Project overview
What enables people to discard old less adaptive identities and to embrace new more adaptive ones? Put another way, what obstructs the process of adaptive identity transformation? For example, what explains why some people, plainly talented and worthy, suffer from low self-esteem or depression? Why do they disdain flattering feedback and dwell instead on their flaws and failings? Or: why are hypochondriacs oddly reluctant to conclude that they are not medical invalids? Why do they not accept benign medical diagnoses and not welcome seeing themselves as healthy people? Finally: why do some of the long-term unemployed fail to imagine themselves as productive members of the workforce? Why do they seize opportunities to channel their efforts and talents into ultimately more personally and social fruitful activities? Such complex questions merit multifaceted answers. But part of the answer may be this. People's existing identities matter to them-which is why they wish to maintain them. However, these identities also matter in a particular way. Not only do people see their identities as positive, and maintain them to engage in pleasant self-enhancement; nor do they only see their identities as warranted, and maintain them to ensure accurate self-assessment; in addition, people maintain their identities because they deem them essential to defining who they are. Identities enable an enduring sense of self to be preserved, interpersonal interactions to be stabilised, and the entire social world to be rendered predictable and controllable. Not only do identities foster subjective positivity, or objective validity, they also render oneself and one's social world coherent. If the above account is true, then deep consequences follow. Suppose someone with a negative identity were to be persuaded both that it is desirable to hold a positive identity and that holding it is justified. Even so, she might still cling to that negative identity. For, if she relinquished it, how would she now organise her life and relationships? Long-time self-perceptions would need to be abandoned, and habitual interactions renegotiated-both potentially daunting prospects, especially where identity is fragile. To recast the above argument, the need to preserve an intelligible identity-above and beyond any concern with its positivity or validity-might stand in the way of adaptive identity alterations. Otherwise put, the motive to self-verify-and not merely the motives to self-enhance or self-assess-might constrain the adoption of a new way of construing oneself and so perpetuate problematic self-perceptions. Indeed, if the motive to self-verify were comparatively potent, there would be important implications for identity change interventions. They would have to focus, not only on changing people's comparative opinions about the merits of existing and alternative identities via persuasive argumentation, but also on bolstering people's sense of who they are in order to minimise potential epistemic and pragmatic disruption. Concretely, that would mean reassuring a depressive, a hypochondriac, or an unemployed person that their self-understanding, their roles and relationships, would not disintegrate upon identity change-but that continuity between their past and future lives would be preserved. Alternatively, if the motive to self-verify were tangential or absent, then such interventions would be misguided. They would be distractions from the task of highlighting the desirability or rationality of alternative adaptive identities. They would be akin to prescribing antibiotics for a viral illness-at best, a waste of time and resources. So it is essential to establish theoretically what motives underlie identity maintenance and change. This proposal seeks to establish-comprehensively and rigorously-the relative contributions of the motives to self-enhance, self-assess, and self-verify to maladaptive identity maintenance.
