There is little more slippery than who we think we are. It is mixed up with what we do, what we want to do, who we like to think we are, who others think we are, who we think others want us to think we are, and dozens of other equally slippery concepts. But we emit words about ourselves, and those statements \u2014 however removed from the truth \u2014 are evidence. For one, their changes over time they can give insight into the development of self-concept. Let’s say that you just had a health scare and quit fast food. How long do you have to have been saying “I’ve been eating healthy” before you start saying “I eat healthy”? A month? Three? A few years? How does that time change with topic, age, sex, and personality? Having stabilized, what is the effect of a relapse in each of these cases? Are people who switch more quickly to “I eat healthy” more or less prone to sustained hypocracy \u2014 hysteresis \u2014 after a lapse into old bad eating habits? And, on the subject of relapse, how do statements about self-concept feed back into behavior; All else being equal, do ex-smokers who “are quitting” relapse more or less than those who “don’t smoke”? What about those who “don’t smoke” against those who “don’t smoke anymore”; does including the regretted-past make it more or less likely to return? With the right data \u2014 large longitudinal corpora of self-statements and creative\/ambitious experimental design \u2014 these may become empirical questions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is little more slippery than who we think we are. It is mixed up with what we do, what we want to do, who we like to think we are, who others think we are, who we think others want us to think we are, and dozens of other equally slippery concepts. But we … Continue reading The empirics of identity: Over what timescale does self-concept develop?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}