Why do people have identities?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m sure everyone has run across someone who refuses to do something because it clashes with the character they have cultivated in their mind, or in some other way they view the world through who they “are”.

You know something like “I ain’t going to no sushi restaurant, I’m a southern redneck I’m not going to try no raw fish.”

I’m not picking on a US region here either, you can find this worldwide. I could do a New Yawker one if you prefer. This can also be class, race, ethnicity, sex based etc.

I just don’t get this at all, this is what as a child made me feel like most people were fake and not actually interfacing with reality but playing a sort of cultivated character in their mind for the reactions of other people.

I can’t ever remember thinking like this, I mean if you asked I could give you facts about me but I don’t view the world through them.

2

Why do we have identitiies? Sometimes they are forced on us and we have to fight to get rid of it. Sometimes we choose identities we can’t live up to and sometimes if everything goes right we just grow right into the kind of person that we are supposed to be. Our families, associates, neighbors and friends all might know us in slightly different ways but it establishes how we interact in the world. Identities can play a big part in how motivated we are and how well our ideas and works are accepted. I think identities are important and ad to our sense of well being. They can also be destructive and serve no useful purpose but either way they are important.

3

Oh I definitely agree with this, I would say it can increase acceptance of a person overall, but I’m not sure that is a good thing.
What made me post this topic was an article about the Zimmerman family where the author had to inject that as per his identity he has never even touched a gun when at a shooting range, it annoyed me and made me roll my eyes.

I’ve also seen people throughout my life fake ignorance or lack of experience with something in accordance with their identity to impress others, that I knew for a fact was a put on. When I would ask them later why they did that, they would just sort of shrug or smile. Just reinforced my impression that a lot of life is acting.

4

We sort of build ourselves during our growing up.

There was a lovely old Gahan Wilson comic strip, called “Nuts” that ran in the National Lampoon ("back when it used to be funny [tm].) In one strip, the protagonist, a boy growing up, decides that stage magic might be fun. He buys a magic trick at a shop, and tries to perform it. It doesn’t go so well. At the end, he bids farewell to that image of himself.

He’d tried it on, like you or I might try on a jacket at a shop. It didn’t fit. So it never became part of his identity.

Do you remember your own wonder years? Trying out this or that. Like trying out for a team. Did you play marbles as a kid? Did you watch Gilligan’s Isle? Why did you like some TV shows but not others?

Some things come around by happenstance. An uncle introduced me to the comic strip Pogo, and it became part of my identity. You might have stumbled on to your favorite movie by pure luck, channel-flipping, and suddenly, poof, there it was and it became foundational to you.

Some luck, some design. Rewind the tape and play it forward again, and you’d be very different in a lot of ways.

5

You’d like this article:

Keep Your Identity Small

6

I think it’s a mechanism for simplifying our functioning in the world.

By voluntarily adhering to stereotypes, you reduce the number of choices you have to make. Also, it allows you to project a constant, reassuring image to the people around you, which makes socializing easier (pack mentality and all that).

Every day, you have to decide where to park, what you’re going to eat tonight, whether to sort out the cardboard from the rest of the garbage, where to invest your money, what charity to give to, whether to go to the gym or not, what kind of alcohol to drink, which vehicle to buy.

Identities, or sets of pre-packaged values, can make many of these choices for you, which makes life simpler. Identities related to religion and politics, as the article implies, are particularly fruitful.

7

What **Heracles **said. That’s the “why”.

Now the “what”: some folks have a real desire to almost never consciously decide anything. They tend to have very rigid & complete identities; all their decisions are pre-made by the identity template they hold up to the situation of the moment.

Other folks, such as the OP, seem driven to near the opposite extreme.
I’d also suggest there’s some correlation here with overall tolerance or preference for novelty and diversity. Many people like lots of homogeneity in their surroundings. Other find that boring or stifling and prefer lots of variety.

8

Here’s what I think: In traditional societies, people’s identity is largely derived from the role they play in their tribe/village/whatever. Some of that still exists… with sex roles perhaps being the most obvious. (It may not be a coincidence that the example the OP gave to illustrate the concept is basically a version of the “manly man” role.)

Also, people have a desire to believe that they are internally consistent. Perceived lack of consistency (cognitive dissonance) is unpleasant. Playing a role offers a sense of coherence.

9

Because people like the sense of belonging that comes with group membership. So if they do something that (in their mind) goes against what that group is supposed to do, it makes them feel like they don’t really belong anywhere. And that’s an uncomfortable feeling.

I have no problem doing stuff that goes counter to the stereotypes attributed to my various “groups”. I get teased about my deviancy sometimes, though, and that’s annoying. So I understand why someone might be afraid to break out of character. In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, other people can pressure us to conform to stereotypes and “roles”.

10

It’s the pieces of ourselves that make us individuals. We may share some facets of ourselves with some people, while sharing other facets of ourselves with other people. I don’t trust people who are carbon copies of all the people in their “group” or “clan.”

Back in high school, there was a girl I knew who didn’t have any identity. If you asked her opinion of something, she’d say "I don’t know, what do you think?’ She was like a chameleon who changed color with her environment. I don’t know what ultimately became of her.

11

If the question is “why do identities exist at all”, the answer is that society is built on individual accountability, which means no two people can inhabit the same social role. Take identical twins for example… it won’t do to consider them the same person, even though they have the same physical appearance and the same ancestry and a lot of the same traits. So we assign an identity even if it’s based on the most trivial of differences.

If the question is “why do some people get so invested in their identities”, the answer is tribal affiliation. Sure, maybe I’d like to try that exotic food, but people might think I’m one of THEM, and then maybe I’d be expelled from my group and left to fend for myself. The more exclusive your group, the more invested you’ll probably be in maintaining your identity.

