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46 PROF. DR. BETTINA HANNOVER IS THE SELF A PERFORMATIVE PHENOMENON? The concept of the self is defined in psychology as the internal image that individuals develop about themselves. People acquire this knowledge by making themselves the object of their own perception, reflecting on themselves. However, the self is also a reflection of others, who carry an image of the person and whom the person tries to impress, seeking confirmation of their self-perceived identity. Personality, in psychology, refers to the characteristics, styles, and behavioral patterns that distinguish a person relatively consistently over time and across different contexts. Interestingly, the question of whether the self is stable and invariant across situations or whether it is a performative phenomenon, variable and manifesting differently depending on the context, has been a controversial topic in psychology for many decades. The notion that the self is multiple and flexible contradicts our everyday psychological, intuitive understanding, which is perhaps reflected in the fact that the German language does not have a plural form for "self": People experience their own identity as stable across contexts and time. Furthermore, people tend to avoid or devalue information that is inconsistent with their self-image. James (1892), considered the founder of self-psychology, distinguished the self into a) the material self (one's own body and the objects surrounding the person), b) the spiritual self (the totality of one's own conscious states and capabilities), and c) the social self (reactions received from others). While each person has only one material and spiritual self, they have multiple social "selves," as many as there are people who hold an image of the person. With the assumption of multiple social selves, James paved the way for the sociological works of symbolic interactionists Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934), who speak of the self as a pure product of social interactions: We see ourselves as others see us. What James, Cooley, and Mead have in common is the belief in not a universal self, but rather multiple constituents, a multiple self. This assumption implies the idea that the self is contextually dependent and varies in its expression. However, James, Cooley, and Mead did not have the appropriate methods to demonstrate the processes through which the multiple self is flexible. Therefore, they could not satisfactorily answer the question of which of the diverse social "selves" is crucial for the subjective experience of the self at a specific point in time. However, this can be accomplished using the methods available in modern social cognition research. Within social cognition research, the self is understood as a representation in memory (Hannover & Kühnen, 2009). The contextual dependence of the self is explained by the structure of the self-concept and the processes related to this structure. Structurally, the self-concept is multiple because self-relevant information is represented in clusters around different contexts. Procedurally, the self is flexible because, at a given time, only a subset of information clusters is accessed. According to the social cognition paradigm, self-relevant information is not tied to different functions but is merely organized around different contexts (e.g., self at home, self as a teacher, self as a daughter). In a specific situation, only the self-relevant information connected to the representation of that context is activated. This makes the self simultaneously stable and variable: As long as the same information cluster is accessed, the self remains stable; if the context changes, the self is flexible. The information clusters can contain different, and in extreme cases, even contradictory, information about the self. Since only a specific information cluster is activated at a given time, people can have different information about themselves represented in their self-concept without perceiving it as a contradiction (overview by Hannover et al., 2004). In summary, within the field of psychology, the concept has been established that the self varies in its expression depending on the context, thanks to the breakthrough of the social cognition paradigm. The self differentially affects our behavior, which, in turn, influences our perception of ourselves. Additionally, through our actions, we actively shape and change the culture in which we live. These findings are compatible with the notion of the self as a performative phenomenon: The self is not so much a stable, context-transcendent, invariant identity of a person, but rather appears as a relationship, enactment, or practice, visible in context-dependent variations in linguistic self-reference and performance before others or in the incorporation of cultural norms and social orders into the mental representation of one's own person.