Against identity

My recent efforts at making a commitment platform – what eventually became obligat.io – led me down a bit of an interesting trip through the psychology of goal setting. I had a hunch that what I was doing would be useful to me, but no evidence backing it up in the general case, so I went looking. Surprisingly, I found a lot of material saying you shouldn't tell people about your goals. Oops!

Digging a little deeper, that advice ultimately comes from the great work of Peter Gollwitzer who, among other things, pioneered symbolic self-completion theory and the idea of self-defining goals. That is, certain goals like "I want to be a doctor" aren't about taking a specific action, they're about being perceived (and perceiving yourself) in a certain way. Symbolic self-completion theory says that when that identity is threatened, you seek out symbols and demonstrations to prove it. Similarly, when working towards a self-defining goal, those kinds of identity-demonstrating behaviours can substitute for actually achieving anything.

Which, to reel it back in, is not the same thing as saying don't tell people about your goals. The mechanism at work is that talking about your identity goals is a way of demonstrating that identity. So talking about all your amazing plans for being a doctor makes you feel like a doctor, and paradoxically reduces your need to actually be a doctor. I feel relatively safe in obligat.io's model, because the commitment structure is fairly specific and accountable, so it should be less vulnerable to identity weaseling. In fact, Gollwitzer's paper suggests this as one of the possible ways to mitigate the effect.

Honestly, the whole identity thing seems kind of inelegant. Why define yourself as the kind of person who does thing X rather than just... doing X? It seems like the latter gets more done with less baggage. In software we've had a storied history constructing elaborate definitions of types of things, and many developers now believe that just expecting certain behaviour, rather than a certain type identity, is a faster and more flexible way to work. In a sense I think identity is similar to happiness: an indirect, consequential property that we've started trying to manipulate directly. Maybe we would be better off if we just got rid of it.

That said, Gollwitzer found at least some benefit to identity goals, and regardless we're probably stuck with our particular set of mental quirks for the forseeable future. The one thing I would say to that is that we can definitely decide what gets to be part of our identity. In which case I would suggest that a good identity is like a good type system: minimal. Maybe you don't need running or fishing or medicine to be your identity, with all their attendant risk of having external factors define your identity.

Perhaps a better way to approach your identity would be to just prune things away until you find the parts of yourself you'd never want to change. That is, instead of defining your identity as things you do, whittle it down to just the essential elements of your character.