I like watches without connectivity, walks without phones, cars without auto-pilot, going without itineraries, cooking without recipes, writing without constraints. Well, maybe that last one isn’t always true. I wanted to understand the relationship between our personal identities and the groups we belong to. I set out to do some research and spent more time than I imagined reading papers, so I thought I’d share what I learned.
Self*
Let’s first talk about self, self-concept, and identity.
I started this essay with a list of self-concepts: beliefs and descriptions of myself. Identity gets closer to answering the question “Who am I?” Something more along the lines of: male, brother, software engineer, musician, Brazilian-but-kind-of-American. The self is more complicated. Originally, I thought of it like learning a new language. If you’re learning French and don’t know the word for “coffee table,” you’ll use other words to describe it. Someone else might describe the same object using completely different words. Nevertheless, it’s still the same object.
That made me think of the Greek proverb “know thyself”. Maybe knowing ourselves is the lifelong practice of building the vocabulary needed to close the gap between how we describe ourselves and who we actually are. But I discovered a problem with that metaphor. A coffee table exists before we find the words to describe it. According to sociologist George Herbert Mead, the self develops through social experience. We don’t first become fully formed individuals and then venture into the world. Interaction with other people is part of how a self develops in the first place.
Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson similarly argued that identity develops across our lives through a series of psychosocial crises, and placed the one most centrally about identity in adolescence. Decades later, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett argued that emerging adulthood, roughly the late teens through the twenties, is also a key window for exploring who we are. That was certainly the case for me. So perhaps knowing yourself isn’t like discovering an object that has been sitting underneath everything all along. Maybe we’re building the coffee table while we’re trying to describe it.
Suszek et al. describe two ways we can experience the self: a unitary self, experienced as cohesive and consistent, and a multiple self, in which we recognize distinct aspects of ourselves. I find it useful to stretch their idea a little further than they do. I think of our values as the part that tends to stay stable, and our roles and interests as the parts that ebb, flow, and adapt across different contexts. Different environments bring different parts forward.
[ Self ] ──► [ Interests & Values ] ──► [ Groups & Relationships ]
▲ │
│ ▼
[ Re-evaluation ] ◄── [ Life Experiences ] ◄── [ Salience ]The self picks up influences, develops interests, seeks groups and relationships, experiences life, and constantly re-evaluates. There’s no clean boundary where “me” ends and “the outside world” begins.
Brewer, Vignoles, and Vectors
When we identify with a group, part of that group can become part of how we understand ourselves. Psychologists call this social identity: the part of our identity that comes from seeing ourselves as members of a group. Marilynn Brewer’s Optimal Distinctiveness Theory describes a tension between two psychological desires: assimilation and differentiation. We want to belong, but we also want to feel distinct. Fashion came to mind when I learned about this. Some people follow trends so they can assimilate. Others who are more fashion literate than I am create their own unique style. Personally, I like the “if-you-know-you-know” stage of a trend—maybe 25% assimilation and 75% differentiation. Once everyone knows, it’s time for something new. The numbers are obviously mine, not Brewer’s. Nevertheless, we seem to want both connection and individuality.
Vivian Vignoles’ Motivated Identity Construction Theory notes that we move toward identities that satisfy six core motives: belonging, self-esteem, distinctiveness, continuity, efficacy, and meaning.
That list helped me understand why groups can become so psychologically powerful. A good community can give us friends. It can give us a language for understanding ourselves. It can make us feel useful. It can connect our past and future. It can give us rituals, goals, status, meaning, and a sense that we’re part of something larger than ourselves.
While reading all of this, I started imagining identities as vectors:
- Magnitude: How strongly one identifies with a group.
- Direction: Whether that identity points inward toward core values, outward toward external group approval, or somewhere in between.
The magnitude and direction change over time. The sharper changes tend to come with career, relationships, politics, religion, or parenthood. The interesting part to me is how one identity can begin changing the others.
Part of what’s going on, I think, is salience. We carry many identities at once, but they aren’t all active at the same time. Sociologists Sheldon Stryker and Peter Burke describe our identities as arranged in a salience hierarchy: some are more likely to be activated in a given situation than others, and the ones that rise to the top tend to be the ones that tie us most closely to other people. A classic example in this research is someone deciding whether to spend a free afternoon as a parent or as a golfer. Whichever one wins says something about which identity sits higher. My guess is that when the same identity keeps getting activated, it starts to color how the others get expressed.
