Later on, I conducted a study that showed, and we don't have time to go into the methodology. It was pretty complicated. In fact, the program, the algorithm I used, I don't think is in existence anymore. But what I'm able to show. That the undesired self-discrepancy, the real/undesired self-discrepancy was a better core of life's satisfaction then the real ideal discrepancy. Absorb that for a minute. That we're, as we get close to our undesired self, and I forgot to put a Symbol of that out here. Undesired self I guess. As we get further away from the, notice I'm going this way because these are not necessarily correlated dimension. But when I get some distance from here, I have more life satisfaction than I do as I approach here. Conception. A little tricky. But you're smart. You can get the distinction I'm making. Here's a quote from Milan Kundura. The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs to be married longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers for fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always unknown to us. So, here we have a real ideal discrepancy, and the ideal self for most people your age and older is very abstract. You have no idea what it's going to be like if one of your goals is to be married or to have this terrific job. You've never been there. Right? And in most instances. And yet you're supposed to assess how close or far you are from something abstract. Not so for the undesired self. Why is that? Because the undesired self could be a time when you're really pissed off about something or somebody's broken up with you. You've already been there. You know what it's like to feel frustrated. You know what it's like to feel unloved. So now you have a real peg for self evaluation as opposed to something in the distance that is rather ethereal. So might we then not ask how much credibility can do a number that represents the distance between an individual and a phantom. So, with good evidence and this was really good evidence. We really worked hard as I had a number of undergraduates with me at that period of time. They were very productive. I argued that the ideal self tends to be abstract. And the undesired self is more derived from experience. It rang a bell with the public. It was published, and it appeared in the New York Times, Science Times section. And, people were calling me. This is a time when this was not put on the Internet and I had to send out hundreds and hundreds of reprints of the article. And so I gained a certain amount of notoriety for that, so much so that I was invited to pay a visit to Charlie Rose on Good Morning America! Boom! So I went. Picked up they said, picked me up in a chauffeured car. I thought that's really cool. I expect this limo to show up at five o'clock in the morning, it was a broken down Chrysler! It barely made it to New York, and they put makeup on my face, and I went and I sat down across from Charlie Rose and some hostess. There's Charlie before the interview. Charlie's made a good name for himself. PBS and very well-known interviewer, sat down and he said, Dr. Ogilvie, are you a happy man? I think what the fuck kind of question is that? >> [LAUGH] >> You get a preview. Somebody calls you and says, these are the kind of questions you're going to be asked, and I say, I can answer, I can answer. And he said, are you a happy man? I almost gave him a lecture, you know, happiness is overrated, fellow! But I was as much of a gentlemen as I can be. This is Charlie after out interview. >> [LAUGH] >> Somehow he managed to change his suit and everything. But anyway, my fame lasted for about five minutes. It calmed down very, very quickly. And what happened was researchers went straight back, computing real ideal-self discrepancies. It's like this never even happened. Why are we so defended? Why is it so offensive for somebody to come up with a concept of the undesired self? So it, for awhile and for quite awhile, it just simply disappeared from the scene, and part of the reason was that there was another person on the scene. His name is E Tory Higgins. As I was sort of quote discovering the undesired self, he was off and running in something he called Self Discrepancy Theory. Which you would think that the undesired self could become part of the Self Discrepancy Theory, but it didn't, it was very successfully blocked. So, I want to tell you about Higgins' Theory. He retains the ideal self, but then introduces another self that is the Ought Self. So this represents the Ought Self. I don't know why. It's the only one I could find. But it's got this long nose and it's like a finger pointing to you. The ought self is like this. It's This is not oh okay. That's it. It looks like a penis [LAUGH] but it's the Ought Self. [LAUGH] >> I should have got a better mask for that. Here's the Ought Self. The Ought Self is how you ought to be. It's like the internalized super ego. Shame on you. You shouldn't have done it. It's like Professor Hamilton's notion of thou shall not. And the super ego is like the internalized parent. Or even the internalized God. Who is watching you constantly and noticing whether or not your behavior is moral or the way it should be? So here's what Higgins did to that. He said that distance between your real self and the Ideal Self co-varies with happiness and sadness. So if you're far from your Ideal Self, then you become sad. The mountain is too high to climb. But as you get closer and closer and closer to your Ideal Self, the happier you get. This operates differently. The further you are from your Ought Self, the more anxious you get. So there's two things going on here. This has to do with anxiety, and this has to do with happiness and sadness. They were on a roll. They produced study after study after study. It was like they were operating a business in this. And this poor, old shit was sitting at Rutgers still thinking about the undesired self and how come I can't get that published? It's because of those guys. So, I decided, well, okay, I'm going to do a few studies myself. And what I was able to demonstrate is, this is of great concern. The Undesired Self. So as long as you're within the realm of the Undesired Self, all right, you're aware of it, and you're low in life satisfaction, and you're also anxious and sad. The distance between this and me has much more, overwhelms any distance over here. So, the real player is the Undesired Self. How close or far you are from your Undesired Self. It's only after you pop out of the sphere of that, that you become anxious about where you are with regards to the Ideal Self. Okay, so Ideal Self predicts depression. Ought Self discrepancy predicts anxiety. And I told you the theories. Okay, this is how they measured it. This is not going to be on the exam. I'm just going to give you ideas of how people go about measuring this. This is Higgins' Self Discrepancy Questionnaire. And he uses synonyms and antonyms. So the Ideal Self, you know, you're a participant, you describe your Ideal Self in 10 terms, it was 20 then. You describe yourself, your Real Self, in 10 terms. I'm not going to talk about the ought self. So this is, let's say you said the Ideal Self was smart, and you're looking for antonyms and synonyms. And you found an antonym on the Real Self, intelligent, and that means okay, there's a pair. It matched up, they're synonyms. But out-going, muscular, and athletic in the Real Self, I mean your Ideal Self, you want to be all