Key Takeaways
- Self-concept is your overall view of yourself and who you are, including your beliefs, identity, and abilities.
- It develops over time and can be influenced by experiences, relationships, culture, and feedback from others.
- While self-concept tends to be fairly stable, you can improve yours through reflection, self-awareness, and effort.
Self-concept is the image we have of ourselves. It is influenced by many forces, including our interaction with the important people in our lives. It is how we perceive our behaviors, abilities, and unique characteristics. For example, beliefs such as “I am a good friend” or “I am a kind person” are part of an overall self-concept.
Verywell / Cindy Chung
Why Self-Concept Matters
Our self-concept impacts how we respond to life, so a well-developed self-concept helps us respond in ways that are more positive and beneficial for us and those around us. One way it does this is by enabling us to recognize our worth. A well-developed self-concept also helps keep us from internalizing negative feedback from others.
Self-concept also affects how we interact and communicate with others. For example, how you communicate with others is often tied to your self-concept and how you relate to your social group. If your social group communicates a certain way, you would likely choose to communicate that way as well. Studies on teens have connected high self-concept clarity with more open communication with parents.
How It Differs From Self-Esteem
Self-concept refers to a broad description of ourselves (“I am a good writer”), while self-esteem includes any judgments or opinions we have of ourselves (“I feel proud to be a good writer”). Put another way:
- Self-concept answers the question: Who am I?
- Self-esteem answers the question: How do I feel about who I am?
What Are Some Examples?
Examples of self-concept include:
- How you view your personality traits, such as whether you are an extrovert or introvert
- How you see your roles in life, such as whether you feel that being a parent, sibling, friend, and partner are important parts of your identity
- The hobbies or passions that are important to your sense of identity, such as being a sports enthusiast or belonging to a particular political party or religious group
- How you feel about your interactions with the world, such as whether you think that you are contributing to society
Our self-perception is important because it affects our motivations, attitudes, and behaviors. It also affects how we feel about the person we think we are, including whether we are competent or have self-worth.
Self-concept tends to be more malleable when we’re younger and still going through self-discovery and identity formation. As we age and learn who we are and what’s important to us, these self-perceptions become much more detailed and organized.
At its most basic, self-concept is a collection of beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. It embodies the answer to the question: “Who am I?” If you want to find your self-concept, list things that describe you as an individual. What are your traits? What do you like? How do you feel about yourself?
How Carl Rogers Explained Self-Concept
Humanist psychologist Carl Rogers believed that self-concept is made up of three distinct parts: ideal self, self-image, and self-esteem. His theory explains what it means when these parts are congruent or incongruent with reality, which impacts your self-concept.
Three Parts of Self-Concept
Rogers described the self-concept as being composed of three parts:
- Ideal self: The ideal self is the person you want to be. This person has the attributes or qualities you are either working toward or want to possess. It’s who you envision yourself to be if you were exactly the person you wanted to be.
- Self-image: Self-image refers to how you see yourself at this moment in time. Physical characteristics, personality traits, and social roles affect your self-image.
- Self-esteem: How much you like, accept, and value yourself contributes to your self-concept. Self-esteem can be affected by a number of factors, including how others see you, how you think you compare to others, and your role in society.
Incongruence and Congruence
Self-concept is not always aligned with reality. When it is aligned, it is said to be congruent. If there is a mismatch between how you see yourself (your self-image) and who you wish you were (your ideal self), your self-concept is incongruent. This incongruence can negatively affect self-esteem.
Rogers believed that incongruence has its earliest roots in childhood. When parents place conditions on their affection for their children (e.g., only expressing love if children “earn it” through certain behaviors and living up to the parents’ expectations), children begin to distort their memories of experiences that leave them feeling unworthy of their parents’ love.
Unconditional love, on the other hand, helps to foster congruence. Children who experience such love—also referred to as family love—feel no need to continually distort their memories in order to believe that other people will love and accept them as they are.
Unconditional Love
Unconditional love, on the other hand, helps to foster congruence between self-concept and reality and thereby nurtures positive self-esteem.
How It Develops Over Time
Self-concept develops, in part, through our interaction and observation of others. In addition to family members and close friends, other people in our community and in the media can contribute to our self-identity.
- People who believe in you: For instance, one study found that the more a teacher believes in a high-performing student’s abilities, the higher that student’s self-concept. (Interestingly, no such association was found with lower-performing students.)
- The characters we identify with: Self-concept can also be developed through the stories we hear. For example, one study found that female readers who were “deeply transported” into a story about a leading character with a traditional gender role had a more feminist self-concept than those who weren’t as moved by the story. Thus, relating to and identifying with the character may affect your emotional response and confirm or alter your own ideas about yourself.
- The media: Both mass media and social media play a role in self-concept development. When these media promote certain ideals, we’re more likely to make them our own. The more often these ideals are presented, the more they affect our self-identity and self-perception.
- Our culture: Different cultures have different beliefs. They have different ideas of how dependent or independent one should be, as well as religious beliefs and views on socioeconomic development. All of these cultural norms influence self-concept by providing the structure of what is expected within that society and how one sees oneself in relation to others.
When Does Self-Concept Stop Developing?
Self-concept development is never finished. Though self-identity is thought to be primarily formed in childhood, your experiences as an adult can also change how you feel about yourself. If your self-esteem increases later in life, for instance, it can improve your self-concept.
Can You Really Change Your Self-Concept?
Self-concept is not static, meaning that it can change. Our environment plays a role in this process:
- Places we are exposed to, especially those that hold a lot of meaning to us, actively contribute to our future self-concept through how we relate these environments to ourselves and how society relates to them.
- Self-concept can also change based on the people with whom we interact. This is particularly true for individuals in our lives who are in leadership roles. They can impact the collective self (the self in social groups) and the relational self (the self in relationships).
- In some cases, a medical diagnosis can change self-concept by helping people understand why they feel the way they do, such as someone receiving an autism diagnosis later in life, finally providing clarity as to why they feel different.
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Alternative Ways to Think About Self-Concept
As with many topics within psychology, several other theorists have proposed different ways of thinking about self-concept.
Social Identity
Social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed social identity theory, which states that self-concept is composed of two essential parts:
- Personal identity: The traits and other characteristics that make you unique
- Social identity: Who you are based on your membership in social groups, such as sports teams, religions, political parties, or social class
This theory states that our social identity influences our self-concept, thus affecting our emotions and behaviors. If we’re playing sports, for instance, and our team loses a game, we might feel sad for the team (emotion) or act out against the winning team (behavior).
Multiple Dimensions
Psychologist Bruce A. Bracken had a slightly different theory and believed that self-concept was multidimensional, consisting of six independent traits:
In 1992, Bracken developed the Multidimensional Self-Concept Scale, a comprehensive assessment that evaluates each of these six elements of self-concept in children and adolescents.
Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Read our editorial process to learn more about how we fact-check and keep our content accurate, reliable, and trustworthy.
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Additional Reading
Weiten W, Dunn DS, Hammer EY. Psychology Applied to Modern Life: Adjustment in the 21st Century. Cengage Learning; 2014.
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