Literature for lecture 6 The self and identity
Steinberg (2020) Chapter 8 Identity
Puberty, cognitive changes and social roles
- Puberty: during puberty, when adolescents are changing so dramatically on the outside, they
understandably have questions about changes that are taking place on the inside: undergoing
the physical changes of puberty may prompt fluctuations in one’s self-esteem and
self-conceptions.
- Cognitive changes:
- Adolescents become much more able to imagine their possible selves: the various
alternative identities that they amy adopt. Adolescents exert conscious, deliberate
effort when asked to think about themselves.
- There is an impressive increase in future orientation: the ability and tendency to
consider the long-term consequences of one’s decisions and imagine what one’s life
might be like in the years to come.
- Social roles: identity development is better understood as a series of interrelated
developments, that involve changes in the way we view ourselves in relation to others and in
relation to the broader society in which we live.
Changes in self-conceptions
Adolescents are more likely to employ complex, abstract, and psychological self-characterizations.
1) Self-conceptions become more differentiated
- The realization that one’s personality is expressed in different ways in different situations.
- Adolescents distinguish between their own opinions of themselves and the views of others.
- Adolescents recognize that they may come across differently to different people.
- Adolescents’ self-conceptions may be particularly sensitive to the opinions of others.
2) Self-conceptions become better organized and integrated
- Adolescents are likely to organize and integrate different aspects of their self-concept into a
more logical, coherent whole.
- The increased psychological complexity of self-conceptions may present some difficulties,
when adolescents become able to recognize - but not yet quite understand or reconcile -
inconsistencies and contradictions in their personality. Although it can cause som distress, it
has some advantages:
- The development of a more complicated view of the self is one way that individuals
cope with the recognition of their faults and weaknesses, a recognition that comes
with increased self-awareness.
- The ability to distinguish among one’s self (who one really is), ideal self (who one
would like to be), and feared self (who one most dreads becoming). An important
aspect of having a healthy self-concept is having an ideal self to balance a feared self.
- The ability to distinguish between their true and false selves: that is, their authentic
and inauthentic selves. False-self behavior is acting in a way one knows is
inauthentic. This occurs less often with parents than with dates, but more often with
parents than wth close friends.
, - Adolescents who report less emotional support from parents and peers, who
have low self-esteem, and who are relatively less satisfied with life are more
likely to engage in false-self behavior.
- The connection between false-self behavior and low self-esteem is
bidirectional.
- Depression and hopelessness are highest among adolescents who engage in
false-self behavior because they genuinely devalue their true self.
3) Dimensions of personality
- A five-factor model is often used to study personality: the ¨big five¨:
- Extraversion: how outgoing and energetic someone is;
- Agreeableness: how kind or sympathetic someone is;
- Conscientiousness: how responsible and organized someone is;
- Neuroticism: how anxious or tense someone is;
- Openness to experience: how curious and imaginative someone is.
- Delinquent adolescents are more likely than their peers to score high in extraversion and low
in agreeableness and conscientiousness, whereas adolescents who are high achievers in school
score high in conscientiousness and openness.
- Personality become increasingly stable as we grow older, in part because we tend to spend
time in environments that reward and reinforce the traits that draw us to these settings. As a
result, we become more like ourselves every day.
- There is a temporary drop in maturity during early adolescence, which appears to be ¨the
life-time peak of meanness, laziness, and closed-mindedness¨, and between adolescence and
young adulthood, individuals become less extraverted, but as they mature, they become more
conscientious, more agreeable, more resilient, and more emotionally stable.
- Many core personality traits are stable between childhood and adolescence and between
adolescence and young adulthood. Although the external manifestations of these traits may
change with age, our basic, underlying traits turn out to be remarkably unchanging.
Changes in self-esteem
- Stability: it only refers to the extent to which individuals’ relative ranking within a group
stays more or less the same over time.
- Self-esteem becomes increasingly more stable between childhood and early
adulthood, as adolescents’ feelings about themselves gradually consolidate and
become less likely to fluctuate in response to different experiences. However, changes
in self-perceptions are greater during early adolescence than during middle or late
adolescence.
- There are three aspects of adolescents’ self-image:
- Self-esteem: how positively or negatively they feel about themselves;
- Self-consciousness: how much they worry about their self-image;
- Self-image stability: how much their self-image changes from day to day.
- The most marked fluctuations in self-image occur during the transition into adolescence,
rather than over the course of adolescence itself, because of low self-esteem, are
self-conscious, and have unstable self-image
- The fluctuations in self-image are probably due to several interrelated factors:
- The sort of egocentrism that is common in early adolescence may make young
adolescents painfully aware of others’ reactions to their behavior.
