Identity Development Theories (AAMC 8A)
Content category 8A covers who we think we are and how that view develops. The identity and self page gives short definitions of self-concept, self-esteem, locus of control and socialization. This page works through the stage theories in full, which the MCAT tests by giving a scenario and asking which stage it represents, and adds the parts of the self-concept that page skips: self-schemas, self-discrepancy, social comparison, and gender and ethnic identity.
The Parts of the Self-Concept
The self-concept is the sum of a person's beliefs about who they are. It is organized into self-schemas: knowledge structures about the self in particular domains (I am athletic; I am bad at math). Self-schemas guide attention and memory, so people process schema-relevant information faster and remember it better, an effect related to the self-reference effect in memory.
- Actual self
- Who you believe you are now.
- Ideal self
- Who you would like to be (your hopes and aspirations).
- Ought self
- Who you believe you should be (duties and obligations, often from others).
- Possible selves
- Images of who you might become, including feared selves; they motivate behavior.
Self-discrepancy theory predicts that a gap between the actual and the ideal self produces dejection-related emotions (disappointment, sadness), while a gap between the actual and the ought self produces agitation-related emotions (anxiety, guilt). Carl Rogers similarly argued that a large gap between self-concept and ideal self causes distress, and that unconditional positive regard helps close it.
Self-esteem is the evaluative part (how much you like yourself); self-efficacy is a belief about competence for a specific task; locus of control is a belief about whether outcomes depend on you (internal) or on outside forces (external). They are separate: a person can have high self-esteem and low self-efficacy for calculus.
Social comparison
Festinger's social comparison theory holds that when objective standards are lacking, people evaluate themselves by comparing with others. Upward comparison (to someone better off) can motivate but can lower self-esteem; downward comparison (to someone worse off) tends to raise self-esteem. People's chosen comparison group, their reference group, therefore shapes self-evaluation. A student at a highly selective school may have a lower academic self-concept than an equally able student at an average school, a pattern called the big-fish-little-pond effect.
Types of Identity
A person holds many identities, each tied to a social role or group membership. According to identity theory, they are arranged in a salience hierarchy: the more salient an identity, the more likely it is to guide behavior in a given situation.
- Gender identity
- A person's internal sense of their own gender, which may or may not match the sex assigned at birth. Distinct from sex (biological characteristics) and from gender roles (a society's expectations for behavior by gender).
- Sexual orientation
- The pattern of a person's romantic and sexual attraction. It is separate from gender identity.
- Ethnic identity
- Identification with a group sharing a common ancestry, culture or language. Ethnic identity often develops through exploration (learning about one's heritage) and commitment.
- Racial identity
- Identification with a socially constructed racial category; often shaped by how others classify and treat the person.
- National, religious and class identities
- Identification with a nation, faith or socioeconomic group; can become highly salient in conflict or migration.
Gender schema theory proposes that children form mental categories of what is masculine and feminine in their culture and then organize their own behavior and perception to fit. Androgyny describes people who show high levels of both traditionally masculine and feminine traits. Whether an identity is felt strongly depends partly on context: people are more aware of an identity when they are in the minority in a setting.
Freud's Psychosexual Stages
Freud proposed that personality develops through stages in which the libido (sexual energy) focuses on different body areas. Unresolved conflict at a stage leads to fixation, which shows up in adult personality.
| Stage | Age (approx.) | Focus | Fixation example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oral | 0 to 1 year | Mouth: sucking, biting | Dependence, smoking, nail biting |
| Anal | 1 to 3 years | Bowel control; toilet training | Anal-retentive (orderly, stingy) or anal-expulsive (messy) |
| Phallic | 3 to 6 years | Genitals; Oedipal and Electra conflicts, resolved by identifying with the same-sex parent | Vanity, problems with authority |
| Latency | 6 years to puberty | Sexual drives dormant; focus on school and same-sex friendships | (Fixation not typically described) |
| Genital | Puberty onward | Mature sexual relationships | Healthy adult functioning if earlier stages resolved |
Freud's theory is historically important but difficult to test, because its concepts cannot be measured directly and its explanations can fit almost any outcome after the fact. That property, being hard to falsify, is a common MCAT criticism.
Erikson's Psychosocial Stages
Erikson extended development across the whole lifespan. Each stage poses a crisis between two outcomes; successful resolution produces a lasting strength (virtue).
| Stage (crisis) | Approx. age | Central question | Virtue if resolved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trust vs mistrust | 0 to 1 year | Can I rely on caregivers? | Hope |
| Autonomy vs shame and doubt | 1 to 3 years | Can I do things by myself? | Will |
| Initiative vs guilt | 3 to 6 years | Can I plan and start activities? | Purpose |
| Industry vs inferiority | 6 to 12 years | Can I master skills and succeed at school? | Competence |
| Identity vs role confusion | Adolescence | Who am I and where am I going? | Fidelity |
| Intimacy vs isolation | Young adulthood | Can I form close, committed relationships? | Love |
| Generativity vs stagnation | Middle adulthood | Am I contributing to the next generation? | Care |
| Integrity vs despair | Late adulthood | Was my life meaningful? | Wisdom |
A 45-year-old engineer starts mentoring junior colleagues and volunteering at a youth coding club because she feels her own career has become routine.
Middle adulthood plus concern with guiding the next generation and avoiding a sense of routine stagnation places her in generativity vs stagnation. Intimacy vs isolation concerns close relationships in young adulthood; integrity vs despair is a late-life review of one's whole life.
