Philosophy and Identity
So...
I really need a high grade on this Phil course and the Psych course I'm currently taking. As such, I've taken this essay rather more seriously than most I've written over the last couple years (ie I didn't start writing this an hour before it was due). I'm sorta proud of this, though it's too brief, and doesn't fully express everything (it's due tomorrow morning, so I'm sorta time-constrained).
Anywho, for those who are inclined, it's below.
The impotence of identity
The question of 'why would anyone want to “create” his or her own identity?' was raised in our term papers, and I wish to examine this question in more detail. The idea of 'identity' (in a psychological/personality/character sense, not in a physical/Aristotelian sense) has no meaning as a descriptive idea, though it may have some value as a normative tool. Identity is that which is inferred/created/assumed when our pattern-seeking minds gaze upon the history of the deeds of an individual. I will be using 'identity', 'personality' and 'character' interchangeably in this essay.
The first important point to note is that identity has no genetic origins. Upon examination of ones DNA, there is no 'good person' gene, or things along those lines. Many traits can be learned over time, and our behaviour can be changed, shaped and conditioned. While certain dispositions have been found to correlate with brain activity (pg 615, Psychology, Eighth Edition, Myers), this doesn't mean that ones personality can be read by simply looking at an EEG. Also, while we may have genetic pre-dispositions towards certain 'personality traits', it doesn't necessarily follow that ones personality can be 'read' from ones DNA. Furthermore, personality is not immutable: a shy child does not necessarily grow into a shy adult. In short, while someone's personality may remain static over the course of their life, it's not certain that it will (some longitudinal studies indicate a strong correlation in personality over a 7 year period: the older the subjects, the stronger the correlation (pg 620, ibid)). In addition, people adopt dispositions that are situational, that don't necessarily reflect the underlying personality (pg 724, ibid).
Secondly, identity is attributed (it is not inherent), either by others or ourselves. These are two slightly different cases. We observe peoples actions and, in an attempt to understand them, attribute the personality type that best fits what we know. Over time, we like to think that this is somewhat accurate but I believe that this is entirely erroneous: not that we make incorrect attributions, per se, but a mistake in reasoning to even attempt to do so. There are several problems here: firstly, we don't know when the person is displaying a 'core disposition' versus a 'situational disposition', known as the fundamental attribution error (ibid). Secondly, we don't know all the actions of the person in all situations, so (at best) we are working from a partial data set. Thirdly, we are inferring reasoning based on our own knowledge of the situation, our prior knowledge of the person, our knowledge of how people act in general, and how we would act in that given situation. The reasoning is entirely inductive, and while 'inference to the best explanation' may be the way to go when dealing with physical events, there are far too many unknowns when it comes to psychology to trust our guesswork. Additionally, the person could be acting on a basis that has no connection to any of the assumptions that we have made. Thus when someone smiles a lot and is generally nice and pleasant in conversation, they are characterised as a 'nice person'. The fact that they job requires them to be so in order to work as a cashier is de-emphasised, and the actions are attributed to their underlying personality.
Why do we do this? Because we have patterns (schemas/representations) in our mind that we assign to 'things in the world' in order to quickly make a judgement and get on with our lives. These are quick, automatic, intuitive judgements known as heuristics that don't reflect a reflective, problem-solving approach to life (pg 401, ibid). We typically make quick judgements based on 'best fit' evidence to fulfill the representativeness heuristic, and the more easily an representation is retrieved from our mind, the more likely we believe that representation fits: this is the availability heuristic (pg 401-402, ibid). In addition to those two heuristics, there is a third compounding factor: once we've come to a decision, we are quite resistant to evidence to the contrary ('belief perseverance', pg 407, ibid). Thus even after multiple convictions for larceny and assault, a parent may cling to the idea that their child is 'basically a good kid' (no specific reference for this, but it's a common theme in many news articles).
When looking at our own lives, and deciding what kind of person we are, we apply all of these heuristics to ourselves. While we have more access to information (especially internal information), we are still subject to the biases and errors as those others who are attributing a personality to us. However, we are more like to positively assess our personality than others: someone may consider us aggressive, but we think we are simpy assertive; they think we are confrontational, we think we don't beat around the bush; etc. Furthermore, our memory is quite selective in recalling the past where we confirmed our belief about ourselves, and we frequently don't recall the negative (hindsight bias, pg 20-21, ibid), which means there is information that we simply don't include in our analysis of our own personality.
When all of this is combined, I believe it is difficult to assert that we can attribute personality to others (and ourselves) accurately. We may be aware that a person has committed certain deeds, and there may be a pattern to those deeds, but it's likely that several different (and possibly conflicting) patterns may be read from the same data. Furthermore we often talk about personality being about more than simply deeds, but also about motivation (especially in a Kantian analysis of their actions): what was their intent? No amount of analysis of behaviour can tell us what the motivation of a person was, or even if their motivation was consistent across their actions.
Finally, in attributing a personality trait to someone, we use this as a tool to make predictions about their behaviour. Not only does a personality trait tell us what a person did, or will do, (a kind person will tend towards compassionate behaviour, listening to people when they speak, etc.), it also tells us what they won't do (a kind person won't exhibit sadism, or roughly push a more vulnerable person simply because it's expedient to do so. Or administer an electric shock to someone on the orders of someone in a white laboratory coat). When someone acts to the contrary, we tend to claim that they are simply 'acting out of character' or 'that's so unlike them'. Although Macbeth shows himself to be a capable soldier and a brutal warrior, he is, according to his wife, incapable of regicide (ln 17-19, Act I, Scene 5, Macbeth, Shakespeare).
But these attributions that we have placed upon that person (even if it's ourself) have no proscriptive power; they don't prevent people from acting in a manner contrary to their personality. Macbeth kills Duncan, despite the widespread belief (including his own) that he was incapable of doing so (off-stage, between Act I and II, ibid). From moment to moment, for the rational, reflective person: all things are possible. Even for the non-reflective person, a moment of rage, or “poor judgement” (if that isn't merely a synonym for 'insufficient reflection'), can result in thousands of people remarking 'oh, but they seemed like such a nice person' when they read the newspapers the following day. Lady Macbeth, knowing what kind of character is necessary to be an accomplice to regicide, calling out to change her character to one capable of murder, demonstrates this even though she believes that an external agent is necessary for her nature to change (ln 40-54, Act I, Scene 5, Macbeth, Shakespeare).
As such, 'identity' is an illusion. As a descriptive tool, it fails. It is too subjective, and any projections we would make from it are unlikely to be correct.
As a normative tool, however, it still has a use. When trying to decide 'the kind of person I want to be', the range of identities that exist are useful as a guiding tool, archetypes to aim for as exemplars: “scholarly”, “patient”, “compassionate”, and “outgoing” are personality traits that I, personally, would consider beneficial for some (or most) people to aim towards. However, this is, essentially, Virtue Ethics and beyond the scope of this essay.
'Identity' is nothing more than a name for that which fits a perception of a person's behaviour, and given weight by our misconception that the naming of a pattern confirms the existence of the pattern. The same set of actions viewed from an entirely different perspective can lead to an entirely different interpretation of that persons identity; The Stranger (Camus) exemplifies this by giving us an entirely motive-free 1st person narrative, that we must interpret through our own biases, and a coherent interpretation is presented to us in the 2nd half of the book. Except in a normative sense, along the lines of Virtue Ethics, the concept should be entirely abandoned.
Comments are, of course, welcome. :)