The role of self-awareness in enhancing cooperative behaviour among students

Abstract

Among skills and aptitudes commonly highlighted in the list of essential elements to be reached by pupils through citizenship education are the ability to cooperate and to consider and appreciate the perspective of others in the society. Understanding the complexity of social life with its demands for cooperation requires thorough analysis of the contingencies between one’s own needs, others’ needs and the structural features of the social context. Hence the concept of citizenship relates to the ability of an individual to make a choice, articulate and then negotiate his or her needs to other participants of social life. Self-awareness, understood as taking the stance of the observer of the self, activates the framework of co-dependence, reminding one of the existing social norms thus leading to more cooperative behaviour. The following article explores the ways in which fostering one’s self-awareness could be helpful in creating the environment well suited for cooperative citizenship. Three studies presented in this article allowed us to obtain results that shed light on the role of self-awareness in helping to incite and maintain the cooperative behaviour of the participants. The participants were Polish university students. In the first study (N=623), those participants whose distinctiveness was primed had less automatic and less stereotypical judgements of others. This creates a path towards more individual and less biased information processing in a situation of conflict. In Study 2 (N=93), students made a choice between four possible reactions to difficult social situations causing embarrassment. Being aware of one’s distinctiveness led to a reduction of ignoring others’ perspectives in communication. In Study 3 (N=49), self-awareness resulted in being more cooperative in a prisoner’s type game. Our conclusions highlight the importance of reinforcement of self-awareness among pupils and students in the process of socialization and education. Thus the state of being distinct from one’s own group of reference should be fostered in the process of education to help individuals exercise their cooperative citizenship more actively.