12

That sounds like what Daniel Kahneman would call System 1 thinking. In the first section of his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow:

It’s been awhile since I listened to the book on tape. If I remember correctly, no one uses either system all the time. Everyone has a ratio of how often they use System 1 to how often they use System 2. And there are fallacies that people who use System 2 more often can fall prey to. It’s an interesting book.

13

Posts like this always make me want to ask if the OP is human. :slight_smile: I mean, is it so hard to understand why we like identities? Nice places where we belong? Now, if your idea of your identity is so tight that it’s inflexible, that may be a problem, but I think we all identify ourselves in some ways or other. It’s just that some of us find something new and run from it, and others find something new, find it doesn’t match that identity and either update that identity or discard it entirely.

I bet we all go through different stages of it at different times of our life.

14

Identitiies seem to be a combination of how others perceive us combined with how we perceive ourselves. Our identity is not cast in stone. Just like an outfit we wear we have the ability to modify who we are. Often times a change in enviroment is a good opportunity to make some changes we may never have been comfortable with. The more I think about this it becomes more clear that establishing an identity that I feel good about has been a major driving force in my life and a very rewarding one.

15

LOL. I feel the same way.

Your comment is making me remember that thread from a few months back about pinball machine geekery and the absence of minority folk at tournaments. Perhaps the concept of identity is especially poignant for people who are members of minority groups. As I said upthread, I generally have no problem doing things that don’t conform to stereotypes about women and black people and black women. But I’d be a lyin’ fool if I said it NEVER bothers me, because it most certainly does. It bothers me to show up to a function where I am the “only” one…and I don’t think it’s because I’m suffering from some kind of twisted pathology. It’s because it sometimes feel weird to do stuff as a visible minority. You may worry if you’re coming across as a poseur…if you’re a “sell-out” or a “wanna-be”…and if people don’t welcome you, you wonder if it’s because you don’t really belong. Maybe these feelings aren’t universal, but surely they are understandable.

I’d also be lyin’ if I said I don’t have expectations for other people based on their group membership. For instance, I wouldn’t expect a drag performer to be a fan of football. I might express surprise upon hearing about it, and that reaction may make the guy regret ever mentioning it. If you’ve ever expressed surprised when someone has done something outside of societal expectation, then you should understand why people may feel weird about being on the “outside”. One feeling causes the other.

16

Yeah, you can’t win. If I do stereotypically Indian stuff it’s clearly because I am not American and still cling to my roots and don’t fit in. If I do stereotypically American stuff I am obviously not proud of my identity and it’s not my culture and I’m appropriating it.

My SO is ethnically Chinese and was born here and is in American in every way possible except for accident of birth - except traditional Chinese people still think of him as a Twinkie and white people think of him as Chinese and sometimes he gets racism directed at him.

There’s no word like Twinkie for Indian people. Maybe Ding Dongs or Ho-Hos. :slight_smile:

17

Because, in the case of all my friends, it is their identity that I like. If it weren’t for that particular identity that they consistently cling to and display, I would have no reason to like them. They would just be moving parts in a de-individualized social order.

18

grude, do you mean group identities (the examples you gave) or personal identities - the face you show in public?
The group identity has a lot to do with the environment you grew up in and what people expect of you.

Personal identities are a mixture of who you are and who you want to be. In the old days people who were celebrities put on a different face when out in public. Now it seems lots of people can’t or won’t differentiate their public face from their private face. Look at the politicians who get into trouble mistaking a public arena for a private one.

On-line is a stage. Smart kids are going to put on their public face when they post, since people are always watching.

19

I got a fair bit through this a while ago, which gives a go at outlining a particular subset of social psychology identity theory. If I may dare to summarise/paraphrase what I remember…:

Everything that we are, as in all of the identities and components of identity that we carry around with us (such as gender, geographic origin, age, etc…), does not exist internally in any absolute singular sense - it only exists in relation to others. I may be a 34-year old man, but I only have the *identity *of a 34-year old man because there are others around me who have other ages and who are of the opposite gender. My income bracket only has any significance in terms of my identity because there are those who earn less and more than me. What it means to be who I am is determined by what it means to *not *be me (and vice versa, in a messy kind of way…) This might sound like a bland truism, but I think the consequences are actually quite far-reaching. We are literally defined by others, and the way that we compare and contrast to/against them. All identity is at first an external, social phenomenon, which is then internalised by the individual. So there is no ‘inner you’, soul, or person ‘deep down’ that you really are - you are just the ‘role’ that you play in front of others: your *persōna *is you. Like this, we are all playing a character - it is impossible not to. The choice we have is *how *we play it, not *whether *we do.

People can’t choose to have identities, then - they just do. And, if they endeavour to not have any sort of identity, then that itself becomes an aspect of their identity - albeit a humourously hypocritical one (doh!).

All of this said, though, some people tend to ham up one particular aspect of their identity while others downplay it (such as geographic origin, a la the OP). Why do some make a big deal of being from a particular place, or of having a particular sexual alignment, or of having a particular religion? I imagine there are lots of reasons, but I suspect that covering up some sort of insecurity plays a part in it most of the time.

“I don’t east sushi because I’m a Southerner!” could mean…

“I am scared of eating raw fish, but I don’t want to admit it - so this Southern identity thing seems like a reasonable enough un-emasculating excuse”

“I feel that, as a Southerner, my origins are not being recognised in this social situation - so here is a way for me to stand my ground and establish where I am from publicly”

“I have fears (legitimate or otherwise) that if my Southern contemporaries were to learn of my eating sushi that I might be though less of, and so will refrain for fear of damage to my reputation”

“I feel that, by way of refusing this particular line of gastronomy on grounds of geographic and cultural origin, I will appear assertive and masculine”

20

Who do you think you are, to ask?