define self bibliography

4.3 Theories of Self and Identity

When we are born, we have a genetic makeup and biological traits. However, who we are as human beings develops through social interaction. Many scholars, both in the fields of psychology and in sociology, have described the process of self-development as a precursor to understanding how that “self” becomes socialized. In this section we will begin by exploring some psychological perspectives on the self and follow that with how sociologists have understood the self.

4.3.1 Psychological Perspectives on Self-Development

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was one of the most influential modern scientists to put forth a theory about how people develop a sense of self. He divided the maturation process into stages, and posited that people’s self-development is closely linked to their early stages of development. According to Freud, failure to properly engage in or disengage from a specific stage results in emotional and psychological consequences throughout adulthood.

Psychologist Erik Erikson (1902–1994) created a theory of personality development based, in part, on the work of Freud. However, Erikson believed the personality continued to change over time and was never truly finished. His theory includes eight stages of development, beginning with birth and ending with death. According to Erikson, people move through these stages throughout their lives. In contrast to Freud’s focus on psychosexual stages and basic human urges, Erikson’s view of self-development gave credit to more social aspects, like the way we negotiate between our own base desires and what is socially accepted (Erikson 1982).

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a psychologist who focused on the role of social interactions in child development. He recognized that the development of self evolved through a negotiation between the world as it exists in one’s mind and the world that exists as it is experienced socially (Piaget 1954). All three of these thinkers have contributed to our modern understanding of self-development.

4.3.2 Cooley and the Looking-Glass Self

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) argued our development of a self is similar to looking through a looking glass. With the looking-glass self , we base our image on what we think other people see (Cooley 1902). We imagine how we must appear to others, then react to this speculation. We wear certain clothes, prepare our hair in a particular manner, wear makeup, use cologne, and the like—all with the notion that our presentation of ourselves is going to affect how others perceive us. We expect a certain reaction, and, if lucky, we get the one we desire and feel good about it. Yet we have no way of knowing what other people are thinking and if they are responding to our presentations. But more than that, Cooley believed that our sense of self is based upon this idea: we imagine how we look to others, draw conclusions based upon what we think other people are thinking about, and then we develop our personal sense of self. In other words, people’s reactions to us are like partial mirrors in which we are reflected.

4.3.3 Mead and Stages of Self-Development

Later, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) studied the self , a person’s distinct identity that is developed through social interaction. Mead argued that our selves have two components, an “I” and a “Me.” The “I” is our creative, novel response to a situation. Our “Me” is the part of our self that accounts for the larger social world. Our self is an internal dialogue between these two components. In most situations our “Me” prevails because of how we are socialized.

In order to engage in this process of self, an individual has to be able to view themself through the eyes of others. That’s not an ability that we are born with (Mead 1934). Through socialization we learn to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and look at the world through their perspective. This assists us in becoming self-aware, as we look at ourselves from the perspective of the “other.”

How do we go from being newborns to being humans with “selves”? Mead believed that there is a specific path of development that all people go through. During the preparatory stage, children are only capable of imitation: they have no ability to imagine how others see things. They copy the actions of people with whom they regularly interact, such as their caregivers. This is followed by the play stage , during which children begin to take on the role that one other person might have. Children might try on a parent’s point of view by acting out grownup behavior, like playing dress-up and acting out the “mom” role or talking on a toy telephone the way they see adults do. This is taking the role of a particular other.

During the game stage , children learn to consider several roles at the same time and how those roles interact with each other. They learn to understand interactions involving different people with a variety of purposes. For example, a child at this stage is likely to be aware of the different responsibilities of people in a restaurant who together make for a smooth dining experience (someone seats you, another takes your order, someone else cooks the food, while yet another clears away dirty dishes).

Finally, children develop, understand, and learn the idea of the generalized other , the common behavioral expectations of general society. By this stage of development, an individual is able to imagine how he or she is viewed by one or many others—and thus, from a sociological perspective, to have a “self” (Mead 1934; Mead 1964).

4.3.4 Goffman and the Presentation of Self

Sociologist Erving Goffman presented the idea that a person is like an actor on a stage and that we can use the metaphor of theater to understand social life. Calling his theory dramaturgy , Goffman believed that we use “impression management” to present ourselves to others as we hope to be perceived. Each situation is a new scene, and individuals perform different selves depending on who is present (Goffman 1959). Think about the way you behave around your coworkers versus the way you behave around your grandparents versus the way you behave with a blind date. Even if you’re not consciously trying to alter your personality, your grandparents, coworkers, and date probably see different sides of you.

From this perspective, social life can be divided into different regions. In front-stage regions, we carry out our performances. In backstage regions, we prepare for our performances. Think about the building you have your sociology class in. The classroom is a front stage region where you and your professors carry out your classes. Within the building there are several backstage regions. The offices of your professors allow them to prepare for class. Bathrooms are also another backstage region within the building. Although there are aspects of behavior in public bathrooms that may be more front stage (Cahill et al. 1985). Stepping outside of your college campus, you can see this division of interactional space within the home (Collett and Child 2009), restaurants (Grazian 2007), or even tourist attractions (MacCannell 1976).

Similar to a play, people will also use props to help carry out their performances. For example, a judge in a courtroom has many “props” to create an impression of fairness, gravity, and control—like their robe and gavel. Those entering the courtroom are expected to adhere to the scene being set. Just imagine the impression that can be made by how a person dresses. This is the reason that attorneys frequently select the hairstyle and apparel for witnesses and defendants in courtroom proceedings.

4.3.5 Identity Theory

Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter and the list of responses you came up with when asked, “Who are you?” As you probably noticed, you have a lot of different selves or identities and that these selves are connected to interactions with other people.

Some of the responses you provided are probably roles. Roles are positions containing a set of socially defined attributes and expectations that determine appropriate behavior for an individual or group based on their status in relation to other people or groups. As an example, you can think of the different roles you may have in your family. You may be a brother, sister, child, grandchild, mother, father, aunt, uncle, or serve in some other role. Or if you listed something related to where you work, it is most likely another role.

Given that you have multiple identities and selves, is there any consistency in our actions across different situations? Sociologists argue yes, and it is associated with identity salience. Identity salience is “the subjective importance or value that persons attach to the various roles that they accept as self-defining” (Thoits 2012:362). This means that some identities are closer to how we define ourselves and are more likely to come up in our interactions with other people. Going back to your list are there any identities/selves that you see as more central to who you are? When you have choices between different activities associated with particular identities, which do you choose?

4.3.6 Licenses and Attributions for Theories of Self and Identity

“Theories of Self and Identity”introductory paragraph and “Psychological Perspectives on Self Development” are from “5.1 Theories of Self Development”by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at OpenStax ; https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/5-1-theories-of-self-development

“Cooley and the Looking Glass Self” and “Mead and the Stages of Development” are from “5.1 Theories of Self Development”by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at OpenStax ; https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/5-1-theories-of-self-development . Section on Cooley edited for clarity and consistency. Section on Mead edited for clarity and consistency, section on I vs. me added.

“Goffman and the Presentation of Self ”introductory paragraph and last paragraph are modified from “4.3 Social Construction of Reality”by Tonja R. Conerly, Kathleen Holmes, Asha Lal Tamang in Openstax Sociology 3e , which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 . Access for free at OpenStax ; https://openstax.org/books/introduction-sociology-3e/pages/4-3-social-constructions-of-reality .

Roles definition from the Open Education Sociology Dictionary is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

All other content in this section is original content by Matthew Gougherty and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Sociology in Everyday Life Copyright © by Matt Gougherty and Jennifer Puentes. All Rights Reserved.

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Article contents

Self and identity.

• Sanaz Talaifar Sanaz Talaifar Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
•  and  William Swann William Swann Department of Psychology, University of Texas
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.242
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Active and stored mental representations of the self include both global and specific qualities as well as conscious and nonconscious qualities. Semantic and episodic memory both contribute to a self that is not a unitary construct comprising only the individual as he or she is now, but also past and possible selves. Self-knowledge may overlap more or less with others’ views of the self. Furthermore, mental representations of the self vary whether they are positive or negative, important, certain, and stable. The origins of the self are also manifold and can be considered from developmental, biological, intrapsychic, and interpersonal perspectives. The self is connected to core motives (e.g., coherence, agency, and communion) and is manifested in the form of both personal identities and social identities. Finally, just as the self is a product of proximal and distal social forces, it is also an agent that actively shapes its environment.

• self-concept
• self-representation
• self-knowledge
• self-perception
• self-esteem
• personal identity
• social identity

Introduction

The concept of the self has beguiled—and frustrated—psychologists and philosophers alike for generations. One of the greatest challenges has been coming to terms with the nature of the self. Every individual has a self, yet no two selves are the same. Some aspects of the self create a sense of commonality with others whereas other aspects of the self set it apart. The self usually provides a sense of consistency, a sense that there is some connection between who a person was yesterday and who they are today. And yet, the self is continually changing both as an individual ages and he or she traverses different social situations. A further conundrum is that the self acts as both subject and object; it does the knowing about itself. With so many complexities, coupled with the fact that people can neither see nor touch the self, the construct may take on an air of mysticism akin to the concept of the soul (Epstein, 1973 ).

Perhaps the most pressing, and basic, question psychologists must answer regarding the self is “What is it?” For the man whom many regard as the father of modern psychology, William James, the self was a source of continuity that gave individuals a sense of “connectedness” and “unbrokenness” ( 1890 , p. 335). James distinguished between two components of the self: the “I” and the “me” ( 1910 ). The “I” is the self as agent, thinker, and knower, the executive function that experiences and reacts to the world, constructing mental representations and memories as it does so (Swann & Buhrmester, 2012 ). James was skeptical that the “I” was amenable to scientific study, which has been borne out by the fact that far more attention has been accorded to the “me.” The “me” is the individual one recognizes as the self, which for James included a material, social, and spiritual self. The material self refers to one’s physical body and one’s physical possessions. The social self refers to the various selves one may express and others may recognize depending on the social setting. The spiritual self refers to the enduring core of one’s being, including one’s values, personality, beliefs about the self, etc.

This article focuses on the “me” that will be referred to interchangeably as either the “self” or “identity.” We define the self as a multifaceted, dynamic, and temporally continuous set of mental self-representations. These representations are multifaceted in the sense that different situations may evoke different aspects of the self at different times. They are dynamic in that they are subject to change in the form of elaborations, corrections, and reevaluations (Diehl, Youngblade, Hay, & Chui, 2011 ). This is true when researchers think of the self as a sort of scientific theory in which new evidence about the self from the environment leads to adjustments to one’s self-theory (Epstein, 1973 ; Gopnick, 2003 ). It is also true when researchers consider the self as a narrative that can be rewritten and revised (McAdams, 1996 ). Finally, self-representations are temporally continuous because even though they change, most people have a sense of being the same person over time. Further, these self-representations, whether conscious or not, are essential to psychological functioning, as they organize people’s perceptions of their traits, preferences, memories, experiences, and group memberships. Importantly, representations of the self also guide an individual’s behavior.

