“Self-knowledge is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”

Simone de Beauvoir

How we define ourselves

Identities define how we view ourselves and behave in given social roles. Identities can be thought of as a set of personal norms against which we compare our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as the reactions of others to us.

  • Our views on identity theory and the way it operates in our process are based on the highly influential works of Henry Tajfel, Dominic Abrams, Michael Hogg, Jonathan Haidt, and Bruce Hood. Have you ever behaved in an uncharacteristic fashion and thought, “I’m not myself today”? Or have you ever said something like, “Part of me agrees with this and part of me does not?” This is identity at work. These questions imply that there is some set of personal norms to which we compare our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as well as the reactions of others to us. In fact, we all have many such sets of norms, called identities, which define how we behave and view ourselves in given social roles such as “student”, “boss”, “mother”, etc. For example, I might define my identity as a good student as being curious, conscientious, collaborative, open to new ideas, and respectful to the instructor.

    Our identities can fall into a number of different categories such as political, religious, racial, socioeconomic, gender, and sexuality for example. We are constantly, and unconsciously comparing our interactions with the standards we hold for given identities, with the goal of confirming those identities. In any given situation, one or more identities may be activated. For example, in a math class, my political identity in unlikely to be activated whereas my identity as a student most certainly will be.

    Identities are useful in that they help us navigate complex social interactions by allowing us more easily to form behavioral patterns that conform to social norms. For example, if we strongly identify as a student and a teacher were to be critical of our work, we might become deeply stressed. When we cannot confirm our identity, we feel anxious and seek ways to rectify the situation through different means: we may revise our student identity standard and study harder, or we may tell ourselves that the teacher is incompetent thus preserving our identity standard. This latter method which often results in scapegoating is a cause of much suffering in the world and is, unfortunately, the path of least resistance for many.

In our programs, we work with people to help them identify how they define their various identities, reflect on which ones are salient given a situation, and how this affects their behavior.

Identity Hierarchies

Identities tend to fall in a hierarchy with some identities acting as controls for those of less salience.  

  • Identities tend to fall in a hierarchy with some identities acting as controls for those of less salience.  For example, let’s think about a BIPOC female professor. The meaning by which she defines the role of professor is likely to be influenced by her identity as a BIPOC female whereas a white male professor may define his role as professor in a very different way. Generally, whether we realize it or not, identities like gender, sexuality, and race tend to be higher up in the identity hierarchy.  

Identity as a filter

How we define our identities influences the ways in which we attend to and process information such that two people may experience the same information in completely different ways, but also limit their intake of information to certain sources.

  • The process of defining and enacting our identities is recursive in that while external factors influence the ways in which we define our identities, we also influence those same factors. For example, my political identity will most likely determine which news outlets I will watch and in an increasingly larger number of cases determine the nature of my relationships with friends and family. It cause me to filter out information sources that do not conform to my identity standards. This, in turn, increases the ratings of the news programs, the advertising dollars they receive and their ability to influence even more people and further reinforce what I want to believe. Additionally, as I become further separated from those with differing beliefs, I am less exposed to alternate viewpoints.

Morality as identity

Morality can be thought of as a kind of identity that informs the definitions of all our identities.

  • Morality is a kind of identity that informs the definitions of all our identities. The degree that someone is considered a moral person, or the degree to which a person’s values inform the enacting of their various identities is another way of thinking about the level at which their moral identity sits in the hierarchy. Morality is so powerful precisely because it touches upon all of our identities. The degree to which we adhere to the values defining our moral identities is on a spectrum from immoral, to amoral, to moral, to righteous.

    Here’s a thought experiment. A mother has no means of support and the only way to feed her child is to steal food. In most cultures, stealing is considered immoral. A righteous person who believes stealing is wrong no matter what would condemn the mother for stealing. Righteousness is the application of morals with regard to context. Someone who is immoral knows stealing is bad but does it anyway, an amoral person does not see stealing as good or bad, and a moral person usually would not steal, but may see a situation in which it might be necessary. What do you think? Is stealing in the mother’s case morally excusable or not? When you hear about the mother stealing, in addition to your moral identity which other(s) are activated for you? How do they influence how you feel about her theft?

The identity trap

While identity can make life easier by establishing readily cognizable norms as behavioral guides, they can also be easily manipulated by others.

  • While identity can make life easier by establishing readily cognizable norms as behavioral guides, they can also be easily manipulated by others. This has become the norm in politics where shared identity and emotions are used by political leaders to create and mobilize groups of people.

The Power of Group Identity

Identity is a powerful behavioral force. Take sports fandom as an example. People identify so strongly with a team that winning or losing a big game may result in riots. The emotional outcomes for a fan far outweigh any rational effect on their daily life yet we have all seen it or felt it ourselves.

  • Back in the day when we shared the savannah with predators who were faster and stronger than we are, living in groups was a key to our survival. Group living allowed us to outnumber predators and share tasks so that some could procure food while others raised young.

    Group life provided redundancies in the event that a group member became incapacitated or died. This way of life was so important that our psychology evolved in such a way that group belonging became a driving force of our behavior and sense of self. In fact the need to belong to a group is so powerful that even random meaningless similarities between individuals can elicit strong group affiliations (Tajfel, 1970).

