How to Understand Identity

Introduction

Identity is something that our culture has been wrestling with for at least the past few decades. From a psychological standpoint, an individual's identity could be thought of in many ways. In one sense, it is you as a category. A category is a pattern of organized information. Sometimes a category has strict boundaries with clear inclusion criteria. Other times, the boundaries are fuzzy. Think of the category "chair". Are a stool, a bean bag, and a tree stump all members of the category "chair"? By what principles do give the identity of "chair" to each object? How are these principles set? Are they fixed forever, or do they change over time? To the degree that identity is conceptualized as a category, we will run into similar problems. What are your boundaries? Where do you start and where do you end? Does your identity only relate to your physical properties? What about things more abstract, like your memories and thoughts about the future? Do those have any bearing on your identity? What about your social relationships? Are those related to your identity? Could there be a category of "you" without the complimentary distinction of "other people"? What about group identity, a topic that's particularly been pervading our public discourse. We use identifying markers such as sex, race, religious affiliation, and sexual orientation to categorize each other, sometimes emphasizing one over the other. Where exactly do "you" fit in the midst of intersecting group identities that necessarily also consist of "other people"? What I want to try and do in this paper is offer a paradigm for thinking about identity that is useful.

How Does Biology Shape Your Identity?

There are many forces at work that influence how you perceive and act in the world. For this paper, I'll focus on two and then utilize the gestalt of their interaction as a pointer to identity. First, you are a biological creature. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution have led to the hierarchical nesting of different biological systems that have adapted to stave off entropy and survive long enough in an environment to reproduce successfully. These biological systems act as a set of constraints on how your perceive and act. From a cognitive standpoint, you can only remember so much information, and the salience of what gets remembered is largely predicated on your conscious and unconscious goals. You perception is also tuned to navigate the world as if the environment consists of tools and obstacles. Tools are objects and phenomena that facilitate progress towards a desired goal, and obstacles are phenomena that inhibit goal-directed behavior. You also have motivations and emotional systems that play a major role in setting and regulating these goals. Thus, much of your experience is predicated on dynamic, biological systems that developed, however imperfectly, with the purpose of enabling goal-directed behavior and perception. The implications of biology for identity may come in the form of individual variation in things such as emotions, motivations, and patterns of attention, but there are also biological differences in groups, whether we are discussing the two sexes or the different races.

How Does Culture Shape Your Identity?

The second force that impacts your identity is culture. We can think of culture as a set of socially constructed norms that govern behavior. Cultural norms set expectations in terms of what is appropriate behavior, and to learn and embody these norms is to become socialized. Being able to speak the same language as your neighbors offers tremendous benefits in terms of cooperation and even productive competition. A culture also consists of micro-rituals that, if enacted properly, signal one's adherence to the cultural norms, and this signal of adherence communicates to everyone else that you are similar enough in your intentions and goals that other people do not need to worry about you. To be socialized, to be subservient to the constraints of cultural norms, is to be predictable, and the more predictable something is, the less psychological entropy there is. Culture can also be thought of as a social story that guides the community. These stories emerged over the course of iterated social interactions, and the patterns of social behavior that led to better outcomes eventually became encoded into images and later into words. Many of us know these as memes today. A meme is an idea that correctly, whatever that means, captures some pattern of reality, and it spreads due to its efficiency of accurate communication and functional utility. One example is "to be a good sport" in the context of competitions. Everyone knows what that phrase means, but it's not just the words that have power. The words point to a set of behaviors that, in this case, we would like each other to embody. There are also memes that point to bad behaviors, such as being a "sore loser". To be more explicit, memes are cultural norms, and cultural norms are agreed upon patterns of social interactions that allow the society to survive.

Identity as Your Psyche

The biological and cultural forces both have positive and negative components. The biological landscape is what gives us life, but it also brings death, disease, and suffering. Biological variations in personality also come with their trade-offs, particularly if a certain personality is not optimized to its niche. For example, if someone is highly creative, much of which is biologically determined, they may struggle in a corporate or military environment that selects for sameness and orderliness. Another example could be someone who is highly agreeable, where their compassion for others will often be seen as a virtue, but they may also have a hard time noticing when they are being taken advantage of. Like our biology, our cultural upbringing has both good and bad elements. As an adolescent, culture gives you a steppingstone in terms of learning how to act in the broader society. The music you listen to, the shows and movies you watch, and slang that you hear, all of these play a role, consciously and unconsciously, in shaping what's normative and therefore expected. People like it when you match their predictions, as this means they can save their cortical energy for other demands. At the same time, just because something is normal does not mean that it is right or good. Many cultural norms have caused atrocity and tragedy, and it often required an individual on the fringe of a cultural, or even someone outside of the culture, to point out the errors of the group. It is because of these positive and negative elements of biology and culture that I believe that we have a psyche, and I believe that your psyche is the best way to think of your identity. Your psyche is your goal-oriented, sociobiological dynamic system that amalgamates past experiences, anticipations of the future, and interpretations of the present. You are born with innate proclivities, interests and desires, and you must learn how to satisfy your biological systems in a social environment with other people and their own idiosyncrasies. Your identity is your unique perspective, your individual pattern of attention that does a better or worse job of integrating your personal goals with those of other people. Your identity is valid insofar as you can pursue goals today, tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year, all while accounting for the needs of your friends and family today and into the future.

Conclusion

You are a biological creature that has evolved minimally viable structures and functions to solve problems related to survival and reproduction. You are also a cultural creature that sublimates these biological demands in such a way that your pursuit of your goals does not greatly interfere with the desires of others. Your identity is not in your biology. Things like intelligence, creativity, and sex are no doubt prevalent, but they are factors in a broader equation, not to be mistaken for the whole. Neither is your identity in your culture or group identity, something that many of us struggle to understand. For the group to survive, it requires individuals that are able to think for themselves. A culture, with its traditional norms, can fall prey to its own rigidity and backwards looking vision. It can struggle to update and keep up with the demands of the future. As the great neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, "You are the music while the music lasts," (Damasio, 1999). There are many different instruments and components that come together to make a song, and the song is not necessarily reducible to any one component. The song is a gestalt, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Like your identity, a song can also be something that is harmonious, rejuvenating, and brings people together in a playful dance, or it can be the opposite.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens. Harcourt Brace & Company.