Bem's theory of self-perception: definition and characteristics

Social psychology has always tried to understand the behavior of people in social situations. In addition, he has also been concerned with understanding how our attitudes are formed, and how they guide our behavior.

Daryl Bem's self-perception theory has tried to explain how people determine our attitudes to different situations and behaviors. In this article we will know it in detail.

• Related article: "The 15 types of attitudes, and how they define us"

Related psychological concepts

We are going to know some previous concepts in order to better understand Bem's theory of self-perception.

attitudes

attitudes are different dispositions to behave, that is, they guide our conduct. Eagly and Chaiken (1993) define an attitude as a psychological tendency that involves the evaluation of favorability or disfavorability towards an object.

For example, it would be the positive attitude towards the elderly, which predisposes them to help this type of person on the street when they have a need.

Cognitive dissonance

What happens when we act against our attitudes or beliefs? A counterattitudinal behavior is produced, which originates a cognitive dissonance.

The cognitive dissonance posed by Leon Festinger consists of the tension or internal disharmony of the system of ideas, beliefs and emotions that perceives a person when he has two thoughts that are in conflict at the same time, or by behavior that conflicts with his beliefs.

Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when it appears, people tend to try to reduce such dissonance, for example by changing the attitude, so that our beliefs, attitudes and behavior are consistent with each other.

Bem's theory of self-perception emerges as an alternative to this theory.

Bem's self-perception theory

Daryl Bem was an American social psychologist who raised the theory of self-perception (1965, 1972), and who tries to explain how we infer our attitudes from counterattitudinal behaviors.

Bem eliminates cognitive dissonance as an explanatory factor for behavior, and in contrast to Festinger, he states that subjects infer their attitudes from their past conduct in relevant or similar situations. This happens because the internal signals (inspection) proposed by other theories (such as Festinger's) are often weak, ambiguous or not interpretable.

We are going to analyze in detail the two fundamental elements of Bem's theory of self-perception.

Past behavior and environmental conditions

Bem (1972) understands attitudes not as a factor that determines behaviors, but as the explanatory factor of past behavior, and suggests that people develop attitudes based on their own behaviors and the situations in which they take place, as we will see below.

The theory states that when cognitive dissonance occurs, or when we are not sure of our attitudes, we do not try to change attitudes for the motivation of reducing our psychological discomfort, but that we carry out an attribution process on our own behavior.

It states that through interpersonal relationships the attitudes of any subject are inferred, from the observation of two elements: the behavior itself (external and observable) and the environmental conditions of the context. All this serves to understand the behavior.

That is, people use the keys of our own behavior and of external conditioning factors. to infer what our own internal states are (beliefs, attitudes, motives and feelings). This It is also applied to determine the internal states of the other, which are inferred in the same way as their own. All this serves to reason the most probable causes and determinants of our behavior.

For example, if a person cleans a street for free, we probably infer that his attitude towards cleaning his city is very positive. On the other hand, if this same act is carried out by a person charging for the service, we will not make such an inference.

When is Bem's theory useful?

The self-perception processes posed by Bem's theory appear when we want to determine our own attitudes (we observe our behavior to know how we feel); these appear when we must face unfamiliar events (Fazio, 1987).

So we feel the need to find out how we feel about a new situation or in which we have acted counterattitudinally.

For example, when we eat a large piece of cake at a party, just when we had started a diet. If we orient ourselves according to Bem's theory of self-perception, we will observe our behavior and think, for example, "because I ate the cake, the birthday must have been important”, to escape a negative impact on our self-esteem or self awareness.

In this way, we are persuading ourselves, and sometimes it can be useful, even if we deceive ourselves in a certain way.

theory problems

Bem's theory of self-perception can explain many cases, but not all, since assumes that people do not have attitudes before the behavior occurs, and this is not always the case.

Generally, we have attitudes before acting, and precisely those attitudes guide our behavior. In addition, these can change as a consequence of our behavior (as Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance maintains).

In this way, Bem's theory of self-perception would be applied only in situations where we have not yet formed attitudes or these are very weak.

Bibliographic references:

• Worchel, S. (2004). Social psychology. Ed. Thomson: Madrid
• Gerrig, R. and Zimbardo, P. (2005). Psychology and life. Prentice Hall Mexico: Mexico
• Lopez-Zafra, E. (2010). Consumer behaviour: contributions from psychology. Official College of Psychologists.