Social identity switching: An investigation of non-demographic identities with computational-linguistic and self-report measures

Abstract

Understanding potential costs of social identity switching contributes to our knowledge of how people manage their various group memberships in a fast-paced and interconnected world. Recent research demonstrates that people can switch between demographic social identities seamlessly. The current studies advance this research by (1) moving beyond demographic identities to identities that are not perceptually distinguishable, (2) developing a new identity switching paradigm based on an implicit computational linguistic style measure of salience and (3) including self-report measures of salience, task difficulty and performance. In two within-subjects studies (N = 211; N = 220), a short writing task was used to prompt a switch from participants' parent identity to their feminist identity or a repetition of the feminist identity. Findings from the implicit measure revealed no identity activation 'cost' in the switch relative to the repeat condition, consistent with previous findings for demographic identities. In contrast, we found evidence for lower self-reported salience of the feminist identity in the switch compared to the repeat condition. Furthermore, Study 2 found little difference in self-rated performance or task difficulty between conditions, indicating that switching identities does not affect self-rated performance. The results illustrate a new paradigm for investigating social identity switching.

Keywords: identity activation costs; linguistic style; multiple identities; social identity; social identity switching.

FIGURE 1

Study procedure. The order of the repeat and switch condition and that of the feminist writing topics were jointly counterbalanced over participants.

FIGURE 2

Salience of feminist vs. parent identity by condition—Study 1. A score of 0 indicates that a parent identity rather than a feminist identity is salient, a score of 0.5 indicates that it is not possible to classify the text one way or the other, and a score of 1 indicates that a feminist identity rather than a parent identity is salient.

FIGURE 3

Self‐reported salience of feminist identity by condition—Study 1.

FIGURE 4

Salience of feminist vs. parent identity by condition—Study 2. A score of 0 indicates that a parent identity rather than a feminist identity is salient, a score of 0.5 indicates that it is not possible to classify the text one way or the other, and a score of 1 indicates that a feminist identity rather than parent identity is salient.

FIGURE 5

Self‐reported salience of feminist identity by condition.