A PERSON'S CONCEPT OF PERSON: A DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL OF SELF

The major claim of this thesis is that the actions of persons can not be understood, predicted or explained, without reference to their concepts of persons. It is argued that the emergence of this "self-inclusive" concept brings with it the property of self-consciousness (described as the ability to imagine oneself from the viewpoint of another) and the capacity to form social organizations of a "non-stimulus-bound" type. Following from this thesis that the essence of persons lies in their capacity to imagine the viewpoint of another, is the thesis that the essence of the development of persons lies in their increasing capacity to imagine an increasing number of viewpoints at one and the same time. This increase in social perspective-taking capacity, in turn, is accompanied by an increase in the behavioral influence of these "internal" representations of self relative to "external" cues and an increase in an individual's capacity to adjust his behavior with respect to ever more complex social units. It is argued further that, since the structure of a person's concept of person determines its content, in so far as this concept develops, its content evolves in a predictable order. It is argued that a person's concept of person--also referred to as a "social concept"--is equivalent to what is elsewhere referred to as "the ego.".;The thesis concludes with an examination of general implications of the theory. In particular, the final chapter explores the nature of interpersonal interdependence from a transcendental, developmental, metaphysical, existential, therapeutic, and metatheoretical point of view.;In the first three chapters of this thesis, the major postulates of this Concept of Person Theory receive logical support by way of argument and reference to theorists in the fields of Philosophy, Psychology and Sociology. The fourth chapter offers empirical support in the form of a report of a correlation study carried out by the author. The tools used in this study were a questionnaire, a sentence completion test and a statistical technique known as "multidimensional scaling." The results indicated: (i)that the content of a person's concept of person evolves in the order predicted--namely from a self-protective attitude, through conformity, to genuine moral thought; (ii)that the consequences of social concept development are as predicted--that external orientation, social isolation and anomie decrease with development, while sense of well-being increases; and (iii)that social concept development can be considered equivalent to what is elsewhere referred to as ego development. In light of the post hoc hypothesis that stress spuriously decreases an individual's perspective-taking capacity as measured by multidimensional scaling, the positive but low association between perspective-taking capacity, as measured by multidimensional scaling, and social concept development, as measured by the questionnaire, remains equivocal.