Resources

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Everything worth your time on the question: What remains when there is nobody to notice, approve or expect anything?

READ · BOOK

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Erving Goffman

Read the first eighty pages. If the exercise concluded you are performing something, he will stop you treating that as a character flaw and start you asking what the performance is for.

Goffman watched ordinary social life the way somebody watches a play, and found that all of us run a front stage and a back stage. The front is not a lie. It is the working version of ourselves that a situation requires. Reading him takes most of the moral charge out of the question, and leaves a far better one behind: which of your performances is worth the effort it costs.

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READ · BOOK

Why We Do What We Do

Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste

Worth it if the exercise found that something you care about only feels worthwhile once somebody notices. He explains the mechanism without making you feel corrupt for it.

The readable account of self-determination theory, written by the man who spent forty years testing it. The finding that matters here is that rewards and approval reliably change why people do things, and that behaviour which survives without either is telling you something the rest is not. It gives you a usable test rather than a feeling.

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READ · RESEARCH

A theory of social comparison processes

Leon Festinger

Best for seeing how much of your self-assessment is borrowed from other people.

The original paper, and still the clearest. Festinger's claim is that in the absence of an objective measure we evaluate ourselves against whoever is nearby, and we choose people close enough to us for the comparison to sting. It explains a great deal about why private ambition and public ambition often turn out to be different things, without reducing everything you want to envy.

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READ · RESEARCH

Social facilitation and the audience effect

Robert Zajonc and the research that followed

Best for accepting that being watched genuinely changes what you do.

Zajonc showed that the mere presence of others improves performance on things we already do well and worsens performance on things we are still learning. It is one of the most replicated effects in social psychology, and it means the difference between your watched self and your unwatched self is partly physiology rather than character. Useful before you accuse yourself of anything.

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