ABSTRACT
This chapter presents theory and research on the self-concept and focuses on the content of self-knowledge and how that content affects people's views of themselves and other people. It examines an emerging research literature that concerns how the organization of self-knowledge affects people's understanding of themselves and others. Self-schemas, for example, are declarative knowledge structures based on repeated self-observation and feedback from others that organize the way people process new self-relevant information. A commonsense understanding of the self-concept suggests that it is a single idea: a concept of oneself, much like a concept of "elephant." The application of theory and methods from cognitive psychology to the study of the self-system moved the focus of research beyond questions about the basic content of self-concept to questions regarding the organization of self-referent thoughts, feelings, and motives in memory. In addition to questions about the organization of self-knowledge, contemporary research on the self-concept has begun to focus on people's experience of self-knowledge.
