A Theory of Objective Self-Awareness by Robert Wicklund and Shelley Duval

 

 

A study by American social psychologists published in 1972. They proposed that a person's attention constantly moves back and forth between aspects of the self and the environment. Any type of stimulation – a mirror, a photo, or the sound of your own voice – capable of directing attention to the self, can produce objective self-awareness and in turn lead to self-experience and experience of identity.

 

This work was based on George Herbert Mead's Symbolic interactionism which highlighted the necessity of assuming the perspective of another in order to develop one's own social identity.