Some psychologists (e.g., behaviorists and more recently Brubaker & Cooper, 2000 ) have questioned the need to implicate a construct as nebulous as the self to explain behavior. Certainly an individual can perform many complex actions without invoking his or her self-representations. Nevertheless, psychologists increasingly regard the self as one of the most important constructs in all of psychology. For example, the percentage of self-related studies published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , increased fivefold between 1972 and 2002 (Swann & Seyle, 2005 ) and has continued to grow to this day. The importance of the self becomes evident when one considers the consequences of a sense of self that is interrupted, damaged, or absent. Epstein ( 1973 ) offers a case in point with an example of a schizophrenic girl meeting her psychiatrist:

Ruth, a five year old, approached the psychiatrist with “Are you the bogey man? Are you going to fight my mother? Are you the same mother? Are you the same father? Are you going to be another mother?” and finally screaming in terror, “I am afraid I am going to be someone else.” [Bender, 1950 , p. 135]

To provide a more commonplace example, children do not display several emotions we consider uniquely human, such as empathy and embarrassment, until after they have developed a sense of self-awareness (Lewis, Sullivan, Stanger, & Weiss, 1989 ). As Darwin has argued ( 1872 / 1965 ), emotions like embarrassment exist only after one has a developed a sense of self that can be the object of others’ attention.

The self’s importance also is evident when one considers that it is a pancultural phenomenon; all individuals have a sense of self regardless of where they are born. Though the content of self-representations may vary by cultural context, the existence of the self is universal. So too is the structure of the self. One of the most basic structural dimensions of the self involves whether the knowledge is active or stored.

Forms of Self-Knowledge

Active and stored self-knowledge.

Although i ndividuals accumulate immeasurable amounts of knowledge over their lifespans, at any given moment they can access only a portion of that knowledge. The aspects of self-knowledge held in consciousness make up “active self-knowledge.” Other terms for active self-knowledge are the working self-concept (Markus & Kunda, 1986 ), the spontaneous self-concept (McGuire, McGuire, Child, & Fujioka, 1978 ), and the phenomenal self (Jones & Gerard, 1967 ). On the other hand, “stored self-knowledge” is information held in memory that one can access and retrieve but is not currently held in consciousness. Because different features of the self are active versus stored at different times depending on the demands of the situation, the self can be quite malleable without eliciting feelings of inconsistency or inauthenticity (Swann, Bosson, & Pelham, 2002 ).

Semantic and Episodic Representations of Self-Knowledge

People possess both episodic and semantic representations of themselves (Klein & Loftus, 1993 ; Tulving, 1983 ). Episodic self-representations refer to “behavioral exemplars” or relatively brief “cartoons in the head” involving one’s past life and experiences. For philosopher John Locke, the self was built of episodic memory. For some researchers interested in memory and identity, episodic memory has been of particular interest because it is thought to involve re-experiencing events from one’s past, providing a person with content through which to construct a personal narrative (see, e.g., Eakin, 2008 ; Fivush & Haden, 2003 ; Klein, 2001 ; Klein & Gangi, 2010 ). Recall of these episodic instances happens together with the conscious awareness that the events actually occurred in one’s life (e.g., Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997 ).

Episodic self-knowledge may shed light on the individual’s traits or preferences and how he or she will or should act in the future, but some aspects of self-knowledge do not require recalling any specific experiences. Semantic self-knowledge involves memories at a higher level abstraction. These self-related memories are based on either facts (e.g., I am 39 years old) or traits and do not necessitate remembering a specific event or experience (Klein & Lax, 2010 ; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008 ). Thus, one may consider oneself intelligent (semantic self-knowledge) without recalling that he or she achieved stellar grades the previous term (episodic self-knowledge). In fact, Tulving ( 1972 ) suggested that the two types of knowledge may be structurally and functionally independent of each other. In support of this, case studies show that damage to the episodic self-knowledge system does not necessarily result in impairment of the semantic self-knowledge system. Evaluating semantic traits for self-descriptiveness is associated with activation in brain regions implicated in semantic, but not episodic, memory. In addition, priming a trait stored in semantic memory does not facilitate recall of corresponding episodic memories that exemplify the semantic self-knowledge (Klein, Loftus, Trafton, & Fuhrman, 1992 ). The tenuous relationship between episodic and semantic self-knowledge suggests that only a portion of semantic self-knowledge arises inductively from episodic self-knowledge (e.g., Kelley et al., 2002 ).

Recently some researchers have questioned the importance of memory’s role in creating a sense of identity. For example, at least when it comes to perceptions of others, people perceive a person’s identity to remain more intact after a neurodegenerative disease that affects their memory than one that affects their morality (Strohminger & Nichols, 2015 ).

Conscious and Nonconscious Self-Knowledge (Sometimes Confused With Explicit Versus Implicit)

Individuals may be conscious, or aware, of aspects of the self to varying degrees in different situations. Indeed sometimes it is adaptive to have self-awareness (Mandler, 1975 ) and other times it is not (Wegner, 2009 ). Nonconscious self-representations can influence behavior in that individuals may be unaware of the ways in which their self-representations affect their behavior (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995 ). Some researchers have even suggested that individuals can be unconscious of the contents of their self-representations (e.g., Devos & Banaji, 2003 ). It is important to remember that consciousness refers primarily to the level of awareness of a self-representation, rather than the automaticity of a given representation (i.e., whether the representation is retrieved in an unaware, unintentional, efficient, and uncontrolled manner) (Bargh, 1994 ).

A key ambiguity in recent work on implicit self-esteem is defining its criterial attributes. One view contends that the nonconscious and conscious self reflect fundamentally distinct knowledge systems that arise from different learning experiences and have independent effects on thought, emotion, and behavior (Epstein, 1994 ). Another perspective views the self as a singular construct that may nevertheless show diverging responses on direct and indirect measures of self due to factors such as the opportunity and motivation to control behavioral responses (Fazio & Twoles-Schwen, 1999 ). While indirect measures such as the Implicit Association Test do not require introspection and as a result may tap nonconscious representations, this is an assumption that should be supported with empirical evidence (Gawronski, Hofmann, & Wilbur, 2006 ).

Issues of direct and indirect measurement are a key consideration in research on the implicit and explicit self. Indirect measures of self allow researchers to infer an individual’s judgment about the self as a result of the speed or nature of their responses to stimuli that may be more or less self-related (De Houwer & Moors, 2010 ). Some researchers have argued that indirect measures of self-esteem are advantageous because they circumvent self-presentational issues (Farnham, Greenwald, & Banaji, 1999 ), but other researchers have questioned such claims (Gawronski, LeBel, & Peters, 2007 ) because self-presentational strivings can be automatized (Paulhus, 1993 ).

Recent findings have raised additional questions regarding the validity of some key assumptions regarding research inspired by interest in implicit self-esteem (for a more optimistic take on implicit self-esteem, see Dehart, Pelham, & Tennen, 2006 ). Although near-zero correlations between individuals’ scores on direct and indirect measures of self (e.g., Bosson, Swann, & Pennebaker, 2000 ) are often taken to mean that nonconscious and conscious self-representations are distinct, other factors, such as measurement error and lack of conceptual correspondence, can cause these low correlations (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Some researchers have also taken evidence of negligible associations between measures of implicit self-esteem and theoretically related outcomes to mean that such measures may not measure self-esteem at all (Buhrmester, Blanton, & Swann, 2011 ). A prudent strategy is thus to consider that indirect measures reflect an activation of associations between the self and other stimuli in memory and that these associations do not require conscious validation of the association as accurate or inaccurate (Gawronski et al., 2007 ). Direct measures, on the other hand, do require validation processes (Strack & Deutsch, 2004 ; Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ).

Global and Specific Self-Knowledge

Self-views vary in scope (Hampson, John, & Goldberg, 1987 ). Global self-representations are generalized beliefs about the self (e.g., I am a worthwhile person) while specific self-representations pertain to a narrow domain (e.g., I am a nimble tennis player). Self-views can fall anywhere on a continuum between these two extremes. Generalized self-esteem may be thought of as a global self-representation at the top of a hierarchy with individual self-concepts nested underneath in specific domains such as academic, physical, and social (Marsh, 1986 ). Individual self-concepts, measured separately, combine statistically to form a superordinate global self-esteem factor (Marsh & Hattie, 1996 ). When trying to predict behavior it is important not to use a specific self-representation to predict a global behavior or a global self-representation to predict a specific behavior (e.g., Donnellan, Trzesniewski, Robins, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2005 ; Swann, Chang-Schneider, & McClarty, 2007 ; Trzesniewski et al., 2006 ).

Actual, Possible, Ideal, and Ought Selves

The self does not just include who a person is in the present but also includes past and future iterations of the self. In addition, people tend to hold “ought” or “ideal” beliefs about the self. The former includes one’s beliefs about who they should be according to their own and others’ standards while the latter includes beliefs about who they would like to be (Higgins, 1987 ). In a related vein, possible selves are the future-oriented positive or negative aspects of the self-concept, selves that one hopes to become or fears becoming (Markus & Nurius, 1986 ). Some research has even shown that distance between one’s feared self and actual self is a stronger predictor of life satisfaction than proximity between one’s ideal self and actual self (Ogilvie, 1987 ). Possible selves vary in how far in the future they are, how detailed they are, and how likely they are to become an actual self (Oyserman & James, 2008 ). Many researchers have studied the content of possible selves, which can be as idiosyncratic as a person’s imagination is. The method used to measure possible selves (close-ended versus open-ended questions) will affect which possible selves are revealed (Lee & Oyserman, 2009 ). The content of possible selves is also socially and contextually grounded. For example, as a person ages, career-focused possible selves become less important while health-related possible selves become increasingly important (Cross & Markus, 1991 ; Frazier, Hooker, Johnson, & Kaus, 2000 ).

Researchers have been interested in not just the content but the function of possible selves. Thinking about successful possible selves is mood enhancing (King, 2001 ) because it is a reminder that the current self can be improved. In addition, possible selves may play a role in self-regulation. By linking present and future selves, they may promote desired possible selves and avoid feared possible selves. Possible selves may be in competition with each other and with a person’s actual self. For example, someone may envision one possible self as an artist and another possible self as an airline pilot, and each of these possible selves might require the person to take different actions in the present moment. Goal striving requires employing limited resources and attention, so working toward one possible self may require shifting attention and resources away from another possible self (Fishbach, Dhar, & Zhang, 2006 ). Possible selves may have other implications as well. For example, Alesina and La Ferrara ( 2005 ) show how expected future income affects a person’s preferences for economic redistribution in the present.

