narcisism what
the image they're trying to project is. But what is

(44:50):
the image that vulnerable narcissts are trying to project. I
think as a combination, I'm not threatening. I need a
certain amount of help. It's not that I'm incompetent as
a s but I want other people to be around
or some so interesting. And that's why we find in
the attachment literature we find a strong correlation between vulnerable

(45:10):
narcisism and both avoidance and anxious attachment, and gradiot narcisses
is actually not crurrelated with those insecure forms of attachment. Wow, okay,
so this all makes sense. Everything we talked about today
kind of we came up with it. We came up
with an integrated, integrated theory of the self today. Well,
and all of my interests in all of this started

(45:32):
with self presentation in grad school. It was an awareness
that's so much social behavior. No matter what else we're doing,
it's not that we go through life just trying to
make impressions on other people. But no matter what else
we're doing, we keep an eye on how are other
people going to regard us in this interaction and is
that going to facilitate or impede whatever my goals are?

(45:53):
And so you know, we're never indifferent to how we're
perceived by other people. Sometimes we're not thinking consciously about it,
but at any given moment, we all know something can
go badly wrong where we look like a fool, we
look at moral people question our judgment, and then all
the kind of defenses come up. So that awareness of
the social image and its importance is what led me
into the interest in belonging, because so much of a

(46:14):
belonging is facilitated by being perceived as a certain kind
of person. That's what moved me into the sociometer thing,
what moved me into the curse of the self initially
because people were too worried what other people thought of them.
So I have really always seen these internal self processes
as working in the service of our social interactions and
relationship makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about religion

(46:36):
and morality for a second. Sure, it's a topic I
know you're interested in, what, yes, how well tell me
in what ways are you interested in that topic and
its relationship to the self. Well, I'm sort of. I'm
interested to some extent in the fact that religion and
morality seem to have emerged in part to help to
control excessive self centeredness of the ills of society and

(47:01):
the ills of group living occur when people become so
focused on themselves that they disregard the well being of
other people. And if it's in your own tribe or
clan or group, that's going to be disastrous. Something has
to keep us from being excessively selfish and excessively egoistic.
And so you know, if left our own devices, if

(47:21):
it didn't backfire, we would all just want to take
everything we could possibly get. We would all be sort
of entitled and narcissistic. Something pulls us back, and it
tends to be things that are in the domains that
we think of as morality. So if you say, why
do we have morality and religion, I think it's to
control excessive selfishness At the most broad level. Who invented
that using evolution? Well, well, evolutionary psychologists certainly say that

(47:45):
some of the most basic moral codes, and even among
other animals, you get things where you get the sense
that they balance their own self interests against the rest
of the group. Because if I take all the meat,
a lot of times you're attacked, you're killed or thrown out.
You've got to sort of go along with your other
members of your group. But I think, even more in
a more modern sense, how do we met people not

(48:06):
to take advantage of others, not to kill others for
their own needs, or to take their land, take their food,
take their cattle. Something has to lead us not to
be so selfish that we just create harm everywhere we go.
I see most of the ills of modern society is
fundamentally problems of excessive selfishness. Whether you're all crime and

(48:27):
greed and murder and rape and plunder and theft, are
all just be believing that my interests and what I
want are more important your interests. And religion and morality originally,
setting aside all the dogmatic stuff in religion was there
to say you can't do that. There's certain rules about
fairness and lack of harm, and treating other people well

(48:48):
and keeping an eye on others help their regulate that
inherent selfishness in every organs. That is so interesting I
think you're quite right. Excessive selfishness. Well, you know, my
colleagues here at pen in the criminology department just recently
developed a new selfishness scale and we found it was
almost perfectly correlated with the Dark Triad measure, you know,

(49:10):
the confluence of narcissism, psychopathy, and machamalianism. And I would argue,
we just collected data that are relevant to that issue,
because I believe that the thing that makes the three
things in the Dark Triad cohere is selfishness. That's the
thing that all three of those have in common, despite
their differences, because they also share lack of empathy, for example.

(49:31):
But I think that abject selfishness lies at the core
of those three things. I like this, and you said
abject selfishness. Now, I think we can actually distinguish, and
Maslow did and what's his name, the Saints Eric from
distinguished the healthy selfishness. So I think it's actually an
important distinction being between healthy selfishness and abject selfishness or

(49:54):
the kind the kind that is associated with Dark triad. Yes,
And the way I think of the healthiness thing is
there's a normative level of selfishness that we all accept
with each other, you're going to pay your own rent
before you give all your money away. We all know
we're going to look at other people, are going to
look out for themselves primarily first. So there's a normative
level we all accept. It's perfectly okay to be interested

(50:16):
in yourself before you're interested in other people. It's when
you step over that line then you're into that abject
to selfishness thing. But yes, you're right, there's an optimal, normal, healthy,
normative level of selfishness, right. You know, study of great
people of moral courage, like really really high levels, you
find they are masters at balancing self interest with other interests. Now,