Marcia's Identity Statuses
James Marcia operationalized Erikson's adolescent stage using two dimensions: exploration (has the person actively considered alternatives?) and commitment (has the person settled on values, goals or a role?).
| Commitment: yes | Commitment: no | |
|---|---|---|
| Exploration: yes | Identity achievement: explored options and committed | Moratorium: actively exploring, not yet committed |
| Exploration: no | Foreclosure: committed without exploring, often adopting parents' choices | Identity diffusion: neither exploring nor committed |
Moral Development: Kohlberg and Gilligan
Kohlberg presented people with moral dilemmas, the best known being whether a man should steal an overpriced drug to save his dying wife, and classified the reasoning behind their answers, not the answer itself.
| Level | Stages | Basis of moral judgment |
|---|---|---|
| Preconventional (most children under about 9) | 1. Obedience and punishment; 2. Self-interest (what is in it for me) | Avoiding punishment and gaining rewards |
| Conventional (most adolescents and adults) | 3. Good boy/good girl, interpersonal accord; 4. Law and order | Gaining approval and upholding rules and social order |
| Postconventional (a minority of adults) | 5. Social contract; 6. Universal ethical principles | Abstract principles of justice and rights, which can override laws |
Carol Gilligan criticized Kohlberg because his original research sample was male and his scoring emphasized abstract justice. She proposed an ethic of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibility to others, arguing it had been unfairly scored as less advanced. Later studies found smaller gender differences than Gilligan predicted, but her critique remains the standard example of sampling bias in developmental theory. Kohlberg's stages have also been criticized as reflecting individualist Western values.
Social Influences on Identity: Mead, Cooley and Vygotsky
Sociologists emphasize that the self emerges through social interaction. Cooley's looking-glass self holds that we see ourselves through how we imagine others see us. George Herbert Mead distinguished the I (the spontaneous, acting self) from the me (the social self, internalized attitudes of others) and described how children learn to take others' perspectives:
- Preparatory stage
- Imitation of others without understanding (a toddler copying a parent sweeping).
- Play stage
- Taking the role of one specific other at a time (playing house, pretending to be a teacher).
- Game stage
- Understanding several roles at once and how they fit together, as in a team sport where each player anticipates the others.
- Generalized other
- The internalized sense of society's expectations, which guides behavior even when no one is watching.
Lev Vygotsky argued that cognitive development is driven by social interaction and culture. The zone of proximal development is the gap between what a child can do alone and what the child can do with guidance from a more knowledgeable other. Support that is gradually withdrawn as competence grows is called scaffolding. Children internalize cultural tools such as language, which Vygotsky saw as the basis of thought.
Culture and the self
Cultures differ in how the self is defined. In more individualist cultures, people tend to describe themselves with personal traits (I am ambitious) and value independence. In more collectivist cultures, people more often describe themselves through relationships and roles (I am a daughter, a member of my team) and value harmony. These are averages; there is wide variation within any culture.
Worked MCQs
5 MCQs in the style of the Psych/Soc section, several built around a study design.
Q1. A college sophomore has switched majors three times this year, is taking courses in several fields, and says she is still figuring out what she values. In Marcia's framework, she is in:
She is actively exploring options but has not yet committed, which defines moratorium. Diffusion involves neither exploration nor commitment, foreclosure involves commitment without exploration, and achievement follows exploration with commitment.
Q2. A 9-year-old feels proud after finishing a science project and worries about being worse than classmates at reading. According to Erikson, he is working through:
In the school-age years (about 6 to 12), children focus on mastering skills and comparing their competence with peers, the crisis of industry vs inferiority. Initiative vs guilt belongs to the preschool years and identity vs role confusion to adolescence.
Q3. Asked whether a man should steal a drug to save his wife, a participant says he should not, because society cannot function if everyone breaks laws when they disagree with them. This reasoning is at which Kohlberg stage?
Reasoning based on maintaining social order and the importance of following laws is stage 4, law and order, in the conventional level. Preconventional reasoning focuses on punishment or personal reward; postconventional reasoning would weigh abstract rights that might override the law.
Q4. A person whose actual self falls short of the self she believes her parents expect her to be is most likely to experience which emotion, according to self-discrepancy theory?
A gap between the actual self and the ought self (duties and obligations, often set by others) is associated with agitation-related emotions such as anxiety and guilt. An actual-ideal gap is associated with dejection-related emotions such as disappointment.
Q5. Critics argued that Kohlberg's theory underestimated the moral reasoning of women because his original data came from male participants. This criticism concerns:
Building a theory from an all-male sample limits how well its stages generalize to other groups, which is a sampling bias affecting external validity. Gilligan's ethic of care was proposed in response.
Quick Recap
- Self-concept is organized into self-schemas; actual, ideal, ought and possible selves.
- Actual-ideal gap brings dejection; actual-ought gap brings anxiety (self-discrepancy theory).
- Social comparison: upward can motivate or deflate; downward boosts self-esteem; reference groups matter.
- Identities form a salience hierarchy; gender identity, sex, gender roles and sexual orientation are distinct.
- Freud: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital; fixation; hard to falsify.
- Erikson: trust, autonomy, initiative, industry, identity, intimacy, generativity, integrity.
- Marcia: diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, achievement (exploration x commitment).
- Kohlberg: preconventional, conventional, postconventional; Gilligan's ethic of care. Mead: I vs me, play to game stage, generalized other. Vygotsky: zone of proximal development.