Accuracy of Self-Knowledge and Feelings of Authenticity

Most individuals have had at least one encounter with an individual whose self-perception seemed at odds with “reality.” Perhaps it is a friend who believes himself to be a skilled singer but cannot understand why everyone within earshot grimaces when he starts singing. Or the boss who believes herself to be an inspiring leader but cannot motivate her workers. One potential explanation for inaccurate self-views is a disjunction between episodic and semantic memories; the image of grimacing listeners (episodic memory) may be quite independent of the conviction that one is a skilled singer (semantic memory). Of course, if self-knowledge is too disjunctive with reality it ceases to be adaptive; self-views must be moderately accurate to be useful in allowing people to predict and navigate their worlds. That said, some researchers have questioned the desirability of accurate self-views. For example, Taylor and Brown ( 1988 ) have argued that positive illusions about the self promote mental health. Similarly, Von Hippel and Trivers ( 2011 ) have argued that certain kinds of optimistic biases about the self are adaptive because they allow people to display more confidence than is warranted, consequently allowing them to reap the social rewards of that confidence.

Studying the accuracy of self-knowledge is challenging because objective criteria are often scarce. Put another way, there are only two vantage points from which to assess a person: self-perception and the other’s perception of the self. This is true even of supposedly “objective” measures of the self. An IQ test is still a measure of intelligence from the vantage point of the people who developed the test. Both vantage points can be subject to error. For example, self-perceptions may be biased to protect one’s self-image or due to self-comparison to an inappropriate referent. Others’ perceptions may be biased because of a lack of cross-situational information about the person in question or lack of insight into that person’s motives. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of each vantage point, self-reports may be better for assessing some traits (e.g., those low in observability, like neuroticism) while informant reports may be better for others (such as traits high in observability, like extraversion) (Vazire, 2010 ).

Furthermore, self-perceptions and others’ perceptions of the self may overlap to varying degrees. The “Johari window” provides a useful way of thinking about this (Luft & Ingham, 1955 ). The window’s first quadrant consists of things one knows about oneself that others also know about the self (arena). The second quadrant includes knowledge one has about the self that others do not have (façade). The third quadrant consists of knowledge one does not have about the self but others do have (blindspot). The fourth quadrant consists of information about the self that is not known to oneself or to others (unknown).

Which of these quadrants contains the “true self”? If I believe myself to be kind, but others do not, who is right? Which is a reflection of the “real me”? One set of attempts to answer this question has focused on perceptions of authenticity. The authentic self (Johnson & Boyd, 1995 ) is alternatively termed the “true self” (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014 ), “real self” (Rogers, 1961 ), “intrinsic self” (Schimel, Arndt, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2001 ), “essential self” (Strohminger & Nichols, 2014 ), or “deep self” (Sripada, 2010 ). Recent research has addressed both what aspects of the self other people describe as belonging to a person’s true self and how individuals judge their own authenticity.

Though authenticity has long been the subject of philosophical thought, only recently have researchers begun addressing the topic empirically, and definitional ambiguities abound (Knoll, Meyer, Kroemer, & Schroeder-Abe, 2015 ). Some studies use unidimensional measures that equate authenticity to feeling close to one’s true self (e.g., Harter, Waters, & Whitesell, 1997 ). A more elaborate and philosophically grounded approach proposes four necessary factors for trait authenticity: awareness (the extent of one’s self-knowledge, motivation to expand it, and ability to trust in it), unbiased processing (the relative absence of interpretative distortions in processing self-relevant information), behavior (acting consistently with one’s needs, preferences, and values), and relational orientation (valuing and achieving openness in close relationships) (Kernis, 2003 ). Authenticity is related to feelings of self-alienation (Gino, Norton, & Ariely, 2010 ). Being authentic is also sometimes thought to be equivalent to low self-monitoring (Snyder & Gangestad, 1982 )— someone who does not alter his or her behavior to accommodate changing social situations (Grant, 2016 ). Authenticity and self-monitoring, however, are orthogonal constructs; being sensitive to environmental cues can be compatible with acting in line with one’s true self.

Although some have argued that the ability to behave in a way that contradicts one’s feelings and mental states is a developmental accomplishment (Harter, Marold, Whitesell, & Cobbs, 1996 ), feelings of authenticity have been associated with many positive outcomes such as positive self-esteem, positive affect, and well-being (Goldman & Kernis, 2002 ; Wood, Linley, Maltby, Baliousis, & Joseph, 2008 ). One interesting line of research examines the interaction of authenticity, power, and well-being. Power can increase feelings of authenticity in social interactions (Kraus, Chen, & Keltner, 2011 ), and that increased authenticity in turn can result in higher well-being (Kifer, Heller, Peruvonic, & Galinsky, 2013 ). Another line of research examines the relationship between beliefs about authenticity (at least in the West) and morality. Gino, Kouchaki, and Galinsky ( 2015 ) suggest that dishonesty and inauthenticity share a similar source: dishonesty involves being untrue to others while inauthenticity involves being untrue to the self.

Metacognitive Aspects of Self

Valence and importance of self-views.

Self-knowledge may be positively or negatively valenced. Having more positive self-views and fewer negative ones are associated with having higher self-esteem (Brown, 1986 ). Both bottom-up and top-down theories have been used to explain this association. The bottom-up approach posits that the valence of specific self-knowledge drives the valence of one’s global self-views (e.g., Marsh, 1990 ). In this view, someone who has more positive self-views in specific domains (e.g., I am intelligent and attractive) should be more likely to develop high self-esteem overall (e.g., I am worthwhile). In contrast, the top-down perspective holds that the valence of global self-views drive the valence of specific self-views such that someone who thinks they are a worthwhile person is more likely to view him or herself as attractive and intelligent (e.g., Brown, Dutton, & Cook, 2001 ). The reasoning is grounded in the view that global self-esteem develops quite early in life and thus determines the later development of domain-specific self-views.

A domain-specific self-view can vary not only in its valence but also in its importance. Domain-specific self-views that one believes are important are more likely to affect global self-esteem than those self-views that one considers unimportant (Pelham, 1995 ; Pelham & Swann, 1989 ). As James wrote, “I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 310). Of course not all self-views matter to the same extent for all people. A professor of Greek studies is likely to place a great deal of importance on his knowledge of Greek. Furthermore, changes to features that are perceived to be more causally central than others are believed to be more disruptive to identity (Chen, Urminsky, & Bartels, 2016 ). Individuals try to protect their important self-views by, for example, surrounding themselves with people and environments who confirm those important self-views (Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ) or distancing themselves from close friends who outperform them in these areas (Tesser, 1988 ).

Certainty and Clarity of Self-Views

Individuals may feel more or less certain about some self-views as compared to others. And just as they are motivated to protect important self-views, people are also motivated to protect the self-views of which they are certain. People are more likely to seek (Pelham, 1991 ) and receive (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ) feedback consistent with self-views that are highly certain than those about which they feel less certain. They also actively resist challenges to highly certain self-views (Swann & Ely, 1984 ).

Another construct related to certainty is self-concept clarity. Not only are people with high self-concept clarity confident and certain of their self-views, they also are clear, internally consistent, and stable in their convictions about who they are (Campbell et al., 1996 ). The causes of low self-concept clarity have been theorized to be due to a discrepancy between one’s current self-views and the social feedback one has received in childhood (Streamer & Seery, 2015 ). Both high self-concept certainty and self-concept clarity are associated with higher self-esteem (Campbell, 1990 ).

Stability of Self-Views

The self is constantly accommodating, assimilating, and immunizing itself against new self-relevant information (Diehl et al., 2011 ). In the end, the self may remain stable (i.e., spatio-temporally continuous; Parfit, 1971 ) in at least two ways. First, the self may be stable in one’s absolute position on a scale. Second, there may be stability in one’s rank ordering within a group of related others (Hampson & Goldberg, 2006 ).

The question of the self’s stability can only be answered in the context of a specified time horizon. For example, like personality traits, self-views may not be particularly good predictors of behavior at a given time slice (perhaps an indication of the self’s instability) but are good predictors of behavior over the long term (Epstein, 1979 ). Similarly, more than others, some people experience frequent, transient changes in state self-esteem (Kernis, Cornell, Sun, Berry, & Harlow, 1993 ). Furthermore, there is a difference between how people perceive the stability of their self-views and the actual stability of their self-knowledge. Though previous research has explored the benefits of perceived self-esteem stability (e.g., Kernis, Paradise, Whitaker, Wheatman, & Goldman, 2000 ; Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989 ), a recent program of research on fixed versus growth mindsets explores the benefits of the malleability of self-views in a variety of domains (Dweck, 1999 , 2006 ). For example, teaching adolescents to have a more malleable (i.e., incremental) theory of personality that “people change” led them to react less negatively to an immediate experience of social adversity, have lower overall stress and physical illness eight months later, and better academic performance over the school year (Yeager et al., 2014 ). Thus, believing that the self can be unstable can have positive effects in that one negative social interaction, or an instance of poor performance is not an indication that the self will always be that way, and this may, in turn, increase effort and persistence.

Organization of Self-Views

Though we have already touched on some aspects of the organization of self (e.g., specific self-views nested within global self-views), it is important to consider other aspects of organization including the fact that some self-views may be more assimilated within each other. Integration refers to the tendency to store both positive and negative self-views together, and is thought to promote resilience in the face of stress or adversity (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2007 ). Compartmentalization refers to the tendency to store positive and negative self-views separately. But both integration and compartmentalization can have positive and negative consequences and can interact with other metacognitive aspects of the self, like importance. For example, compartmentalization has been associated with higher self-esteem and less depression among people for whom positive components of the self are important (Showers, 1992 ). On the other hand, for those whose negative self-views are important, compartmentalization has been associated with lower self-esteem and higher depression.

Origins and Development of the Self

Developmental approaches.

Psychologists have long been interested in when and how infants develop a sense of self. One very basic question is whether selfhood in infancy is comparable to selfhood in adulthood. The answer depends on definitions of selfhood. For example, some researchers have measured and defined selfhood in infants as the ability to self-regulate and self-organize, which even animals can do. This definition bears little resemblance to selfhood in adulthood. Nativist and constructivist debates within developmental psychology (and language development in particular) that grapple with the problem of the origins of knowledge also have implications for understanding origins of the self. A nativist account (e.g., Chomsky, 1975 ) that considers the human mind to be innately constrained to formulate a very small set of representations would suggest that the mind is designed to develop a self. Information from the environment may form specific self-representations, but a nativist account would posit that the structure of the self is intrinsic. A constructivist account would reject the notion that there are not enough environmental stimuli to explain the development of a construct like the self unless one invokes a specific innate cognitive structure. Rather, constructivists might suggest that a child develops a theory of self in the same way scientific theories are developed (Gopnik, 2003 ).

