Am I Who I Say I Am? Social Identities and Identification

Abstract

When we talk about social identities, we can have one of at least two senses of the phrase in mind: (1) We can think of social identities as a social status. On this view one bears some social identity S, just in case one can be classified as an S according to some criteria.1 The social sta tuses relevant for considerations of social identity include gender and race, as well as familial roles like being a father, a mother, a sister, or a brother, and occupational roles like being a professor, a firefighter, or a landscaper. (2) We can also think of social identities as psychological in nature. On this view one bears a social identity S, just in case one has the appropriate psychological attachment to some social status. Social identity when thought of according to (1) is an objective mat ter, so to speak. That is, if one wants to know if some person bears some social identity S, one does not need to consult a person's opinion regard ing whether or not she thinks of herself as an S. There are social and his torical facts that determine a person's social identity. In contrast, there is a tendency among theorists to think of social identities according to (2) as subjective. That is, bearing some social identity depends on whether a person endorses her social status or, at the very least, explicitly believes that she bears some social status. On this view, social identity, in the psychological sense, just is one's subjective take on one's social statuses. This paper will focus on the second sense of social identity. I take the prevailing view in the field, noted above, to be mistaken. Psychological social identity is not a matter of subjective self-ascription. It is instead a feature of a person's mental life that does not rely on a person's explicit ly held understanding of who or what she is. Psychological social identi ties are a product of our emotional life, which often operates below the surface of self-reflective awareness. I arrive at this conclusion by first showing how the prevailing view fails to address the following cases: