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Is personal identity intransitive?
Julian De Freitas1, Lance J Rips2
1Marketing Unit, Harvard Business School, Harvard University.
Journal of Experimental Psychology. General
|December 12, 2024
Summary
People may make judgments suggesting multiple personal identities, but this doesn't mean they truly think of identity as intransitive. Research shows individuals typically shift identification to a single person, not embrace multiple selves simultaneously.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Cognitive Science
- Philosophy of Mind
Background:
- Recent studies suggest individuals can psychologically represent multiple people, including themselves, as distinct individuals simultaneously.
- This challenges the traditional, transitive understanding of personal identity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether intransitive judgments about personal identity reflect an underlying intransitive concept of identity.
- To determine if psychological representations of self can genuinely encompass multiple individuals concurrently.
Main Methods:
- Manipulation of factors influencing transitivity versus intransitivity in personal identity judgments.
- Analysis of participant responses under varying conditions, including identical individuals and practical commitment considerations.
- Inclusion of experiments assessing the ability to simultaneously imagine multiple perspectives.
Main Results:
- Most participants favored transitive judgments when any basis for distinguishing individuals existed.
- Participants shifted their personal identification to a single individual based on competitive strength, rather than identifying with both.
- Transitive judgments increased when participants considered practical commitments, and participants reported difficulty imagining two perspectives simultaneously.
Conclusions:
- Intransitive judgments observed in prior research may not accurately reflect an intransitive psychological concept of personal identity.
- Evidence suggests that personal identity is predominantly conceptualized transitively, even when faced with scenarios that could imply multiplicity.
- The findings challenge the notion of simultaneous psychological representation of multiple distinct personal identities.
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