Because infants and children cannot self-report their mental states as adults can, psychologists must use other methods to study the self in childhood. One method involves studying the development of children’s use of the personal pronouns “me,” “mine,” and “I” (Harter, 1983 ; Hobson, 1990 ). Another method that is used cross-culturally, mirror self-recognition (Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979 ; Lewis & Ramsay, 2004 ), has been associated with brain maturation (Lewis, 2003 ) and myelination of the left temporal region (Carmody & Lewis, 2006 , 2010 ; Lewis & Carmody, 2008 ). Pretend play, which occurs between 15 and 24 months, is an indication that the self is developing because it requires the toddler’s ability to understand its own and others’ mental states (Lewis, 2011 ). The development of self-esteem has also historically been difficult to study due to a lack of self-esteem measures that can be used across the lifespan. Recently, psychologists have developed a lifespan self-esteem scale (Harris, Donnellan, & Trzesniewski, 2017 ) suitable for measuring global self-esteem from ages 5 to 93.

The development of theory of mind, the understanding that others have minds separate from one’s own, is also closely related to the development of the self. For example, people cannot make social comparisons until they have developed the required cognitive abilities, usually by middle childhood (Harter, 1999 ; Ruble, Boggiano, Feldman, & Loebl, 1980 ). Finally, developmental psychology is also useful in understanding the self beyond childhood and into adolescence and beyond. Adolescence is a time where goals of autonomy from parents and other adults become particularly salient (Bryan et al., 2016 ), adolescents experiment with different identities to see which fit best, and many long-term goals and personal aspirations are established (Crone & Dahl, 2012 ).

Biological Approaches

Biological approaches to understanding the origins of the self consider neurological, genetic, and hormonal underpinnings. These biological underpinnings are likely evolutionarily driven (Penke, Denissen, & Miller, 2007 ). Neuroscientists have debated the extent to which self-knowledge is “special,” or processed differently than other kinds of knowledge. What is clear is that no brain region by itself is responsible for our sense of self, but different aspects of the self-knowledge may be associated with different brain regions. Furthermore, the same region that is implicated in self-related processing can also be implicated in other types of processing (Ochsner et al., 2005 ; Saxe, Moran, Scholz, & Gabrieli, 2006 ). Specifically, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) have been associated with self-related processing (Northoff Heinzel, De Greck, Bermpohl, Dobrowolny, & Panksepp, 2006 ). But meta-analyses have found that the mPFC and PCC are recruited during the processing of both self-specific and familiar stimuli more generally (e.g., familiar others) (Qin & Northoff, 2011 ).

Twin studies of personality traits can shed light on the genetic bases of self. For example, genes account for about 40% to 60% of the population variance in self-reports of the Big Five personality factors (for a review, see Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001 ). Self-esteem levels also seem to be heritable, with 30–50% of population variance accounted for by genes (Kamakura, Ando, & Ono, 2007 ; Kendler, Gardner, & Prescott, 1998 ).

Finally, hormones are unlikely to be a cause of the self but may affect the expression of the self. For example, testosterone and cortisol levels interact with personality traits to predict different levels of aggression (Tackett et al., 2015 ). Differences in levels of and in utero exposure to certain hormones also affect gender identity (Berenbaum & Beltz, 2011 ; Reiner & Gearhart, 2004 ).

Intrapsychic Approaches

Internal processes, including self-perception and introspection, also influence the development of the self. One of the most obvious ways to develop knowledge about the self (especially when existing self-knowledge is weak) is to observe one’s own behavior across different situations and then make inferences about the aspects of the self that may have caused those behaviors (Bem, 1972 ). And just as judgments about others’ attributes are less certain when multiple possible causes exist for a given behavior, the same is true of one’s own behaviors and the amount of information they yield about the self (Kelley, 1971 ).

Conversely, introspection involves understanding the self from the inside outward rather than from the outside in. Though surprisingly little thought (only 8%) is expended on self-reflection (Csikszentmihalyi & Figurski, 1982 ), people buttress self-knowledge through introspection. For example, contemporary psychoanalysis can increase self-knowledge, even though an increase in self-knowledge on its own is unlikely to have therapeutic effects (Reppen, 2013 ). Writing is one form of introspection that does have psychological and physical therapeutic benefits (Pennebaker, 1997 ). Research shows that brief writing exercises can result in fewer physician visits (e.g., Francis & Pennebaker, 1992 ), and depressive episodes (Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, & Glaser, 1988 ), better immune function (e.g., Esterling, Kiecolt-Glaser, Bodnar, & Glaser, 1994 ), and higher grade point average (e.g., Cameron & Nicholls, 1998 ) and many other positive outcomes.

Experiencing the “subjective self” is yet another way that individuals gain self-knowledge. Unlike introspection, experiencing the subjective self involves outward engagement, a full engagement in the moment that draws attention away from the self (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ). Being attentive to one’s emotions and thoughts in the moment can reveal much about one’s preferences and values. Apparently, people rely more on their subjective experiences than on their overt behaviors when constructing self-knowledge (Andersen, 1984 ; Andersen & Ross, 1984 ).

Interpersonal Approaches

At the risk of stating the obvious, humans are social animals and thus the self is rarely cut off from others. In fact, many individuals would rather give themselves a mild electric shock than be alone with their thoughts (Wilson et al., 2014 ). The myth of finding oneself by eschewing society is dubious, and one of the most famous proponents of this tradition, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, actually regularly entertained visitors during his supposed seclusion at Walden (Schulz, 2015 ). As early as infancy, the reactions of others can lay the foundation for one’s self-views. Attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969 ; Hazan & Shaver, 1994 ) holds that children’s earliest interactions with their caregivers lead them to formulate schemas about their lovability and worth. This occurs outside of the infant’s awareness, and the schemas are based on the consistency and responsiveness of the care they receive. Highly consistent responsiveness to the infant’s needs provide the basis for the infant to develop feelings of self-worth (i.e., high global self-esteem) later in life. Though the mechanisms by which this occur are still being investigated, it may be that self-schemas developed during infancy provide the lens through which people interpret others’ reactions to them (e.g., Hazan & Shaver, 1987 ). Note, however, that early attachment relationships are in no way deterministic: 30–45% of people change their attachment style (i.e., their pattern of relating to others) across time (e.g., Cozzarelli, Karafa, Collins, & Tagler, 2003 ).

Early attachment relationships provide a working model for how an individual expects to be treated, which is associated with perceptions of self-worth. But others’ appraisals of the self are also a more direct source of self-knowledge. An extremely influential line of thought from sociology, symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902 ; Mead, 1934 ), emphasized the component of the self that James referred to as the social self. He wrote, “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” ( 1890 / 1950 , p. 294). The symbolic interactionists proposed that people come to know themselves not through introspection but rather through others’ reactions and perceptions of them. This “looking glass self” sees itself as others do (Yeung & Martin, 2003 ). People’s inferences about how others view them become internalized and guide their behavior. Thus the self is created socially and is sustained cyclically.

Research shows, however, that reflected appraisals may not tell the whole story. While it is clear that people’s self-views correlate strongly with how they believe others see them, self-views are not necessarily perfectly correlated with how people actually view them (Shrauger & Schoeneman, 1979 ). Further, people’s self-views may inform how they believe others see them rather than the other way around (Kenny & DePaulo, 1993 ). Lastly, individuals are better at knowing how people see them in general rather than knowing how specific others view them (Kenny & Albright, 1987 ).

Though others’ perceptions of the self are not an individual’s only source of self-knowledge, they are an important source, and in more than one way. For example, others’ provide a reference point for “social comparison.” According to Festinger’s social comparison theory ( 1954 ), people compare their own traits, preferences, abilities, and emotions to those of similar others, making both upward and downward comparisons. These comparisons tend to happen spontaneously and effortlessly. The direction of the comparison influences how one views and feels about the self. For example, comparing the self to someone worse off boosts self-esteem (e.g., Helgeson & Mickelson, 1995 ; Marsh & Parker, 1984 ). In addition to increasing self-knowledge, social comparisons are also motivating. For instance, those undergoing difficult or painful life events can cope better when they make downward comparisons (Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985 ). When motivated to improve the self in a given domain, however, people may make upward comparisons to idealized others (Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, & Kuyper, 1999 ). Sometimes individuals make comparisons to inappropriate others, but they have the ability (with mental effort) to undo the changes made to the self-concept as a result of this comparison (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995 ).

Others can influence the self not only through interactions and comparisons but also when an individual becomes very close to a significant other. In this case, according to self-expansion theory (Aron & Aron, 1996 ), as intimacy increases, people experience cognitive overlap between the self and the significant other. People can acquire novel self-knowledge as they subsume attributes of the close other into the self.

Finally, the origins and development of the self are interpersonally influenced to the extent that our identities are dependent on the social roles we occupy (e.g., as mother, student, friend, professional, etc.). This will be covered in greater detail in the section on “The Social Self.” Here it is important simply to recognize that as the social roles of an individual inevitably change over time, so too does their identity.

Cultural Approaches

Markus and Kitayama’s seminal paper ( 1991 ) on differences in expression of the self in Eastern and Western cultures spawned an incredible amount of work investigating the importance of culture on self-construals. Building on the foundational work of Triandis ( 1989 ) and others, this work proposed that people in Western cultures see themselves as autonomous individuals who value independence and uniqueness more so than connectedness and harmony with others. In contrast to this individualism, people in the East were thought to be more collectivist, valuing interdependence and fitting in. However, the theoretical relationship between self-construals and the continuous individualism-collectivism variable have been treated in several different ways in the literature. Some have described individualism and collectivism as the origins of differences in self-construals (e.g., Gudykunst et al., 1996 ; Kim, Aune, Hunter, Kim, & Kim, 2001 ; Singelis & Brown, 1995 ). Others have considered self-construals as synonymous with individualism and collectivism (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002 ; Taras et al., 2014 ) or have used individualism-collectivism at the individual level as an analog of the variable at the cultural level (Smith, 2011 ).

However, in contrast to perspectives that treat individualism and collectivism as a unidimensional variable (e.g., Singelis, 1994 ), individualism and collectivism have also been theorized to be multifaceted “cultural syndromes” that include normative beliefs, values, and practices, as well as self-construals (Brewer & Chen, 2007 ; Triandis, 1993 ). In this view, there are many ways of being independent or collectivistic depending on the domain of functioning under consideration. For example, a person may be independent or interdependent when defining the self, experiencing the self, making decisions, looking after the self, moving between contexts, communicating with others, or dealing with conflicting interests (Vignoles et al., 2016 ). These domains of functioning are orthogonal such that being interdependent in one domain does not require being interdependent in another. This multidimensional picture of individual differences in individualism and collectivism is actually more similar to Markus and Kitayama’s ( 1991 ) initial treatment aiming to emphasize cultural diversity and contradicts the prevalent unidimensional approach to cultural differences that followed.