(50:39):
of that, but there are other interests, there are other
things they do are they've they've made it so that's
so well aligned with what they're intrinsically motivated to do.
And I think that's an important distinction from the kind
of self serving self enhancement you get from narcissists. So
we actually found what we did a factor analysis of
grandiose and vulnerable. We found that self self sacrificing self

(51:01):
enhancement loaded about equally on both factors. It's something that
seems to be in common amongst multiple forms of narcissism
is that they use, you know, helping these grandiose I'm
the best at helping, you know, like they use, but
it's not coming from a real genuine place of wanting
to really help a person. It's coming from a place
of primarily serving that self esteem function. So this all

(51:26):
makes sense, This all makes sense. Lastly, I want to
just ask you what are some tips ways that people
can transcend their ego in the ways, you know, not
getting rid of the self Like I really like the
model of the quiet ego. I don't know if you're
aware of the emerging research on the quiet ego, some
really good research on that topic. So how can we

(51:46):
have more of a quiet ego? I would ask? Well,
And in fact, Kirk Brown, you know who developed the
mindfulness scale, and I just edited the book on hypo
egoic Phenomena. That quiet ego term came from a conference
in flag Staff at Arizona a number of years ago.
It's a great term. I like the word hypogoing a
low level of ego. We all have to be self focused,

(52:07):
we have to be concerned with ourselves, but how do
we keep it at a minimal level where we're able
to function well as human beings, but it doesn't impose
on everybody else. And that and my view, that's one
of the primary challenges of life for everybody. How do
I pursue what I want in a way that's not
excessively self preoccupied and going. I don't know that I

(52:29):
have any any great tips for the average person in
terms of how do you balance that? How do you
have a quiet ego except to concentrate on it and
realize when your own self interest, your own ego, your
own self preoccupation is creating problems for you or others,
and then you just sort of monitor it and control it.

(52:51):
There's that executive function coming in saying I don't have
to run over other people to achieve my goals in life.
What are some practices people can do? Have you ever
thought about ring a self help book? Well, the book
I'm working on right now is called Toward a Less
Egoic World, and it's not a self help book exactly,
but it's sort of an expersay on the impact of

(53:14):
excessive egoic thought and selfishness on societal problems. And I
don't know how self helpy it's going to be. I'm
only about a quarter of the way through throwing junk
down on pages, so it's going to be a while.
But I've given a lot of thought to this because
I think so many problems in personal life and in
social life are egoic problems. And what do we do

(53:34):
to tone people back a little bit? The first just
simply make people aware that this is a problem, and
if we can we can minimize that, then some of
these problems will well be reduced somewhat. You're not going
to get rid of them. I don't have a lot
of solutions right now. You mentioned Buddhism before. I'm not
a Buddhist, but I do meditate it. I found that

(53:55):
meditation is a good way to sort of reduce the
self awareness to some extent, the self preoccupation I don't
think I have. I don't think I watch out for
myself less than I used to. But I don't push
my own interest when it's not in mind other people's
best interests as much as I used to because I'm aware. Yeah,
the awareness aspect is huge, and I think that because

(54:19):
the self awareness aspect can be so beneficial, I do think,
you know, there's further evidence that's for their evidence for
suggesting we should make this distinction between what evolution's psychologists
call sub selves and the what social psychologists call the self. Yes,
so that there can be kind of a you know anyway,

(54:40):
I think that's that's helpful. What's the word you use
that you like better than quite ego ecoic hypo egoing
hyphenated h y p o hyphen e g o I C.
That's not as sexy, No, but it's more likely to
get published in a journal. Yeah, yeah, no, I totally
respect that. And it's not and we're not talking about egotism,

(55:02):
and we're not talking about egoism. We're talking about egoic egoicism,
which is a sort of a selfish self preoccupation, because
you can you can be very low in egotism and
still be very self preoccupied, Like a highly depressed person
is highly egoic, even though they might have negative, very
negative self view. Vulnerable vulnerable narcissism is yes, is egoic, Yes,

(55:24):
very egoic, even though it's not egotistical in the general
sense of the word. So this phrase incorporates both forms
of narcissism. Then yes, good, good, I really like that. Oh, well, well, Mark,
I just want to say this has been such an
honor for me to be able to I've wanted to
talk about a lot of these issues with you for
a really long time, and I thought what better way

(55:45):
than for everyone to hear you know and great fun.
I don't know if anybody else is really interested in
our ramblings, but I have certainly enjoyed it a great deal,
both here we have to say and for you to
force me to think about what I think. Thanks Mark, Well,
I look for fair enough by vice versa vice versa. Well,
I look forward to reading your new book when it
comes out, and to continue reading your work. So thank you.

(56:07):
I've enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Scott. Thanks for listening
to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you'd like to react in some way to something
you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast
dot com. Also, please add a reading and review of
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(56:29):
great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Mark Leary || The Self, Identity, and Removing the Mask