When we cease being ourselves?

Yesterday we launched a “toy” survey just to quickly ask our network whether they have ever changed their behavior or personality for social acceptance. Hopefully, we had a great response! Many of our readers answered the survey, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. A bit more than 90% of our readers stated that they changed the genuine way in which they’d express themselves. Not that bad!

In fact, this is quite consistent with the common idea that is taught in Social Psychology courses that social conformity is one of the strongest processes of social influence, along with obedience to authority. After the classical studies from Asch & Milgram, this idea became widespread and even impregnated common wisdom.

Ninety percent is a huge number, and there are many plausible reasons for it. These figures tell us that most of us, whether for avoiding a conflict, or for acceptance, or for politeness, or for conformity, or just because they are intelligent and know how to behave at any given moment. But, does it mean that we cease being ourselves at some point? Being repeatedly in the situation of changing our way of expressing ourselves make change our authentic self? Does our essence vanish out?

The answer to this question is tricky. Our identity is different from our personality. The latter is a set of traits and dispositions that predispose us to behave in certain ways, whereas the former is much more complex. It also includes life narratives, characteristic adaptations, or cultural and social influences. In addition, our core set of traits is not permanently stable over time, it changes in many ways, while at the same time, remain stable in others. Finally, personality psychologists have recently suggested that even though our “trait level” might be X, in reality, we express a broad variety of “personality states” that create the impression that we change our way of being a lot. But, eventually, our identity is preserved.

All in all, although we have a clear sense of our identity, and how we perceive ourselves, the reality is that our behavior is quite changing. The challenge here is how we can predict it!