those things. In the Real Self, it's wall-flower, weak, and skinny. Those are antonyms, and so you throw that stuff into a formula and you come up with a discrepancy. It's all trait-based. And so I have reservations of that. But I thought it's important for you to at least get a sense of how these things are measured. Okay, I came up with a simpler thing. In terms of various ways I think and feel about myself, I would say currently I am either close to my best or far from my best. Now see, that doesn't rely on traits. It relies maybe on traits, but, it relies on a kind of intuitions, which number feels best for you. There are other things that I designed that I like even better, but anyway. And then, you get the worst scale. In terms of various ways I think and feel about myself, I would say that currently I am close to my worst or far from my worst. That takes advantage, there's a possibility of being two dimensions. Okay, the two dimensions are, sometimes, seem to be independent of each other. Like I said before, you'll be close to your best and close to your worst at the same time. Distance between the worst, or the Undesired Self, is more related to both anxiety and sadness than in distance from either the best, Ideal Self, or Ought Self, using Higgins' own measures. And finally, while both males and females use the Undesired Self as a standard for self evaluation, females do so in a more pronounced manner. Guys, let me tell you something, females remember stuff. They remember when stuff happens, and they can date it, they can be very, very precise. Most of you guys are in nowhere land. You forget all kinds of stuff, particularly this has to do with emotions. Females don't. They know that it was on June 3rd, 1992 when that son of a bitch did some blah, blah, blah. And you might be the son of a bitch, and you have no idea what she's talking about. >> [LAUGH] >> Okay, now I really got interested in asking people to describe what being at their worst was like, because at the worst is where the action is. Females describe being at their worst in interpersonal contexts when there's trouble in a relationship. And this is particularly looking back as adolescents unhappy with their appearance. During times of transition, moving from one school to another, school moving from high school to college, for example. Males describe their, and there are lots of others, males describe being at their worst in the context of concerns about their identities. Like, who am I? What am I going to do in terms of their careers? When I was 13 years old, I was confused. Now I got it all worked out, because I'm going to be an engineer. A good deal more abstract than females. Males have a more difficult time describing themselves at their worst than females. I had a 32-year-old physician I was interviewing. I did a lot of stuff those days. And I said, could you describe yourself at your worst? And he said, aah, I don't think I have a worst. Oh please. Or another man, I don't know, I want to help you but can you give me some examples of being at your worst. So males, I love you but not all that much. When it comes to getting research done. >> [LAUGH] >> So in general, from teenage years and beyond, people tend to describe their ideal selves in terms of desirable roles. Worsts tend to come about when roles don't work out, are not available, or collapse. An elderly woman said I was at my best when both my husband and I were retired and we had a grange, and we sold fresh vegetables. Those are roles. People, I'll be at my best when I'm married, and have a job that I really like, and have children who I adore. Those are roles, right? Undesired self is when roles typically aren't there, or they vanished. Or they collapse, or you had a breakup in a relationship, or you lost your job. Now, that's interesting to me. I became fascinated by that and I was not surprised. So, the field of psychology was not ready to hear about the undesired self. So I turned my attention to terror management theory. Remember that? Sheldon Solomon. I reconnected with Sheldon Solomon after many years of not being in touch with him and the only consistent thing through all that time is he continued to wear his short pants. So one of his students, undergraduate students came to work as a graduate student at Rutgers and she ended up working with me. And we conducted the following study. Now this is where you're saying why is he talking about this now? This is where there's going to be like an intersection. I'm going to introduce a set of studies and then we're going to circle back to the undesired self. Particularly with regards to the undesired self and loss of roles. Got it? Loss of social roles. All right. See if you can keep track. This was about the 2003, 2004, second presidential election for Bush. We had two independent variables. Remember Sheldon talking about the death salience. Some people in a study are asked to write, please describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you. That's part of the design, that's a part of the terror management design. And then another group is asked to write about something else. In the meantime, they don't know somebody else next to them, for example, is writing about their death. They could be writing about, what is it like to take a difficult exam. Please describe the emotions that the thought of taking an exam arouse in you. That's the control condition. So we have an experimental, and we have a control condition. And it's important to know that these are independent variables. This means that they're being manipulated with one group writing about one thing and the other group writing about another thing. The dependent variable, and again this around the Bush Administration, not terribly long after, well a couple years after 9/11, people were very sensitive to that event, and rightly they should be. This was the dependent variable. It's essential that our citizens band together and support the President of the United States, his efforts to secure our great nation against dangers of terrorism. Personally I endorse the action of President Bush and members of the administration who have taken bold action in Iraq. This is when they were trying to chase down Saddam Hussein. Mr. Bush has been a source of great inspiration to us all. God bless him and God bless America. America. >> [LAUGH] >> Now, why theoretically, would people who had written about death, it was predicted, that they were more strongly endorse this? Well. Terror management predicts that under the threat of death, you're going to endorse your cultural values. And here we have a group of people who attacked us and that scares us. It brings up the whole idea of death. And so more likely to support the culture and support a president, in this instance, he's going to bat for you! Whereas people who write about taking an exam, they would be less sensitive to that. Okay, so that's the measure. To what degree do you agree with that statement. The results floored me. They were amazing. People who endorse that, exam salience, said yeah, a little bit, no it's actually on the other side, no no no. Death salience, wow! I'm thinking, hey Sheldon Solomon and his company, they're really into something! They're really onto something important. I had no idea that this study would work out. So, students who were thinking about their death endorsed that high patriotic statement, where people who wrote about an exam didn't endorse it at all.
