Interpreting Your Score

General Self-Consciousness

The average range for scores on the total Self-Consciousness Scale is from 53 to 63. People who score below this range tend not to spend much time or energy examining their own behavior or scrutinizing their thoughts. To other people, this may appear as a lack of self-understanding or as an unwillingness to be concerned about personal growth. High scorers focus on their own thoughts and actions much of the time and are concerned about the motives for their own behavior. At its extreme, self-consciousness can appear as an obsessiveness with self-examination.

A. Private Self-Consciousness

The average range for this subscale is from 23 to 29. Lower scorers show the tendency to avoid thinking about themselves and are reluctant to examine their own inner thoughts, feelings, and impulses. High scorers are very concerned about the "inner self" and spend high levels of energy in self-examination. In additions, high scorers are sensitive, perhaps overly sensitive, to events in their environment that affect them. A high level of private self-consciousness may be, for some, undesirable. Constant self-examining thoughts can inhibit the action needed to make the changes discovered during that period of reflection.

B. Public Self-Consciousness

The average range for this set of items is from 16 to 22. Low scorers show little concern about how other people will react to them in social settings. This may relate to a lack of awareness about how they appear to others or to an apparent insensitivity born out of high self-confidence. High scorers, on the other hand, are very concerned about the actions and opinions of others that relate to them. Such awareness may make one overly sensitive and highly susceptible to feelings of rejection.

C. Social Anxiety

The average range for this subscale is from 9 to 16. Low scorers generally appear confident in social situations and at ease when interacting with other people. High scorers show discomfort in such social situations. This anxiety may stem from self-examination that has left the person concerned about certain inadequacies. Since the danger of looking inward is that it could trigger feelings of anxiety, the socially anxious individual may begin to avoid social interactions altogether. These problems, however, will not change any more than they world of the ostrich changes while he has his head buried in the sand. High social anxiety needs and responds well to professional help.

About the Scale

Carl Jung developed the concept of introversion in 1933. G. H. Mead developed ideas about the impact of an individual becoming aware of himself as a social object in 1934. Psychologists Allan Fenigstein, Michael Scheier, and Arnold Buss unified these views to produce the Self-Consciousness Scale in 1975.

Basing their desire to develop a new measure of self-consciousness on Jung, Mead, and recent social psychological theory, these three psychologists divided that global concept into three subsets: private self-consciousness, public self-consciousness, and social anxiety. The first, private self-consciousness, is similar to Jung's idea about introversion. Both deal "with a cognitive, private mulling over the self." They emphasize internal experiences, known, perhaps, only to the individual himself. The second subscale, that of public self-consciousness, comes about, as Mead argued, "when the person becomes aware of another's perspective; then he can view himself as a social object." The emphasis in public self-consciousness is on how others react to us and to that part of us we consider self. Social anxiety, the third factor, is defined as a discomfort in the presence of others. According to Drs. Fenigstein, Scheier, and Buss, social anxiety may relate to a deficit in our ability to handle our public self-consciousness. Once we become aware of how others react to us, we may see ourselves as falling short of some ideal and become apprehensive. They point out, however, "self-awareness dose not automatically imply social anxiety; a person may focus attention on himself without experiencing discomfort."