Trait of Self-Consciousness
Just as situations evoke a state of self-awareness, some individuals are generally more self-focused than others. Research has revealed an important distinction between private self-consciousness—the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings—and public self-consciousness— the tendency to focus on our outer public image (Buss, 1980; Fenigstein, 2009; Fenigstein et al., 1975). m Table 3.1 presents a sample of items used to measure these traits.
Private and public self-consciousness are distinct traits. People who score high on a test of private self-consciousness tend to fill in incomplete sentences with first-person pronouns. They also make self-descriptive statements and recognize self-relevant words more quickly than other words. In contrast, those who score high on a measure of public self-consciousness are sensitive to the way they are viewed from an outsider’s perspective. Thus, when people were asked to draw a capital letter E on their private self-consciousness A personality characteristic of individuals who are introspective, often attending to their own inner states.
