PSYC 3310 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Personal Identity, Identity Formation, Social Order
20 Jun 2018
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CHAPTER 9 IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
Defining Identity
• Identity: the psychological structure that gives people a sense of personal
continuity across situations and across their individual history
o Thoughts, feelings, values, attitudes and behaviours by which a
person defines him or herself, and by which other define him or her.
o Who am I?
• Self-concept – What am I like?
o Akin to personality
Self-concept
• Self-concept: the organized set of thoughts, ideas, and perceptions that
people hold about themselves
o Summary of personality
• Transitory self-concept: self-concept accepted by an event or different
situations
• Social self: what one is like interpersonally
o Socially skilled
o Social kind of person
• Ideal self: what you would like to be like
• Actual self: what you are like
o We strive to be more like our ideal self than accept actual self
• Possible selves: people’s sense of the different selves they might become
under various circumstances and with various courses of action
o Include roles and characteristics you may take on in the future
• Feared self: what you don’t want to be like
• False self: self we present to others when we feel that our actual self is not
good enough
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Self-understanding
• Looking-glass self: indicates that we find about ourselves by observing the
way others respond to us in our interactions
o Cooly (1902)
o We start to understand what we are like through the eyes of others.
o We see ourselves the way other people see us.
• Generalized other: a person’s internalized summary of the ways others have
responded to him or her in social interactions
o we pool everybody’s opinions of us and summarize it, and then carry it
around with us
o Mead (1934)
I and Me
• William James (1890) pointed out that the self has two contrasting sides to it.
• I: the psychological process that allows us to think and know about ourselves
o The “something” in their heads that thinks their thoughts, feels their
feelings, and is the core of who they really are.
o The self as experiencing subject
• Me: the sum total of what a person knows or believes about himself or herself
o The self as beliefs about oneself as object
• The four constituents of the “me” are: physical, active, social, and
psychological selves.
• The four experiences of the “I” are: continuity (sense of how much you’ve
changed over time), distinctness (when the I reflects on the me compared
with others), volition or control (sense of control or make judgments about
being relatively out of control), and self-reflection.
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Changes in Understanding of Self
• Sense of self starts to develop very early.
o 1 year – babies react differently to images of themselves than they do
to images of others
o 2 years – can recognize their own image in a mirror
• Concrete to abstract
o Childhood – large focus on the physical “me”
▪ Concrete categories such as age, sex, physical characteristics,
achievements, and personal likings
o Adolescence – personality, include sense of
continuity/distinction/control
• Simple to complex
o Adolescents are able to differentiate transitory self
o Variety of personal and interpersonal traits
o Positive and negative traits
o Go beyond external characteristics to describe personal beliefs,
attitudes, motives, and emotions
o They may also keep in mind any discrepancies between the ways they
feel privately and the way they resent themselves to others.
• More differentiation
o Adolescents’ make distinctions that their view of themselves may differ
from how other people see them.
o They are more sensitive to the ways situations interact with their
internal states.
o They are able to notice more than one aspect of their behaviour – their
habitual characteristics and the circumstances that alter those
behaviour – and to think about these different aspects at the same
time.
• More abstract qualities
o Higher-order, more abstract generalizations