Recent research has pointed out other shortcomings of this dichotomous approach. There is a great deal of heterogeneity among the world’s cultures, so simplifying all culture to “Eastern” and “Western” or collectivistic versus individualistic types may be invalid. Vignoles and colleagues’ ( 2016 ) study of 16 nations supports this. They found that neither a contrast between Western and non-Western, nor between individualistic and collectivistic cultures, sufficiently captured the complexity of cross-cultural differences in selfhood. They conclude that “it is not useful to characterize any culture as ‘independent’ or ‘interdependent’ in a general sense” and rather advocate for research that identifies what kinds of independence and interdependence may be present in different contexts ( 2016 , p. 991). In addition, there is a great deal of within culture heterogeneity in self-construals For example, even within an individualistic, Western culture like the United States, working-class people and ethnic minorities tend to be more interdependent (Markus, 2017 ), tempering the geographically based generalizations one might draw about self-construals.

Another line of recent research on the self in cultural context that has explored self-construals beyond the East-West dichotomy is the study of multiculturalism and individuals who are a member of multiple cultural groups (Benet-Martinez & Hong, 2014 ). People may relate to each of the cultures to which they belong in different ways, and this may in turn have important effects. For example, categorization, which involves viewing one cultural identity as dominant over the others, is associated positively with well-being but negatively with personal growth (Yampolsky, Amiot, & de la Sablonnière, 2013 ). Integration involves cohesively connecting multiple cultures within the self while compartmentalization requires keeping one’s various cultures isolated because they are seen to be in opposition. Each of these strategies has different consequences.

Finally, the influence of religion remains significant in many parts of the world (Georgas, van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004 ; Inglehart & Baker, 2000 ), and so religion is also an important source of differences in self-construal. These religious traditions provide answers to the question of how the self should relate to others. For example, Buddhism emphasizes the interdependence of all things and thus agency does not necessarily reside in individual actors. Moreover, for Buddhists the boundaries between the self and the other are insignificant, and in fact the self is thought to be impermanent (see Garfield, Nichols, Rai, Nichols, & Strohminger, 2015 ).

Motivational Properties of the Self

Need for communion, agency, and coherence.

Understanding what motivates people is one of social psychology’s core questions, and a variety of motives have been proposed. Three motives that are particularly important to self-processes are the need for communion (belonging and interpersonal connectedness), the need for agency (autonomy and competence), and the need for coherence (patterns and regularities). The needs for communion and agency are the foundations of many aspects of social behavior (Baumeister & Leary, 1995 ; Wiggins & Broughton, 1991 ). Among attitude researchers, constructs similar to communion and agency (i.e., warmth and competence) represent the two basic dimensions of attitudes (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2007 ; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Judd, James-Hawkins, Yzerbyt, & Kashima, 2005 ). Of even more relevance to the self, communion and agency correspond with the dual forms of self-esteem (e.g., Franks & Marolla, 1976 ; Gecas, 1971 ). That is, self-esteem can be broken down into two components: self-liking and self-competence (Tafarodi & Swann, 2001 ). Self-competence is an evaluation of one’s ability to bring about a desired outcome while the need for communion is an evaluation of one’s goodness, worth, and lovability. Each of these dimensions of self-esteem predicts unique outcomes (e.g., Bosson & Swann, 1999 ; Tafarodi & Vu, 1997 ).

Those who do not fulfill their communion needs have poorer physical outcomes such as relatively poor physical health, weakened immune functioning, and higher mortality rates (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988 ; Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996 ). As far as psychological outcomes, people who lack positive connections with others also experience greater loneliness (Archibald, Bartholomew, & Marx, 1995 ; Newcomb & Bentler, 1986 ), while those with rich social networks report higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction (Diener, Suh, Lucas, & Smith, 1999 ). People’s sense of autonomy also contributes to psychological well-being (Ryff, 1989 ) and encourages people to strive for high performance in domains they care about. Autonomy strivings can also be beneficial in that they contribute to people’s need for self-growth (e.g., Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 2001 ; Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995 ).

Finally, a great deal of support exists for the notion that people have a fundamental need for psychological coherence or the need for regularity, predictability, meaning, and control (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006 ). Coherence is a distinct from consistency because it refers specifically to the consistency between a person’s enduring self-views and the other aspects of their psychological universe (English, Chen, & Swann, 2008 ). The coherence motive may be even more basic than the needs for communion and agency (Guidano & Liotti, 1983 ; Popper, 1963 ). That is, self-views serve as the lenses through which people perceive reality, and incoherence degrades the vision of reality that these lenses offer.

When people feel that their self-knowledge base is incoherent, they may not know how to act, and guiding action is thought to be the primary purpose of thinking in the first place (James, 1890 / 1950 ).

Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification Motives

Drawing on Prescott Lecky’s ( 1945 ) proposition that chronic self-views give people a strong sense of coherence, self-verification theory posits that people desire to be seen as they see themselves, even if their self-views are negative. Self-views can guide at least three stages of information processing: attention, recall, and interpretation. In addition, people act on the preference for self-confirmatory evaluations ensuring that their experiences reinforce their self-views. For example, just as those who see themselves as likable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them positively, so too do people who see themselves as dislikable seek out and embrace others who evaluate them negatively (e.g., Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989 ). The theory suggests that people both enter and leave relationships that fail to satisfy their self-verification strivings (Swann, De La Ronde, & Hixon, 1994 ), even divorcing people who they believe have overly positive appraisals of them (for a review, see Kwang & Swann, 2010 ). People may also communicate their identities visually through “identity cues” that enable others to understand and react accordingly to that identity (Gosling, 2008 ). People seek verification of their specific as well as global (self-views). They are especially inclined to seek self-verifying evaluations for self-views that are certain or important (Pelham & Swann, 1994 ; Swann & Pelham, 2002 ).

For the 70% of individuals with globally positive self-views (e.g., Diener & Diener, 1995 ), self-verification may look like self-enhancement strivings (Brown, 1986 ) in that it will compel people to seek and prefer positive feedback about the self. In fact, even people with negative self-views tend to self-enhance when they do not have the cognitive resources available to reflect on their self-views and compare it to the feedback available (Swann, Hixon, Stein-Seroussi, & Gilbert, 1990 ). In addition, people have a tendency to self-enhance before they self-verify (Swann et al., 1990 ). Other evidence for self-enhancement includes the tendency for people to view themselves as better than average, though this may be most likely for ambiguous traits that can describe a wide variety of behaviors because the evidence that people use to make self-evaluations is idiosyncratic (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ).

It is important to remember in discussions of self-verification and self-enhancement that people do not seek to see themselves as they actually are but rather as they see themselves . As mentioned in the section on accuracy, this self-view may overlap to varying degrees with “reality” or others’ perceptions of the self.

The Social Self

Identity negotiation.

People’s self-views influence the kinds of relationships they will engage in, and people can take on numerous identities depending on the situation and relationship. Identity negotiation theory (Swann & Bosson, 2008 ) suggests that relationship partners establish “who is who” via ongoing, mutual, and reciprocal interactions. Once people establish a “working consensus” for what roles each person will take in the relationship (e.g., Swann & Bosson, 2008 ), their agreed-upon expectations help disconnected individuals collaborate toward common obligations and goals, with some commitment to each other. Identity negotiation processes help define relationships and serve as a foundation for organized social activity. The identities that people negotiate tend to align with their chronic self-views. People follow these identity-negotiating processes, albeit largely unintentionally, during each of several successive stages of social interaction. Identities only survive to the extent that they are nourished and confirmed by the social environment, so negotiating identities in relationships is one way an individual ensures the survival of their self-views.

Personal and Social Self-Knowledge

Researchers have historically distinguished between two types of identity: personal and social. Personal identity refers to those features of the self that distinguish us from others while social identity refers to features of the self that are a source of commonality with others, such as group memberships. Once formed, social identities have a powerful influence on thought and behavior (Tajfel, 1981 ; Tajfel & Turner, 1979 ). Social category memberships can influence a person’s self-definition as much or more than idiosyncratic personal attributes (Ray, Mackie, Rydell, & Smith, 2008 ). One version of social identity theory posits that people enter groups that they view as both positive and distinctive to bolster their self-views (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1988 ). Evidence shows that people display a strong ingroup bias, or tendency to favor their own group relative to outgroups (e.g., Brewer & Kramer, 1985 ; Tajfel, Billig, Bundy, & Flament, 1971 ). This bias, along with the outgroup homogeneity effect whereby people see outgroup members as more similar than ingroup members (Linville & Jones, 1980 ) facilitates people’s ability to dehumanize members of outgroups. Dehumanization, perceiving a person as lacking in human qualities, then allows for the justification and maintenance of intergroup prejudice and conflict (Cortes, Demoulin, Rodriguez, Rodriguez, & Leyens, 2005 ; Vaes, Paladino, Castelli, Leyens, & Giovanazzi, 2003 ).

Self-categorization theory, in contrast to emphasizing motivation as in social identity theory, stresses the perceptual processes that lead humans to categorize the world into “us” and “them” (Turner, 1985 ; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987 ). Other approaches argue that social identities reduce uncertainty (e.g., Hogg, 2007 , 2012 ), make the world more coherent (e.g., Ellemers & Van Knippenberg, 1997 ), or protect people from the fear of death (Castano, Yzerbyt, Paladino, & Sacchi, 2002 ). Though these approaches emphasize cognitive aspects of group membership, group-related emotions are also an important component of social identity. For instance, intergroup emotions theory proposes that a person’s emotional reactions toward other social groups can change in response to situationally induced shifts in self-categorization (Mackie, Maitner, & Smith, 2009 ).

Whatever the nature of the motive that causes people to identify with groups, although group memberships are critical for survival, they can also place people in grave danger when they motivate extreme action on behalf of the group. Research on identity fusion, which occurs when the boundaries between one’s personal and social identities become porous, shows how strong alignment with a group can lead to fighting and dying for that group at great personal cost (Whitehouse, McQuinn, Buhrmester, & Swann, 2014 ). This occurs when people come to view members of their social group as family (Swann et al., 2014 ).

Some research has investigated how personal and social identities are cognitively structured (Reid & Deaux, 1996 ). The segregation model of identity assumes that social and personal attributes are distinct (Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991 ) while the integration model suggests that identities and attributes coexist in a limited set of cognitive structures. Deaux, Reid, Mizrahi, and Cotting ( 1999 ) suggest that what constitutes social versus personal identity should not be determined by the attribute itself but rather the function it is serving (i.e., connecting the self to other people or distinguishing the self from other people). Similarly, optimal distinctiveness theory (Brewer, 1991 ) argues that individuals have an inherent drive to identity with groups but an equally important drive to maintain their individuality. To cope, they strive to find a balance between these opposing forces by finding an identity that supports both the individual’s need for autonomy and affiliation.

For most people, gender and ethnicity are important social identities, and there is variation in the strength of people’s identification with these groups (Luhtanen & Crocker, 1992 ). In terms of how gender affects the expression of the self, girls are often socialized to prioritize the qualities that align them to others, while boys are taught to prioritize the qualities that distinguish and differentiate them from others (e.g., Spence, Deaux, & Helmreich, 1985 ). Moreover, women’s self-esteem tends to be connected more to their relational qualities, while men’s self-esteem is linked to their independent qualities (Josephs, Markus, & Tafarodi, 1992 ).

