Questions of Identity

 

Who are you? Most people answer that question first by stating their name. Once we have done that, we might talk about our occupation, our other important social roles (husband, father, son), our personality, or our values. Sometimes we will pick a group membership that also conveys something about our likely values and beliefs (I'm Lutheran, I teach at a college of nursing). We might state our race or ethnicity, our gender, or our age. Psychologist Carl Rogers said that all of these things make up our "self-image," our mental picture of who we are. If our self-image matches up with who we want to be, then we have what Rogers first described as "self-esteem." If not, then we probably feel bad, and maybe we come to hide who we "really are" from others.

My daughter is a high school senior who was asked to create a podcast for her English class on a topic related to identity. Another psychologist, Erik Erikson, suggested that questions of identity are particularly important for people her age. We create an identity, he said, through a developmental process that starts in infancy with questions of basic trust for our caregivers. Later, we learn about autonomy, independence, and accomplishment. By the time we are teenagers, all of that comes together into a sense of who we are in the world, which is what allows us to go on and accomplish the tasks of adult life. But the process can be stormy, particularly for people who still have questions or concerns related to the earlier stages of development. It was Erikson who coined the term an "identity crisis." He thought this was a fairly typical experience in late adolescence as we each figure out who we are.

Here's a link to the podcast: https://www.wevideo.com/view/2845327046. In it, my daughter and I explore a different view of identity, one that's more in line with contemporary neuroscience: Rather than being something internal and stable throughout your life, identity is a descriptor of your interactions with other people. This idea isn't new. Sociologist Erving Goffman suggested it in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where he wrote that "when an individual appears in the presence of others, there will usually be some reason for him to mobilize his activity so that it will convey an impression to others which it is in his interests to convey" (p. 4). This is similar to psychologist Jonathan Haidt's metaphor, in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, about "the rider and the elephant": We each are like an elephant that lumbers through life trying to achieve some Intuitive-level goals. But the elephant also finds it beneficial to bring along a rider that functions like an in-house public relations firm. The rider calls out to other riders and explains the elephant's actions, trying to keep them happy, but doesn't actually control what the elephant is doing. The rider is the Narrative mind, and is also what other elephant-rider teams would perceive to be that elephant's "identity." In the podcast, we talk about the idea that a person can't have an identity apart from some community that they are part of. My daughter strongly identifies herself based on her identity as concertmaster (first violin) of the high school orchestra. But one can't be a concertmaster without being part of an orchestra: The identity depends on the larger group. In the podcast, I present an argument that all identities are socially determined in this way.

At an early age we become aware that people act differently in different circumstances, and this can be a source of discomfort. Adolescents are particularly sensitive to perceived "hypocrisy" in adults, and tend to be concerned about feeling "true to themselves." Rogers and Erikson would have said that it's possible to adopt a false public identity, potentially at odds with the “true” identity we carry within us. Rogers further argued that expressing your authentic self was the key to self-esteem; Erikson said that the next developmental task, intimacy with someone else, could be accomplished only if you had a strong sense of who you were yourself. Again, these views don't fit well with the idea that your identity actually emerges from your interactions with other people.

A social formulation of identity acknowledges that it's uncomfortable when your public persona is different from your internal experience, but Goffman suggests a simpler origin for this feeling of discomfort: Rather than being the result of some an internal psychodynamic tension, it's a simple fear of being "found out." But Goffman also points out that most people will ignore discrepant information if the public persona is strong, appealing, and consistent enough -- others are motivated to see us as having a consistent identity just as much as we are motivated to project that identity, and they are accordingly willing to offer us some suspension of disbelief. And the longer we present ourselves publicly in a certain way, the more strongly we come to actually see ourselves that way.

There are some downsides to the traditional view of identity that a social formulation might help us to avoid. For example, a feeling that you are inside of one group is often achieved by defining yourself as outside of another -- Lutherans are not Catholics, Republicans are not Democrats, people who have lived in the U.S. for generations are not recent immigrants. All of these identities defined over and against another group create the potential for conflict, oppression, or even violence. The idea of identity as something internal and permanent also makes your sense of self overly rigid, and might make it harder to continue learning and growing throughout adult life. Finally, the old view of identity was strongly bound up with traditional social roles, such as gender roles that many people now find to be overly restrictive. 

A social view of identity helps to overcome these limitations, by viewing one's identity as a continual process of negotiation or a web of relationships, and by situating each individual solidly within a group of people rather than treating them as an autonomous whole. A social view can help us to see that all identities are probably to some degree illusory, and also to a great extent temporary. And yet, as we continue to interact with our social networks in consistent ways, these interactions can also help us to gain a strong sense of who we "really are." Identity is not something you can choose, but it is something that you can affect through your history of interactions -- a Narrative social process that eventually becomes an Intuitive sense of who you are.