How Your Identity Changes Your Perspectives

Have you found yourself waving goodbye at the end of your Zoom calls lately? The subtle things we do every day reflect our state of mind.

Consider how the COVID vaccine debate has morphed into a solidarity pledge amongst members of in-groups. The public discourse has been less about addressing the underlying concerns and more about garnering support with whom we identify. It has created an “Us vs. Them” mentality that allows no room for maneuver.

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How did we get there? One clue to the linkage between identity and behavior is the opaque relationship between values and traits posited by Professor Emeritus Shalom H. Schwartz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He suggested that while personality traits are about temperament, values drive behavior through character. The connection is opaque because our behavior is primarily described in our personality traits and attributes to how we identify ourselves. In other words,

Our behavior reflects the motivation underpinned by our values and identities.

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Erik Erikson, one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the 20th century, described in his Psychosocial Theory of Human Development that we are constantly re-interpreting the world around us. Every interaction adds a new dimension to our cognitive self until we fully develop our self-identity, a.k.a. ego, by reconciling who we are and what we represent. Alongside this identity is a set of values that eventually becomes a guiding force to how we interact — our perception, judgment, and consequently, behavior.

As we transition through different stages in life, our perspectives alter to suit our environment in part due to our desire for acceptance. Meanwhile, any unresolved issues from the past would linger, like skeletons in the closet, until resolution.

Could these unresolved issues be the culprit that leads to our unhappiness?

Erikson’s theory, where he coined the phrase “identity crisis,” sums up our human development experience when and why we need what we need. Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Values describes how opposing values counter or reinforce our desires to serve those identities in our behavior. When there are incompatible values, we are confronted with varying versions of narrative conflicts that are only too common on the big screen — Man vs. Self, Man vs. Nature, or Man vs. Society— that are so seductive yet allusive.

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Work happiness is a by-product of how we embody our identity to the extent of serving our self-concept — our sense of who we are and what we are capable of.

It is not to say we don’t rely on others to validate our existence. Instead, happiness at work is achievable when we have a comfortable sense of self and a feedback system that fulfills our needs.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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