Chapter sixteen
Chapter sixteen
Self and Identity
From the beginning, psychology's relationship with the "self" has been a tempestuous one. When, for example, William James marched the self to psychology's center stage in his classic text, the field promptly ushered it to the wings. There it languished for more than half a century, ignored by a psychological mainstream whose embrace of positivism made it squeamish about constructs that seemed to lack clear empirical referents. And when the self finally did gain admission into the social psychological mainstream in the nineteen sixties, it had been stripped of some crucial features of the construct that James introduced. Whereas James saw the self as a source of continuity that gave the individual a sense of "connectedness" and "unbrokenness," the nineteen sixties were dominated by an ephemeral, shape-shifting self that routinely reinvented itself in the service of winning social approval.
Happily, over the last few decades, conceptualizations of the self have reclaimed much of the richness and integrity with which James first imbued the construct. Moreover, contemporary social-personality psychologists have warmly embraced these emerging, "neo-Jamesian" visions of the self: Between nineteen seventy-two and two thousand two, the percentage of self-related studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology increased fivefold. The rejuvenated image of the self is multidimensional. Most researchers now assume that the self has a rich history, some of which is conscious and accessible through self-reports and some of which is presumably nonconscious and accessible primarily through indirect measures. Although a strong belief still exists in the prepotency of a desire to win approval from others, most theorists acknowledge the significance of rival motivational forces, particularly in non-Western cultural settings. And modern researchers have complemented their long-standing interest in personal self-views or identities (we use these terms interchangeably) with investigations of social identities. It was this growing interest in social identity that prompted us to cover this work and title the chapter "Self and Identity" instead of simply "The Self," the title of Baumeister's earlier contribution to this volume. Before turning to the specific substantive issues that we cover here, we place our analysis in historical context. In particular, we briefly describe the chain of events that led to the legitimization of a multifaceted, enduring conception of the self.
EMERGENCE OF THE "NEO-JAMESIAN" SELF
EMERGENCE OF THE "NEO-JAMESIAN" SELF
Psychology's failure to follow up on James's initial investigation of the self left a void that scholars from other fields quickly stepped in to fill. Two of the most prominent such scholars, the sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead, rallied behind the banner of a theoretical perspective known as symbolic interactionism. This theory was designed to illuminate the nature and origins of self-knowledge, especially the reactions of others and the roles people play. We know ourselves, the theory assumed, by observing how we fit into the fabric of social relationships and how others react to us. In its emphasis on the social construction of the self, symbolic interactionism zeroed in on the aspect of self that James dubbed the "social self" and about which he famously noted that "a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind."
Conspicuously absent from these accounts were the other, more enduring aspects of the self that figured prominently in James's account, notably the "empirical self," which includes the physical self, and the "spiritual self," which consists of beliefs about one's qualities. As symbolic interactionism assumed center stage in the scientific community's emerging understanding of the nature of the self, James's relatively enduring forms of self-knowledge faded into obscurity.
Several decades later, the dominance of the social self was augmented by one of symbolic interactionism's most prominent intellectual progeny, the dramaturgical movement. Spearheaded by Goffman, this movement assumed that people are like actors in a play who perform for different audiences. As people take on various identities, the self is merely a consequence, rather than a cause, of the performance, a "product of the scene that comes off." Once people lay claim to an identity, they are obligated to remain "in character" until they move to the next scene, at which point the former self is discarded in favor of a self that fits the new context. For Goffman, there was no enduring sense of self; instead, Goffman envisioned the self as an ahistorical construction that emerged and vanished at the whim of the situational cues that regulated its form and structure.
When mainstream social psychologists developed an interest in the systematic study of the self in the nineteen sixties, they looked to sociology for a promising paradigm. They were smitten with Goffman's newly minted vision of self and identity. Goffman's influence is most obvious in accounts of impression management, accounts that were later embellished by Edward Jones's students, as well as others. These theorists proved to be extremely influential in shaping early social psychological views of the self. But Goffman's vision of the self had broader impacts as well. First, if anyone could assume any identity that the situation demanded, then people were essentially interchangeable. This sentiment helped legitimize a situationist approach to the self and identity. Second, the theatre metaphor that Goffman used to exemplify social interaction led researchers to focus narrowly on a single goal: gaining the approval of "the audience" (i.e., other people). From this vantage point, people were presumably in the business of constructing whichever identities they believed would help them win the favor of their interaction partners, with the only proviso being that they should strive to prevent observers from viewing them as inconsistent or dishonest. Nowhere in this scheme was there an intrinsic need to reconcile the presented self with an enduring, underlying, or authentic sense of self. For social psychologists of the day,
the world was, as Daniel Webster put it, "governed more by appearances than by reality."
Even when researchers became interested in motives that seemed superficially incompatible with approval seeking or "self-enhancement," these motives were not informed by an enduring sense of self. For example, when researchers began to examine "self-consistency," they typically left the enduring self out of the equation. Dissonance researchers would subtly persuade participants to behave in ways that made them look more or less deficient and then observe their subsequent efforts to save face. Again, social actors were presumed to be interchangeable. Consequently, researchers had no need to consider how an enduring sense of self might influence people's reactions to the situations in which they found themselves.
It was not until the nineteen seventies that the paradigm began to shift and the enduring sense of self began to gain currency within mainstream social psychology. Snyder developed a personality measure (the "self-monitoring" scale) that distinguished people who were thought to be perpetually engaged in Goffman-esque impression management activities from those whose actions were guided by a deep-seated, enduring sense of self that valued cross-situational consistency. In a somewhat parallel effort that drew on developments in cognitive psychology, Markus introduced the idea that some people possessed enduring "self-schemas" that systematically guided information processing about the self. Shortly afterwards, Kuiper and Rogers provided evidence that people store representations of the self in memory and that these mental representations facilitate the retrieval of self-relevant information.
By nineteen eighty, the stage had been set for a wide-ranging examination of the nature and consequences of a multi-faceted self that featured enduring, as well as relatively fleeting, components. No longer were social psychologists' conceptualizations of the self hitched to the wagon of pretense stubbornly intent on self-enhancement. Increasingly, researchers were abandoning the stage-acting metaphor of the self and the superficial relationships it illuminated and instead turning their attention to the relatively stable identities that people negotiated in their ongoing social relationships. This is not to say that all prominent social psychologists followed this trend. But even the few who continued to emphasize the ephemeral self over the enduring self updated and refined their analyses considerably. And when more mainstream self theorists began to acknowledge people's stable identities, they quickly came to embrace the richness and complexity of the multifaceted, neo-Jamesian conception of self. In the following section, we begin to examine the fruits of these efforts by turning to work that conceptualizes the self as a mental representation.