ABSTRACT
At the turn of the 20th century, when American psychology began to form as an academic discipline, the notion of self-beliefs and their resulting effects on human behavior became a major topic of interest. Indeed, the father of American psychology, William James, was among the first to emphasize the importance of self-beliefs in understanding human behavior. Despite the numerous theoretical and paradigmatic shifts that have occurred in psychology since then, self-beliefs remain one of the most widely examined constructs in the field of psychology. As backlash against the psychological movement of behaviorism, whereby psychologists believed that only a person’s observable and measurable behavior was fit for scientific inquiry and the inner mind of the individual was largely avoided because it was not observable, several groups of psychologists called for renewed attention to the inner experience.