Breadth and Coherence
As we attend to different groups, their contribution to our identity can change with how often those identities become salient. Putting these studies together, I think two things shape how all of these identities live together: breadth and coherence.
- Breadth: Belonging to enough different groups that no single group holds a monopoly over our self-worth or meaning. Research by Sønderlund et al. suggests that multiple group memberships can provide psychological resources, although the benefits depend in part on how compatible and supportive those identities are.
- Coherence: Being able to tell one clear narrative about ourselves that integrates all our different roles. As Mosanya et al. found, integrating our identity dimensions predicts well-being, while compartmentalizing them predicts psychological stress.
Breadth without coherence makes us chameleons who change depending on who’s around. Coherence without breadth leaves us dependent on a single community for our entire identity.
A 2×2 for overthinkers
None of the papers gave me a neat framework for putting all of this together, so naturally I tried to force it into a table. These aren’t psychological categories, and I don’t think they’re fixed types. Most of us probably move between them over the course of our lives.
| Closed to challenge | Open to challenge | |
|---|---|---|
| Clear values | Settled Knows what they stand for and isn’t looking to revisit it. Steady, but slow to change even when change would help. | Grounded Knows what they care about and lets challenging ideas in. Can change their mind without feeling threatened, though it’s rarely comfortable. |
| Unclear values | Guarded Pushes back on outside ideas without a clear sense of what they’re protecting. | Searching Open to almost everything, trying on ideas and groups without settling. Sees a lot, but can feel unanchored or alone. |
Michael Hogg proposes that when we feel uncertain about ourselves, we’re drawn to identify with groups, especially groups with clear boundaries, clear beliefs, and clear rules for how to behave. William Swann and colleagues describe people who are fused with a group, meaning their personal identity and their group identity feel like the same thing. In their studies, those people were more willing to fight or die for the group.
The researchers behind an intervention called Groups 4 Health describe the core of loneliness as a lack of belonging, not just a lack of people. In their program, participants mapped out their social groups, then worked on strengthening the ones that mattered and building new ones. In a randomized trial, it reduced loneliness more than the usual treatment.
Being grounded made me think of authenticity. It’s something I value and strive for. There are people whose expression seems intriguingly fluid. They may say strange things or have unusual interests and they don’t seem especially bothered when other people don’t get it. And it’s not like they’re trying to be different—that would be its own kind of performance. And it’s not like they aren’t influenced by others, because that’s not possible.
So if authenticity can’t mean being uninfluenced, what does it mean? In a cross-cultural study, Valery Chirkov and colleagues found that people in South Korea, Russia, Turkey, and the United States internalized different cultural practices, but in all four countries, the more people genuinely endorsed the practices they followed, the better their well-being. Maybe that’s what the people I described above have in common. Not originality, but some kind of congruence between the influences they’ve absorbed and the values they actually hold.
Moving on, getting older
I didn’t expect to end another essay referencing self-awareness, but here we are. Psychologists have fancy terms they like to use: metacognition and decentering. Metacognition is the ability to think about your own thinking. Decentering is a metacognitive skill: stepping back to observe your thoughts and emotions as passing mental events rather than permanent definitions of who you are (Bernstein et al.). Their research focuses on thoughts and feelings, but I think the same move works for group loyalties. Instead of getting swept away by a group’s emotional current, decentering lets you watch the wave roll in from the shore and decide whether you actually want to jump in.
I’ve learned that identity is not a static destination we arrive at once and lock in forever. It’s more like a feedback loop. We need some continuity or we’d feel like a different person every morning. We need some flexibility or we’d never change. We want to belong but also want to be distinct. We contain multiple identities and want them to somehow feel like one.
[ Self ] ──► [ World ]
▲ │
│ ▼
[ Revision ] ◄─ [ Experience ]Perhaps “know thyself” isn’t an instruction to discover the final answer. Maybe it’s an invitation to keep paying attention.
All ideas are my own. I used AI to help me in researching and editing.