Though society has made great strides in allowing men and women to embrace identities of their own choosing (e.g., Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2004 ), traditional social expectations about what it means to be a man or a women persist. For example, gender stereotypes have remained constant over the past thirty years even as women have made significant professional and political gains (Haines, Deaux, & Lofaro, 2016 ). These stereotypes remain entrenched for men as well. England ( 2010 ) argues that for the gender revolution to be complete, not only should traditionally male professions and domains be open to women but traditionally female domains should be increasingly occupied by men. This would help move society closer to attaining gender equality while signaling that traditionally female-dominated roles are equally valued.

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Harvard Style Bibliography | Format & Examples

Published on 1 May 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on 7 November 2022.

In Harvard style , the bibliography or reference list provides full references for the sources you used in your writing.

• A reference list consists of entries corresponding to your in-text citations .
• A bibliography sometimes also lists sources that you consulted for background research, but did not cite in your text.

The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. If in doubt about which to include, check with your instructor or department.

The information you include in a reference varies depending on the type of source, but it usually includes the author, date, and title of the work, followed by details of where it was published. You can automatically generate accurate references using our free reference generator:

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Table of contents

Formatting a harvard style bibliography, harvard reference examples, referencing sources with multiple authors, referencing sources with missing information, frequently asked questions about harvard bibliographies.

Sources are alphabetised by author last name. The heading ‘Reference list’ or ‘Bibliography’ appears at the top.

Each new source appears on a new line, and when an entry for a single source extends onto a second line, a hanging indent is used:

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

Reference list or bibliography entries always start with the author’s last name and initial, the publication date and the title of the source. The other information required varies depending on the source type. Formats and examples for the most common source types are given below.

• Entire book
• Book chapter
• Translated book
• Edition of a book

Journal articles

• Print journal
• Online-only journal with DOI
• Online-only journal without DOI
• General web page
• Online article or blog
• Social media post

Newspapers and magazines

• Newspaper article
• Magazine article

When a source has up to three authors, list all of them in the order their names appear on the source. If there are four or more, give only the first name followed by ‘ et al. ’:

Sometimes a source won’t list all the information you need for your reference. Here’s what to do when you don’t know the publication date or author of a source.

Some online sources, as well as historical documents, may lack a clear publication date. In these cases, you can replace the date in the reference list entry with the words ‘no date’. With online sources, you still include an access date at the end:

When a source doesn’t list an author, you can often list a corporate source as an author instead, as with ‘Scribbr’ in the above example. When that’s not possible, begin the entry with the title instead of the author:

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Though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a difference in meaning:

• A reference list only includes sources cited in the text – every entry corresponds to an in-text citation .
• A bibliography also includes other sources which were consulted during the research but not cited.

In Harvard referencing, up to three author names are included in an in-text citation or reference list entry. When there are four or more authors, include only the first, followed by ‘ et al. ’

In Harvard style referencing , to distinguish between two sources by the same author that were published in the same year, you add a different letter after the year for each source:

• (Smith, 2019a)
• (Smith, 2019b)

Add ‘a’ to the first one you cite, ‘b’ to the second, and so on. Do the same in your bibliography or reference list .

To create a hanging indent for your bibliography or reference list :

• Highlight all the entries
• Click on the arrow in the bottom-right corner of the ‘Paragraph’ tab in the top menu.
• In the pop-up window, under ‘Special’ in the ‘Indentation’ section, use the drop-down menu to select ‘Hanging’.
• Then close the window with ‘OK’.

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If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the ‘Cite this Scribbr article’ button to automatically add the citation to our free Reference Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2022, November 07). Harvard Style Bibliography | Format & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 14 May 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/referencing/harvard-bibliography/

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Self-Knowledge by Quassim Cassam LAST REVIEWED: 13 January 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 13 January 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0112

In philosophy, self-knowledge usually means one of two things: knowledge of one’s particular mental states or knowledge of one’s own nature. To have self-knowledge in the first of these senses is to know one’s particular sensations, experiences, and propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, and so on). Much of the recent literature has concentrated on self-knowledge in this sense. To have self-knowledge in the second sense is to know one’s own ontological nature, or less abstract characteristics, such as one’s own character, abilities, or values. Several different questions can be asked about self-knowledge: (1) What is its character, and what, if anything, distinguishes self-knowledge from other kinds of knowledge? (2) What are the sources of self-knowledge, and, if we have it, how do we get it? (3) What is the scope of self-knowledge, and what are its limits? (4) What is the value, or importance, of self-knowledge? It’s helpful to think about work on self-knowledge as addressing one or more of these questions, and this entry will be structured accordingly. Responses to (1) have focused on the idea that some self-knowledge is epistemically privileged. Responses to (2) include different versions of the following ideas: (a) self-knowledge is acquired by some kind of inner observation, or self-scanning; (b) self-knowledge is acquired by inference or self-interpretation; (c) self-knowledge is acquired by asking and answering the appropriate questions about the world at large. This is the “transparency” approach to self-knowledge, which can be seen as a version of or an alternative to inferentialism. (a), (b), and (c) assume that self-knowledge is acquired by employing the appropriate epistemic procedure and that questions about the origins of self-knowledge are fundamentally epistemological. Nonepistemic approaches include (d) expressivism and (e) constitutivism. The former focuses on the role of avowals (self-ascriptions of one’s current state of mind) as expressions rather than descriptions of one’s state of mind. The latter says that in the normal case there is a constitutive relation between being in a given mental state and knowing or believing that one is in that state. Constitutive approaches concentrate on the metaphysics rather than the epistemology of self-knowledge. Some responses to (3) discuss the obstacles to self-knowledge and identify varieties of self-knowledge that are difficult or impossible to acquire. Others seek to rule out certain forms of self-ignorance. With regard to (4), the issue is, what good does it do us to have self-knowledge, and what kinds of self-knowledge are valuable to us?

Gertler 2008 provides an extremely useful overview of the current debate. This is the best place to start. For a more detailed overview, see Gertler 2011 . Hetherington 2007 is also a good introduction to the subject. It is written in the form of a personal mediation and does not attempt to survey the contemporary literature on self-knowledge. At a more advanced level, the opening chapter of Moran 2001 is an excellent introduction to some of the key issues in the philosophy of self-knowledge.

Gertler, Brie. “ Self-Knowledge .” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2008.

An exceptionally clear and comprehensive survey and discussion. Highly recommended for anyone seeking an overview of philosophical accounts of self-knowledge.

Gertler, Brie. Self-Knowledge . New York: Routledge, 2011.

A detailed and thorough introduction to the epistemology and metaphysics of self-knowledge. Highly recommended.

Hetherington, Stephen. Self-Knowledge: Beginning Philosophy Right Here and Now . Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007.

An unusual and stimulating elementary introduction not just to the topic of self-knowledge but to philosophy generally. It is refreshingly jargon-free, and focuses on aspects of self-knowledge that tend to get neglected in more advanced philosophical discussions.

Moran, Richard. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

A widely discussed book. Its opening chapter gives an accessible account of some of the key features of self-knowledge that need to be accounted for by a good theory of self-knowledge.

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How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography: The Annotated Bibliography

• The Annotated Bibliography
• Fair Use of this Guide

Explanation, Process, Directions, and Examples

What is an annotated bibliography.

An annotated bibliography is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents. Each citation is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph, the annotation. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited.

Annotations vs. Abstracts

Abstracts are the purely descriptive summaries often found at the beginning of scholarly journal articles or in periodical indexes. Annotations are descriptive and critical; they may describe the author's point of view, authority, or clarity and appropriateness of expression.

The Process

Creating an annotated bibliography calls for the application of a variety of intellectual skills: concise exposition, succinct analysis, and informed library research.

First, locate and record citations to books, periodicals, and documents that may contain useful information and ideas on your topic. Briefly examine and review the actual items. Then choose those works that provide a variety of perspectives on your topic.

Cite the book, article, or document using the appropriate style.

Write a concise annotation that summarizes the central theme and scope of the book or article. Include one or more sentences that (a) evaluate the authority or background of the author, (b) comment on the intended audience, (c) compare or contrast this work with another you have cited, or (d) explain how this work illuminates your bibliography topic.

Critically Appraising the Book, Article, or Document

For guidance in critically appraising and analyzing the sources for your bibliography, see How to Critically Analyze Information Sources . For information on the author's background and views, ask at the reference desk for help finding appropriate biographical reference materials and book review sources.

Choosing the Correct Citation Style

Check with your instructor to find out which style is preferred for your class. Online citation guides for both the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Psychological Association (APA) styles are linked from the Library's Citation Management page .

Sample Annotated Bibliography Entries

The following example uses APA style ( Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , 7th edition, 2019) for the journal citation:

Waite, L., Goldschneider, F., & Witsberger, C. (1986). Nonfamily living and the erosion of traditional family orientations among young adults. American Sociological Review, 51 (4), 541-554. The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.

This example uses MLA style ( MLA Handbook , 9th edition, 2021) for the journal citation. For additional annotation guidance from MLA, see 5.132: Annotated Bibliographies .

Waite, Linda J., et al. "Nonfamily Living and the Erosion of Traditional Family Orientations Among Young Adults." American Sociological Review, vol. 51, no. 4, 1986, pp. 541-554. The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.

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Personal Identity

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons ). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, moral agents, or material objects. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich but challenging literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy: see the entry on Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy .)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self . This term is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). It is often used without any clear meaning and will be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

2. understanding the persistence question, 3. accounts of our persistence, 4. psychological-continuity views, 6. the too-many-thinkers objection, 7. animalism and brute-physical views, 8. wider themes, other internet resources, related entries.

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected and not always distinguished. Here are the most familiar:

Characterization. Outside of philosophy, the term ‘personal identity’ commonly refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My personal identity in this sense consists of those properties I take to “define me as a person” or “make me the person I am”. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what my most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person I am in some deep and fundamental sense. This individual personal identity contrasts with my gender, ethnic, and national identity, which consist roughly of the sex, ethnic group, or nation I take myself to belong to and the importance I attach to this.

Someone’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It is a subset, usually a small one, of the properties someone has: it could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity but not being a man or a cyclist, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and a cyclist belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. Someone may not even need to have the properties belonging to her identity: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself and thus part of my identity, even though the belief is false.

What determines someone’s personal identity in this sense is sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1). It asks, in the expectation of a deep and revealing psychological answer, Who am I? (Glover 1988: part 2 and Ludwig 1997 are useful discussions.)

Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? The question often arises in connection with specific cases: we may ask, for example, at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or a computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word ‘person’, filling the blanks in the formula ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’.