    This has profound implications for empathy with regards to group dynamics. Study after study has shown that empathy for members of the out-group is significantly less than that for in-group members. This leads to situations like the horrors found in Nazi concentration camps, the detention of Japanese during World War II, the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq, or splitting up families and keeping children locked in cages at detention centers on the Mexico border. Humanity is replete with examples of the lack of humanity attributed to out-group members throughout history.

Identity Manipulation

“Take a ride in a rugged [insert brand here] and you’ll see the world like never before. And the world will see you like never before. That’s because driving a [insert brand here] says a lot about you, on the road and off. Your passion for discovery. Your quest for fun.”

This is real text excerpted from an ad by a well know manufacturer of off-road vehicles. Marketers and politicians know well the power of Identity. How many individuals buy a rugged off-road vehicle and really only use it to drive a half mile down a nicely paved road to the supermarket? Most regular cars get better gas mileage and handle better yet images like this sell a lot of vehicles to people who will never go off-road because identifying oneself as a rugged, fun-loving adventurer is so seductive. Imagine the power of messaging that targets our more salient identities?

All politics is identity politics.

The most effective way for a politician to get people to vote for them or donate money to their campaign is to harness the power of identity.

All it takes is the wrong kind of sausage.

  • They identify a threat to voters’ identity, identify the other party as supporting that threat or doing nothing about it, and then position themselves as the only one with a solution. Politicians regularly hire ad agencies which are experts at manipulating identities to craft campaign messaging. This method of politicking has little to do with common sense policy and everything to do with manufacturing issues false issues or ignoring real ones for the sole purpose of activating groups with certain identities.

    Political identity umbrella

    They have drawn in more and more identities under the political umbrella to the point that shopping at Whole Foods or Cracker Barrel has become a reliable indicator of political leanings. Even the introduction of plant based sausage on the breakfast menu of Cracker Barrel has raised a public outcry. Yes, all it takes is sausage to pull us apart.

    Even something as inherently unpolitical as vaccines and mask wearing have become part of the political debate because they have been falsely associated with certain identities by unscrupulous politicians who seek power.

Intentionally cultivated tribalism

By crafting simple identity activating messaging, saying those identities are under threat, and proposing themselves as the savior of those identities, politicians have created an environment ripe for tribalism and binary thinking.

  • By crafting simple identity activating messaging, saying those identities are under threat, and proposing themselves as the savior of those identities, politicians have created an environment ripe for tribalism and binary thinking. Binary thinking is “either”, “or” thinking where everything is either black or white and often results from the threat processing (limbic system) centers of the brain taking over. It is a primal, regressive, way of thinking that inhibits executive functioning and higher order thinking. There is little nuanced thought when our limbic system gets activated.

    The insurrection on January 6th was inevitable given the lengths that some politicians went to to activate the identities of a certain group of people and channel their fear and anxiety into a violent outburst.

    The result of this is that the meanings we hold as part of our identities have shifted away from a more nuanced set of meanings to more extreme ones. And as the rhetoric becomes more extreme so does the energy with which we cling to our group identities.  This is really dangerous because when are triggered, we are more susceptible to cognitive distortion and bias. One such distortion is that we view outgroups as being more homogeneous than they really are and that they are more different from our ingroup than they really are. These dynamics perpetuate because of other cognitive distortions like confirmation bias and availability bias. In other words, we tend to only pay attention to information that confirms our beliefs and we pay closer attention to information that is more readily available to us. Cable news outlets, think Fox and MSNBC, as well as social media allows us to only be fed information we want to hear.

Education is not the most important answer

Many often say education is the key because then people will understand the facts about complex topics that are being debated but because of these cognitive distortions, people have tremendous difficulty accepting and internalizing them.

  • Many often say education is the key because then people will understand the facts about complex topics that are being debated but because of these cognitive distortions, people have tremendous difficulty accepting and internalizing them. Studies have shown that even math is subject to the cognitive distortions associated with political identity. The better one is at math, the more likely one is to make errors in calculations that go against ones previously held beliefs (Kahan, 2013). The only real way to improve the current situation is to help people better understand why we behave the way we do.

    The reason that so many political behaviors seem so utterly irrational is that they actually are irrational. Studies have shown that so long as our ingroup fairs better than the outgroup we are happier even when our own group suffers – just so long as it suffers less than the outgroup. (Tajfel, 1979) Empathy is the same way. Empathy dramatically decreases when members of the outgroup suffer. However, when members of different groups share stories about each other and offer an opportunity to cognitively reappraise a situation, that empathy gap decreases (Halperin, 2012).

Politicians and the media have a vested interest in encouraging tribalism.

Our goal is to bring people back to a more nuanced and balanced view and to realize that each side is not as homogeneous as we are led to believe.

S.C.A.R.F. + Identity

If at the most primal level our Approach/Avoidance behaviors are activated by S.C.A.R.F. domains in social interactions, how can two people have such wildly different viewpoints about the same issue?

At Beyond Primal, we believe that our identities act as filters that influence what we information we pay attention to, how we interpret it, and how that information impacts our S.C.A.R.F. profiles.

To illustrate this idea let’s look at how identity shapes how students S.C.A.R.F. domains may get activated over the issue of implementing school uniforms.

  • Students whose identity includes being fashionable may be negatively impacted.

  • Students whose identity does not include fashion or whose socioeconomic identity does not allow for it may be positively impacted.