selfconceptualization,selfknowledge,andregulatory.docVIP

Self Conceptualization, Self Knowledge, and Regulatory Scope: A Construal Level View Cheryl J. Wakslak University of Southern California Yaacov Trope New York University Nira Liberman Tel Aviv University Chapter to appear in: S. Vazire and T. Wilson (Eds.), Handbook of Self Knowledge. New York: Guilford Press. Address Correspondence to: Cheryl J. WakslakDepartment of Psychology Brooklyn College City University of New York 2900 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11210 cwakslak@ Phone: (718) 951-5000 x 6059  Decades of research in social psychology highlight the impact the situation exerts on people’s attitudes, judgments, and behaviors. From the opinions of other people (Asch, 1956) to the instructions of an authority (Milgram, 1965), to previously unscrambled sentences (Srull Wyer, 1979) and the race of an experimenter (Lowery, Hardin, Sinclair, 2001), research has illustrated the incredible power of the situation to influence the self-concept and behavior. At the same time, people do show consistent patterns of behavior that differ reliably from one person to another (Digman, 1990), and people intuitively believe that the self exists (Bem Allen, 1974). Given that the self is characterized by both variety and consistency, how do we best think of self-knowledge? Does knowing the self mean being able to accurately predict how the self will act in a given context, or can one know the self as it exists in general, even if the self in any one given context might act quite differently? In the current chapter, we distinguish between two modes of self representation, and argue that these different types of self representations can be accurate (and inaccurate) in different ways. In particular, we suggest that self-representations act as self guides, regulating the self across different contexts, and that the nature of a self guide varies according to the proximity of the self-regulation context, something we term regulatory scope. Guides for deal