The most common answer is that to be a person is to have certain special mental properties. Locke, for instance, said that a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (1975: 335; Baker 2000: ch. 3 is a detailed account of this sort). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and these special mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring them (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6). (A very different answer is mentioned in section 6.)

Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of things is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all existing back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time , as it has to do with whether the earlier and the later being are one thing or two—that is, whether they are numerically identical. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions .

Historically this question often arises from the thought that we might continue existing after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo ). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings our existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would she have to relate to you as you are now in order to be you, rather than someone else? What would the Higher Powers have to do to keep you in existence after your death? Or is it even possible? The answer to these questions depends on the answer to the persistence question.

Evidence. How do we find out who is who? What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? One source of evidence is first-person memory: if you remember doing some particular action (or seem to), and someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is you. Another source is physical resemblance: if the person who did it looks just like you—or better, if she is in some way physically or spatio-temporally continuous with you—that too supports her being you. Which of these sources is more fundamental? Does first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, or only insofar as we can check it against physical facts? What should we do when these considerations support opposing verdicts?

Suppose Charlie’s memories are erased and replaced with accurate memories (or apparent memories) of the life of someone long dead—Guy Fawkes, say (Williams 1956–7). Ought we to conclude on these grounds that the resulting person is not actually Charlie, but Guy Fawkes brought back to life? Or should we instead infer on the basis of physical continuity that he’s just Charlie with different memories? What principle would answer this question?

The evidence question dominated the anglophone literature on personal identity from the 1950s to the 1970s (Shoemaker 1963, 1970 and Penelhum 1967 are good examples). It’s important to distinguish it from the persistence question. What it takes for you to persist through time is one thing; how we ought to evaluate the relevant evidence is another. If the criminal had fingerprints just like yours, the courts may rightly conclude that he is you, but having your fingerprints is not what it is for a past or future being to be you: it’s neither necessary (you could survive without any fingers at all) nor sufficient (someone else could have fingerprints just like yours).

Population. If the persistence question is about which of the characters introduced at the beginning of a story have survived till the end of it, we may also ask how many are on the stage at any one time. What determines how many of us there are right now? If there are eight billion people on the earth at present, what facts—biological, psychological, or what have you—make that the right number?

You may think the number of people at any given time (or at least the number of human people) is simply the number of human organisms there are then. But this is disputed. Some say that cutting the main connections between the cerebral hemispheres results in radical disunity of consciousness so that two people share a single organism (Nagel 1971; for skeptical views see Wilkes 1988: ch. 5 and van Inwagen 1990: 188–212). Others say that a human being with multiple personality could literally be the home of two or more thinking beings (Wilkes 1988: 127f., Rovane 1998: 169ff.; see also Olson 2003, Snowdon 2014: ch. 7). Still others argue that two people can share an organism in cases of conjoined twinning (Campbell and McMahan 2016; see also Olson 2014).

The population question is sometimes called the problem of “synchronic identity”, as opposed to the “diachronic identity” of the persistence question; but these terms need careful handling. They are apt to give the mistaken impression that identity comes in two kinds, synchronic and diachronic. The truth is simply that there are two kinds of situations where we can ask how many people (or other things) there are: those involving just one moment and those involving several. To make matters worse, the term ‘synchronic identity’ is sometimes used to express the personhood question.

Personal ontology. What are we? What properties of metaphysical importance do we human people have, in addition to the mental properties that make us people? What, for instance, are we made of? Are we composed entirely of matter, as stones are, or are we partly or wholly immaterial? Where do our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? Do we extend all the way out to our skin? If so, what fixes those boundaries? Do we have temporal as well as spatial parts? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or an activity of something else?

Here are some of the main proposed accounts of what we are (Olson 2007):

• We are biological organisms (“animalism”: van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997, 2003a).
• We are material things “constituted by” organisms: a person is made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are different things because what it takes for them to persist is different (Baker 2000, Johnston 2007, Shoemaker 2011).
• We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism as your childhood stands to your life as a whole (Lewis 1976).
• We are spatial parts of animals: something like brains, perhaps (Campbell and McMahan 2016, Parfit 2012), or temporal parts of brains (Hudson 2001, 2007).
• We are partless immaterial substances—souls—as Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz thought (Unger 2006: ch. 7), or compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a biological organism (Swinburne 1984: 21).
• We are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said (1978 [1739]: 252; see also Quinton 1962, Campbell 2006).
• There is nothing that we are: we don’t really exist at all (Russell 1985: 50, Unger 1979, Sider 2013).

There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question.

What matters in survival. What is the practical importance of facts about our persistence? Why does it matter ? If you had to choose between continuing to exist or being annihilated and replaced by someone else exactly like you, what reason would you have to prefer one over the other? And what reason do you have to care about what will happen to you, as opposed to what will happen to other people? Or is there any such reason? Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head and that neither of us has any choice about this. The resulting person will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay? Will the resulting person—who will think he is you—be responsible for your actions or for mine? (Or both, or neither?) These questions are summarized in the phrase what matters in survival .

The answer may seem to turn entirely on whether the resulting person would be you or I. Only I can be responsible for my actions. The fact that some person is me, by itself, gives me a reason to care about him. Each person has a special, selfish interest in her own future and no one else’s. Identity itself (numerical identity) is what matters in survival. But some say that I could have an entirely selfish reason to care about someone else’s future for his own sake. Perhaps what gives me a reason to care about what happens to the man people will call by my name tomorrow is not that he is me, but that he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now (see Section 4). If someone else were psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have what matters to me and I ought to transfer my selfish concern to him. Likewise, someone else could be responsible for my actions, and not for his own. Identity itself has no practical importance. (Sosa (1990) and Merricks (2022) argue for the importance of identity; Parfit (1971, 1984: 215, 1995) and Martin (1998) argue against.)

That completes our survey. Though some of these questions may bear on others, they are to a large extent independent. Many discussions of personal identity leave it unclear which one is at stake.

Turn now to the persistence question. Few concepts have led to more misunderstanding than identity over time. The persistence question is often confused with others or stated in a tendentious way.

It asks roughly what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future being to be someone existing now. If we point to you now, then describe someone or something existing at another time, we can ask whether we are referring twice to one thing or once to each of two things. The persistence question is what determines the answer to such queries. (And there are precisely analogous questions about the persistence of other things, such as dogs or stones.)

Here are three common misunderstandings of this question. Some take it to ask what it means to say that a past or future being is you. This would imply that we can answer it simply by reflecting on our linguistic knowledge—on what we mean by the word ‘person’, for example. The answer would be knowable a priori. It would also imply that necessarily all people have the same persistence conditions—that the answer to the question is the same no matter what sort of people we considered. Though some endorse these claims (Noonan 2019b: 84–93), they are disputed. What it takes for us to persist might depend on whether we are biological organisms, which we cannot know a priori. And if there could be immaterial people—gods or angels, say—what it takes for them to persist might differ from what it takes for a human person to persist. In that case our persistence conditions could not be established by linguistic or conceptual analysis.

Second, the persistence question is often confused with the question of what it takes for someone to remain the same person (as in this passage by Bertrand Russell (1957: 70): “Before we can profitably discuss whether we shall continue to exist after death, it is well to be clear as to the sense in which a man is the same person as he was yesterday.”) If Baffles were to change in certain ways—if she lost much of her memory, say, or changed dramatically in character, or became severely disabled—we might ask whether she would still be the person she was before, or instead become a different person. This is not a question about persistence—about numerical identity over time. To ask whether Baffles is the same person that she was before, or to say that she is a different person from the one she used to be, presupposes that she herself existed at the earlier time. The question arises only when numerical identity is assumed. To ask about Baffles’ persistence, by contrast, is to ask not whether she has continued to be the same person, but whether she has continued to exist at all.

When we speak of someone’s remaining the same person or becoming a different one, we mean remaining or ceasing to be a certain sort of person. For someone no longer to be the same person is for her still to exist, but to have changed in some important way. This typically has to do with her individual identity in the sense of the characterization question—with changes in respect of those properties that “define someone as a person.”

Third, the persistence question is often taken to ask what it takes for the same person to exist at two different times. The most common formulation is something like this:

• If a person x exists at one time and a person y exists at another time, under what possible circumstances is it the case that x is y ?

This asks, in effect, what it takes for a past or future person to be you, or for you to continue existing as a person . We have a person existing at one time and a person existing at another, and the question is what is necessary and sufficient for them to be one person rather than two.

This is narrower than the persistence question. We may want to know whether each of us was ever an embryo, or whether we could survive in an irreversible vegetative state (where the resulting being is biologically alive but has no mental properties). These are clearly questions about what it takes for us to persist. But as personhood is most commonly defined (recall Locke’s definition quoted earlier), something is a person at a given time only if it has certain special mental properties at that time. Embryos and human beings in a vegetative state, having no mental properties at all, are thus not people when they’re in that condition. And in that case we cannot infer anything about whether you were once an embryo or could exist in a vegetative state from a principle about what it takes for a past or future person to be you.

We can illustrate the point by considering this answer to question 1:

Necessarily, a person x existing at one time is a person y existing at another time if and only if x can, at the first time, remember an experience y has at the second time, or vice versa.

That is, a past or future person is you just if you (who are now a person) can now remember an experience she had then, or she can then remember an experience you’re having now. Call this the memory criterion . (It too is often attributed to Locke, though it’s uncertain whether he actually held it: see Behan 1979.)

The memory criterion may seem to imply that if you were to lapse into an irreversible vegetative state, you would cease to exist (or perhaps pass to the next world): the resulting being could not be you because it would not remember anything. But no such conclusion follows. Assuming that an organism in a vegetative state is not a person, this is not a case involving a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time. The memory criterion can only tell us which past or future person you are, not which past or future being generally. It says what it takes for someone to persist as a person , but not what it takes for someone to persist without qualification. So it implies nothing about whether you could exist in a vegetative state or even as a corpse, or whether you were once an embryo. As stated, it’s compatible with your surviving with no memory continuity at all, as long as this happens when you are not a person (Olson 1997: 22–26, Mackie 1999: 224–228).

No advocate of the memory criterion would accept this. The view is intended to imply that if a person x exists now and a being y exists at another time—whether or not it’s a person then—they are one just if x can now remember an experience y has at the other time or vice versa. But this not an answer to Question 1: what it takes for a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time to be one rather than two. It’s an answer to a more general question: what it takes for something that is a person at one time to exist at another time as well, whether or not it’s a person then:

• If a person x exists at one time and something y exists at another time, under what possible circumstances is it the case that x is y ?

Those who ask Question 1 are commonly assuming that every person is a person essentially : nothing that is in fact a person could possibly exist without being a person. (By contrast, no student is a student essentially: something that is in fact a student can exist without being a student.) This claim, “person essentialism,” implies that whatever is a person at one time must be a person at every time when she exists, making Questions 1 and 2 equivalent.

