Switching social identities happens seamlessly

Each person has multiple social identities, such as: employee, parent, young person, friend or even fan of a particular sports team.

Previous research has shown that frequently switching task tends to result in lower performance: longer completion times and reduced accuracy. A new study finds that identity switching may pose less difficulty.

What the researchers say: “Our lives have sped up a lot in recent years and decades, so we have to switch more often between different identities,” said the lead researcher. “Due to the pandemic, many more people now work from home – so they no longer have the slow switch of a commute separating home from work. Our research aimed to find whether rapidly activating different identities comes with a cost. We were surprised to find that these switches are extremely effective – people can switch quite rapidly with no apparent difficulty.”

The researchers note, however, that this ability might come with a downside. “We might have little control over these switches,” the researchers explained. “For someone working from home, it may be important to stay in a professional identity – but our findings suggest you could easily be drawn away from it.”

The researchers conducted several studies using the “Implicit Association Test”, in which participants have to quickly sort words and images into categories.

Using this method, participants were made to think about a certain identity—for example, the researchers encouraged them to think of themselves as “young people” by asking them to sort images of faces by age.

It was then possible to make people switch to a different identity—or at other times stay in the same identity—to observe the effects.

One study also created a new “minimal group” identity, by asking participants to remember images of people's faces as members of a newly formed group (the participant was encouraged to think of these people and themselves as part of the “blue group”).

Switching between this new identity and existing identities was also seamless.

So, what? Each identity switch causes certain genes to express differently. We become, in literal fact, different people—sometimes to quite an appreciable extent. Thomas Jefferson as writer of the “all men are created equal” preamble to the US Constitution and the Thomas Jefferson farmer/slaveholder who declared that Black people were inferior in mind and body.

At home we might be the good parent who is liberal in outlook and at work the CEO who dismisses thousands of people to preserve “shareholder value.”

That we do this “seamlessly” without conscious effort largely is because of our need to fit into the various “tribes” that we belong to—family, C-Suite executives, revolutionaries and slaveholders. Our need to belong, and therefore to conform to the norms and assumptions of each group that our “identity” belongs, trumps everything else.