, - As individuals become more socially active, they begin to learn that people play
games when they interact, and they learn that it is not always possible to tell what
others are thinking on the basis of how they act of what they say: impression
management.
- Because of the increased importance of peers, young adolescents are especially
interested in their peers’ opinions of them.
- The most important predictor of overall self-esteem is physical self-esteem, followed by
self-esteem about relationships with peers. However, adolescents are often unaware of the
degree to which their self-worth is based on their feelings about their appearance.
Group differences in self-esteem
- Girls’ self-esteem is lower, their degree of self-consciousness is higher, and their self-image is
shakier. This is probably due to the fact that young girls are more concerned than boys about
their physical attractiveness, dating and peer acceptance, and therefore they may experience a
greater number of self-image problems.
- Black adolescents on average have higher self-esteem than white adolescents, who, in turn,
tend to have higher self-esteem than Hispanic, Asian, or native American youth. There are
two main explanations for the relatively high self-esteem of black adolescents:
- Despite their encounters with racism and prejudice, black teenagers often benefit
from the support and positive feedback of adults in the black community, especially
in the family.
- THe very strong sense of ethnic identity that exists among black adolescents enhances
their overall self-esteem
- High school students who go to a school in which their ethnic or socio-economic
group is in the minority, are more likely to have self-image problems than those who
are in the majority.
Consequences of high or low self-esteem
Self-esteem is enhanced by having the approval of others, especially parents and peers, and by
succeeding in school. However, adolescentes whose self-esteem is to dependent on the approval of
others - especially the approval of peers - may be at risk for developing self-image problems, because
peer acceptance may fluctuate over time and values and expectations of the peer group change.
- Academic success leads to improvements in how adolescents feel about themselves, not the
other way around.
- It appears more likely that low self-esteem to lead to depression than the reverse: adolescents
with negative feelings about themselves are less likely to seek positive feedback and social
support from others.
The adolescent identity crisis
Erikson’s theoretical framework
- Erikson viewed the developing person as moving through a series of eight psychosocial crisis
over the course of the life span.
- Erikson believed that the establishment of a coherent sense of identity - what he called the
crisis of identity versus identity diffusion - is the chief psychosocial crisis of adolescence.
- According to Erikson, it is not until adolescence that one even has the mental or emotional
capacity to tackle this task.
, - The key to resolve the crisis of identity versus identity diffusion lies in the interaction with
others. The other people with whom the young person interacts serve as a mirror that reflects
back information about who he or she is and ought to be.
- Thus, developing an identity is a social as well as a mental process. The adolescent’s identity
is the result of a mutual recognition between the young person and society: the adolescent
forges an identity, but, at the same time, society identifies the adolescent.
Influences of the social context on identity development
- The social context has an impact on the nature and outcome of the process of identity
development.
- The social context also influences whether the search for self-definition will be a full-blown
crisis or a more manageable challenge: in contemporary society, it is more difficult for
adolescents to develop identity, because of the many possible options and decisions for
careers there must be made.
- According to Erikson, the complications inherent in identity development in modern society
have created the need for a psychosocial moratorium: a ¨time out¨ during adolescence from
excessive responsibilities and obligations that might restrict the pursuit of self-discovery.
During moratorium, adolescents experiment with trying on different postures, personalities,
and ways of behaving.
Problems in identity development (according to Erikson)
1. Identity diffusion: the incoherent, disjointed, incomplete sense of self characteristic of not
having resolved the crisis of identity. Identity diffusion is reflected not only in problems of
identity, but also in the areas of autonomy, intimacy, sexuality, and achievement.
2. Identity foreclosure: the premature establishment of a sense of identity, before sufficient role
experimentation has occurred. Identity foreclosure in an interruption of identity development
process, one that interferes with the individual’s discovery of his or her full range of
potentials.
3. Negative identity: the selection of an identity that is obviously undesirable in the eyes of
significant others and the broader community. The adolescent who adopts a negative identity
is recognized by those around him or her, but not in a way that fosters healthy development.
Selecting a negative identity usually represents an attempt to forge some sense of
self-definition in an environment that has made it difficult to establish an acceptable identity.
According to Erikson, most adolescents would rather be somebody ¨bad¨ than nobody at all.
Research on identity development
1) Studying identity status
- The processes of exploration (experimenting with different ideas about occupations, values,
relationships, etc.)
- Commitment (making choices among various alternatives)
- Exploration in ¨depth¨: making a commitment to an identity and then exploring one’s options,
vs. exploration in ¨breadth¨: exploring one’s options and them making a further commitment.
- Determining an adolescent’s identity status:
- 1. Identity achievement: the individual has established a coherent sense of identity,
that is, has made commitments after a period of exploration;
