Whenever I do something in public, I am concerned about my gestures and appearance.
– Item 6, Self-Consciousness Scales, Gray-Matter Expansion of Social Brain Networks in Individuals High in Public Self-Consciousness
… everything conscious was subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was relatively unchangeable …
– Three Case Histories
In A Korean Odyssey, Asanyo, a priestess recently awoken from a thousand-year sleep taunts the Devil King that the Spiritual Realm managed to finally tame him by banishing Queen Mother to ten thousand years of pain. After having experienced a thousand years of cultivating his superego and inhibiting his id, he just blinked off the suggestion sheepishly.
Asanyo knew that the Devil King was very conscious about his public image. Indeed, when he lost his eyesight after having received 88 of 99 death stars into his own body on behalf of Queen Mother, he explained to Ms Ma his assistant, that even though he had lost his sight, it was very important that he did not lose his style.
The sense of style he referred to here was really what Higa et al., (2008) termed Appearance Consciousness in their Structural Model of Self-Consciousness in Children. In this model, they attempted to deconstruct the concept of self-consciousness.
According to them, Self-Consciousness comprises, Private Self-Consciousness and Public Self-Consciousness. The former comprises Self-Reflectiveness and Internal State Awareness. The latter comprises Style Consciousness and Appearance Consciousness.
To understand the difference between Style Consciousness and Appearance Consciousness, we can turn to the Self-Consciousness Scales (SCS, Fenigstein et al., 1975) items which aim to measure each construct distinctly from the other.
A person who is “concerned about my style of doing things” and “the way I present myself” is style conscious. A person who is, “usually aware of my appearance” and for whom looking “in the mirror” is “One of the last things I do before I leave my house” is appearance conscious.
Consciousness begins with awareness and this has to do with sensory receptors and cognition. Awareness can be adaptive if it is strictly objective. To illustrate, Jason Bourne after getting shot, realises he may be one of the bad guys. He says to Marie Kreutz, “I come in here and the first thing I’m doing is I’m catching the sightlines and looking for an exit” and “I can tell you the licence plate numbers of all six cars outside”. He was aware of his surroundings and situation because his profession put him in dangerous situations where a lack of awareness could be fatal.
Awareness can be maladaptive if it is subjective in a self-defeating way. Subjective awareness is what psychologists call attention bias. If one pays more attention to negative stimuli when there are also neutral and positive stimuli present in an environment, such a person would be overly aware of but one part of the whole and misconstrue reality to his detriment. This reinforces low self-esteem and accentuates social and performance anxiety.
An antidote would be to focus on the positive stimuli which are in every way also part of objective reality.
Awareness can also be maladaptive if one’s subjective awareness is only or overly on positive stimuli when there are other types of stimuli in an environment, in cases of deception and self-deception. A has a hope. B realises it. When in A’s line of sight, B behaves in a way which feeds A’s hopes or otherwise entices A’s investment in B.
An antidote here would be to recognise B’s self-conscious behaviour. B is self-conscious here to the extent that B fully expects A to be watching which is why a carefully designed image is presented.
Simply put, when making a decision about someone new, people generally have their guard up during direct interactions. In social interactions with new acquaintances, people generally put their best foot forward. It will be difficult to achieve an objective appraisal. So, one sensing the decision maker’s interest, could simply perform in a manner to reinforce his hopeful narrative when in his line of sight. So, only observations of B when B is unaware of A’s presence should count in the decision to invest. This will be very difficult for someone who enjoys performances. It will be helpful for such a person to remind himself that performances are very tiring and for this reason will not last beyond a fixed and short time.
Consciousness though goes beyond awareness in that it also entails an additional element of valence. Once some stimulus enters the awareness, one labels it as good or bad. This is the root of mental distress according to the eccentric Zhuangzi. In the introduction of his translation of Zhuangzi’s philosophy, Burton Watson writes, “It is this baggage of conventional values that man must first of all discard before he can be free… If man would once forsake his habit of labelling things good or bad, desirable or undesirable, then the man-made ills, which are the product of man’s purposeful and value-ridden actions, would disappear, and the natural ills that remain would no longer be seen as ills but as an inevitable part of the course of life”. Watson was distilling the essence of Zhuangzi’s philosophy in so writing.
Self-consciousness and public self-consciousness in particular is in general not a good thing unless one loves performing. Wait, is that not a label on public self-consciousness?
Zhuangzi was a freedom lover who did not like to be tamed by conventions. His entire philosophy aims to achieve a free and consequently fulfilling life. The best way to pay homage to him would be to, immediately after citing him, go on to do what if only on the surface appears to contravene the very thing he was cited on.
Indeed, Zhuangzi would have disapproved a fixation on mere words. In The Secret of Caring for Life, his Cook Ding says, “go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes”. Elsewhere, he says, “words rely on vain show”.
What he really was suggesting in his advice to avoid labels is this. Labels or value judgements give rise to obsession and resistance. Both are unstable states. Something can of course be objectively good or bad and this was not his point. What Zhuangzi was really saying is “man-made ills” are “the product of man’s purposeful and value-ridden actions” and that such actions are the sine qua non of “ills”.
In actual fact, the psychologist view is entirely aligned with Zhuangzi’s philosophy. For instance, Higa et al., (2008) echoed Mor and Winquist’s (2002) view that, “private self-consciousness is more strongly related to depression whereas public self-consciousness is more strongly related to social anxiety”. Private self-reflection coupled with negative attention bias could result in, “shame, guilt and social anxiety” (Takishima-Lacasa et al., 2014). This has been written about here and here.
To return to where we were before the digression, public self-consciousness is not a good thing for various reasons. We can examine two.
First, it can be weaponised, for instance like when Asanyo attempted to tame the Devil King by suggesting that he had in fact already been tamed. If he had taken her suggestion seriously, he might have begun to self-reflect on his public behaviour and increased attention to acts which could be perceived “pliant” which was the exact word she used. He would then have experienced shame and initiated “value-ridden actions” which would have worked in her favour.
Another instance of weaponization of self-consciousness is known as negging in social interaction. Negging is really colloquialism for directing attention to some ‘flaw’ in someone. For example, one could be shamed for wearing shoes which are not matching the attire as a whole. Such a person should in the ordinary course accept the suggestion and begin to feel smaller in relation to the one who made the comment. Negging is a technique to alleviate social anxiety for instance when meeting someone one esteems to be salient in relation to self by creating social anxiety in the one negged. If the person negged keeps silent and appears to go along, it could of course be because his personality is weaker. It could be because he wants to observe more to spot the butterfly which caused the storm. It could be because he feels for/ has feelings for/ feels the negger. Finally, it could even simply be because, he wants to let the negger believe whatever the negger wants.
Secondly, public self-consciousness results in expansion of grey matter in areas of the brain which process emotion such as the Anterior Cingular Cortex and Insular Cortex, according to, Morita and others (2021). These researchers concluded, “caring about observable (overt) aspects of the self has a stronger impact on neuronal processes in one’s brain than thinking about internal (covert) aspects of the self, presumably explained by the fact that humans are social creatures”. They added, “Hence, those who are highly concerned about public aspects of the self are likely to recruit emotion-related and default mode networks involved in social cognition … frequently in their daily lives”. What this means is it becomes almost automatic after a while for people who are highly self-conscious and who have felt embarrassed to frequently experience social interactions as an emotionally draining, even frightening, experience. This is an unfortunate outcome because humans are social creatures.
Playing the fool may not be foolish after all.
The Brain Dojo
