Identity Case

Identity is an area of psychological study focusing mainly on the understanding of human being and their everyday lives. Human identities build partly from a specific category of the self 1 and partly from the interaction of our personalities2 and people around us. Psychologists who focus on different aspects of identity take different perspectives, ask different questions, utilize different methods and evidence, and hence advance different theories. In the following, four influential psychological theories about identities will be considered, including psychosocial identity theory, social identity theory and social constructionist theories. Apart from the proximate explanations of how identity works, this essay also covers the issue of why identity exists in terms of the evolution of human behaviours and their essential adaptive functions from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

The Psychosocial Theory

Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst who draws heavily on Freud's psychoanalytic ideas, views identity as psychosocial, that is, both personal and social factors have impacts on identity development. For Erikson, 'ego identity' is paramount as it provides a sense of continuity with the past and a direction for the future. To achieve this, a stable, consistent and reliable sense of who and what one is has to develop. It is also important that our social group has a consistent view towards us. Erikson suggests that the achievement of identity is a lifelong developmental process in which each stage of conflict has to be resolved so as to provide a foundation for the next developmental stages.

Ego identity

Erikson identified eight developmental stages of identity starting from the stage of birth to the stage of late adulthood. For example, at the first developmental stage, baby will face crisis of whether to trust or mistrust others. The fifth psychosocial stage, adolescence, is among the most important one as the achievement of ego identity was the major developmental task. For Erikson, adolescence is a period in which several life decisions3 have to be faced because adolescents not only have to reconsider who they are, but also have to consider who they can be in the future.

Psychosocial moratorium

Erikson recognized adolescence as a stage of psychosocial moratorium. In this stage, young people are generally accepted to spend more time exploring different components of their identity before making concrete social choices. Erikson observed, however, that some teenagers strand in a period called 'identity crisis' that they find it difficult to negotiate their way into the stage of adulthood. Some even experience 'role diffusion' that they fail to make commitments to the role of adult, in other words, they fail to achieve a firm ego identity.

The identity status model

Erikson's psychosocial theory was further adapted by James Marcia, a US clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, who provided a method allowing Erikson's theory to be measured. Focusing on Erikson's developmental stage of adolescence, Marcia devised the identity status interview to study how adolescents' identity changed over the period of adolescence. This semi-structured interview measures the extent of their commitments or crises in relation to the exploration of choices between possible alternatives, such as occupation, religion before committing to particular roles. Marcia categorizes adolescents into one of four possible identity statuses as follows:

Identity diffusion (low commitment and low exploration). It is the period in which adolescents are neither exploring social roles nor committed to a consistent set of values and goals. They do not have a developed sense of identity.

Identity foreclosure (high commitment and low exploration). It is the period in which young people commit themselves to identities without having explored other alternatives.

Moratorium (low commitment and high exploration). It is a period in which adolescents actively search for the identity to which they want to be committed.

Identity achievement (high commitment and high exploration). It is the period in which the stage of moratorium was successfully negotiated, and a firm and consistent identity was built. For Marcia, it is the most developmentally advanced status (Dorothy 2002).

These statuses are related to personality because different young man exhibits different way on experiencing and dealing with the world. Although Erikson and Marcia view identity as psychosocial, they have concentrated more on the individual aspects of identity. The next section discusses a theory of social identities that focuses on group, rather than personal identities.

The Social Identity Theory (henceforth SIT)

SIT is a theory on social processes, developed from the work of Henri Tajfel, by which people come to identity with particular groups and differentiate themselves from others. For Tajfel, identity can be divided into two relatively separate sub-systems: personal identity4 and social identity5. The main concept of SIT is that we always subjectively ascribe our social identity to the characteristics of our own social groups6. The act of self-categorization into groups labels us with a set of specific attitudes and behaviours that can influence our actions. Once we consider a particular social identity essential to us, we will reflect that identity on our attitudes and behaviours by means of self-stereotyping and stick to that stereotype.

Minimal groups

Tajfel et al. conducted a series of laboratory studies (experimental method) creating minimal groups to investigate whether simply categorizing individuals into groups is enough to generate identity with the ingroup and discrimination against the outgroup regardless of how arbitrary or meaningless the groups were formed. Researches on minimal groups show that people tend to give privileged treatment to members of their own group even though there have no concrete purpose or reason for being a group nor do they gain from refusing privileges to the outgroup. Tajfel (1978, 1981) explains that people build social identities from their group membership and have basic psychological needs for satisfying social identities. In order to create satisfactory social identities, we need to have a sense of belonging to groups that have a positive image and high status in comparison with other groups. Unlike the above theories, the following social constructionist theory of identity has diverse origins in various disciplines from different perspectives.

The Social Constructionist Theory

For