But person essentialism is controversial (Olson and Witt 2020). Combined with a Lockean account of personhood, it implies that you were never an embryo: at best you may have come into being when the embryo that gave rise to you developed certain mental capacities. Nor could you exist in a vegetative state. It rules out the brute-physical view described in the next section. Whether we were once embryos or could exist in a vegetative state, or whether we are people essentially, would seem to be substantive questions that an account of our persistence should answer, not matters to be presupposed in the way we frame the debate.

Three main sorts of answers to the persistence question have been proposed. Psychological-continuity views say that our persistence consists in some psychological relation, the memory criterion mentioned earlier being an example. You are that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features from you—beliefs, memories, preferences, the capacity for rational thought, and so on—and you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in this way. There is dispute over what sort of inheritance this has to be—whether it must be underpinned by some kind of physical continuity, for instance, and whether it requires a “non-branching” restriction—and about what mental features need to be inherited. (We will return to some of these points.) But most philosophers writing on personal identity since the early 20th century have endorsed some version of this view: e.g. Dainton 2008, Hudson (2001, 2007), Johnston (1987, 2016), Lewis (1976), Nagel (1986: 40), Parfit (1971; 1984: 207; 2012), Shoemaker (1970; 1984: 90; 1997; 1999, 2008, 2011), Unger (1990: ch. 5; 2000).

A second answer is that our persistence consists in a physical relation not involving psychology: you are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like. Call these brute-physical views. (Advocates include Ayers (1990: 278–292), Carter (1989), Olson (1997), Snowdon (2014), van Inwagen (1990: 142–188), and Williams (1956–7, 1970).)

Some try to combine these views, saying that we need both mental and physical continuity to survive, or that either would suffice without the other (Nozick 1981: ch. 1, Langford 2014, Madden 2016, Noonan 2021).

Both views agree that there is something that it takes for us to persist—that there are informative, nontrivial, necessary and sufficient conditions for a person existing at one time to exist at another time. A third view, anticriterialism , denies this. Psychological and physical continuity are evidence for persistence, it says, but do not always guarantee it and may not be required. The clearest advocate of this view is Merricks (1998; see also Swinburne 1984, Lowe 1996: 41ff., 2012; Langford 2017; for criticism see Zimmerman 1998, Shoemaker 2012). There is also debate about how anticriterialism should be understood (Olson 2012, Noonan 2011, 2019a).

Most people—most Western philosophy teachers and students, anyway—feel immediately drawn to psychological-continuity views. If your brain were transplanted, and that organ carried with it your memories and other mental features, the resulting person would be convinced that he or she was you. This can make it easy to suppose that she would be you, and this would be so because of her psychological relation to you. But there is no easy path from this thought to an attractive answer to the persistence question.

What psychological relation might it be? We have already mentioned memory: a past or future being might be you just if you can now remember an experience she had then or vice versa. This proposal faces two historical objections, dating to Sergeant and Berkeley in the 18th century (see Behan 1979) but more famously discussed by Reid and Butler (see the snippets in Perry 1975).

First, suppose a young student is fined for overdue library books, and as a middle-aged lawyer remembers paying the fine. In her dotage, however, she remembers her law career but has entirely forgotten not only paying the fine but all the other events of her youth. According to the memory criterion the young student is the middle-aged lawyer, the lawyer is the elderly woman, but the elderly woman is not the young student. This is an impossible result: if x and y are one and y and z are one, x and z cannot be two . Identity is transitive; memory continuity is not.

Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine (or the experience of it) is to remember yourself paying. That makes it uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that memory continuity is sufficient for us to persist. It’s uninformative because we could not know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether she is the one who had it. Suppose we ask whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom we know to have existed at some past time. The memory criterion tells us that Blott is Clott just if Blott can now remember an experience Clott had then. But Blott’s seeming to remember one of Clott’s experiences counts as genuine memory only if Blott actually is Clott. So we should already have to know whether Blott is Clott before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether she is. (There is, however, nothing uninformative about the claim that memory connections are necessary for us to persist—that you cannot survive in a condition in which you are unable to remember anything, for example.)

One response to the first problem (about transitivity) is to modify the memory criterion by switching from direct to indirect memory connections: the old woman is the young student because she can recall experiences the lawyer had at a time when the lawyer remembered the student’s life. The second problem is commonly met by replacing memory with “quasi-memory”, which is just like memory but without the identity requirement: even if it’s impossible to remember doing something you didn’t do but someone else did, you could still “quasi-remember” it (Penelhum 1970: 85ff., Shoemaker 1970; for criticism see McDowell 1997).

But there remains the obvious problem that there are many times in our pasts that we cannot remember or quasi-remember at all, and to which we are not linked even indirectly by an overlapping chain of memories. There is no time when you could recall anything that happened to you while you dreamlessly slept last night. The memory criterion has the absurd implication that you have never existed at any time when you were unconscious, and that the person sleeping in your bed last night was someone else.

A better solution replaces memory with the more general notion of causal dependence (Shoemaker 1984, 89ff.). We can define two notions, psychological connectedness and psychological continuity. A being is psychologically connected , at some future time, with you as you are now just if she is in the psychological states she is in then in large part because of the psychological states you are in now (and this causal link is of the right sort: see Shoemaker 1979). Having a current memory (or quasi-memory) of an earlier experience is one sort of psychological connection—the experience causes the memory of it—but there are others. The important point is that our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we were in at times when we were unconscious. For example, most of your current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: they have caused themselves to continue existing. You are then psychologically continuous , now, with a past or future being just if some of your current mental states relate to those he or she is in then by a chain of psychological connections.

That would enable us to say that a person x who exists at one time is the same thing as something y existing at another time just if x is, at the one time, psychologically continuous with y as it is at the other time. This avoids the most obvious objections to the memory criterion.

It still leaves important questions unanswered, however. Suppose we could somehow copy all the mental contents of your brain to mine, much as we can copy the contents of one computer drive to another, thereby erasing the previous contents of both brains. Whether this would be a case of psychological continuity depends on what sort of causal dependence counts. The resulting being (with my brain and your mental contents) would be mentally as you were before, and not as I was. He would have inherited your mental properties in a way—but a funny one. Is it the right way? Could you literally move from one organism to another by “brain-state transfer”? Psychological-continuity theorists disagree. (Shoemaker (1984: 108–111, 1997) says yes; Unger (1990: 67–71) says no; see also van Inwagen 1997.)

A more serious worry for psychological-continuity views is that you could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at once. If your cerebrum—the upper part of the brain largely responsible for mental features—were transplanted, the recipient would be psychologically continuous with you by anyone’s lights, and any psychological-continuity view will imply that she would be you. If we destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would also be psychologically continuous with you. (Hemispherectomy—even the removal of the left hemisphere, which controls speech—is sometimes carried out as a treatment for severe epilepsy: see Shurtleff et al . 2021.) And it would be the same if we did both at once, destroying one hemisphere and transplanting the other: the recipient would be you on any psychological-continuity view.

But now suppose that both hemispheres are transplanted, each into a different empty head. (We needn’t pretend that the hemispheres are exactly alike.) The two recipients—call them Lefty and Righty—will each be psychologically continuous with you. The psychological-continuity view as we have stated it implies that any being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you. It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty. But that again is an impossible result: if you and Lefty are one and you and Righty are one, Lefty and Righty cannot be two. And yet they are: there are evidently two people after the operation. One thing cannot be numerically identical with two different things.

Psychological-continuity theorists have proposed two different solutions to this problem. One, sometimes called the “multiple-occupancy view”, says that if there is fission in your future, then there are two of you, so to speak, even now. What we think of as you is really two people, who are now exactly similar and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The surgeons merely separate them (Lewis 1976, Perry 1972, Noonan 2019b: 141–144).

The multiple-occupancy view is usually combined with the general metaphysical claim that people and other persisting things are composed of temporal parts (often called “four-dimensionalism”; see Hudson 2001, Sider 2001a, Olson 2007: ch. 5). For each person, there is, for example, such a thing as her first half: an entity just like the person only briefer, like the first half of a meeting. On this account, the multiple-occupancy view is that Lefty and Righty coincide before the operation by sharing their pre-operative temporal parts or “stages”, then diverge by having different temporal parts located afterwards. They are like two roads that coincide for a stretch and then fork, sharing some of their spatial parts but not others. Much as the roads are just like one road where they overlap, Lefty and Righty are just like one person before the operation when they share their temporal parts. Even they themselves can’t tell that they are two. There are two coinciding people before the operation because of what happens later, just as there may be coinciding two roads here because of what’s the case elsewhere. Whether we really are composed of temporal parts, however, is disputed. (Its consequences are explored further in section 8.)

The solution more commonly proposed by psychological-continuity theorists abandons the claim that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist, and says that a past or future being is you only if she is then psychologically continuous with you and no other being then is. (There is no circularity in this. We need not know the answer to the persistence question in order to know how many people there are at any one time: that comes under the population question.) So neither Lefty nor Righty is you: they both come into existence when your cerebrum is divided. If both your cerebral hemispheres are transplanted, you cease to exist—though you would survive if only one were transplanted and the other destroyed. Fission is death. (Shoemaker 1984: 85, Parfit 1984: 207; 2012: 6f., Unger 1990: 265).

This proposal, the “non-branching view”, has the surprising consequence that if your brain is divided, you will survive if only one half is preserved, but you will die if both halves are. That looks like the opposite of what we should expect: if your survival depends on the functioning of your brain (because that’s what underlies psychological continuity), then the more of that organ we preserve, the greater ought to be your chance of surviving.

In fact the non-branching view implies that transplanting one hemisphere and leaving the other in place would be fatal. Its consequences are especially surprising if brain-state transfer counts as psychological continuity: in that case, even copying your total brain state to another brain without doing you any physical harm would kill you.

These consequences are not only hard to believe, but mysterious as well. Keeping half your brain functioning is normally sufficient for your survival, according to psychological-continuity views. Why then would you not survive if the other half too were kept functioning, separate from the first? How could an event that would normally ensure your survival destroy you if accompanied by a second such event having no causal effect on the first (Noonan 2019b: 128–141)?

The non-branching view is largely responsible for the interest in the question of what matters in identity. Faced with the prospect of having one of your hemispheres transplanted, there is no evident reason to want the other one to be destroyed. Most of us, it seems, would rather have both preserved, even if they go into different heads. Yet on the non-branching view that is to prefer death over continued existence. This leads Parfit and others to say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer. We have no reason to want to continue existing, at least for its own sake. What you have reason to want (assuming that your life is going well) is that there be someone in the future who is psychologically continuous with you, whether or not she is you. The usual way to achieve this is to continue existing yourself, but on the non-branching view it’s not necessary.

Likewise, even the most selfish person may have a reason to care about the welfare of the beings who would result from her undergoing fission, whether or not either of them would be her. The non-branching view suggests that the sorts of practical concerns you ordinarily have for yourself can apply to someone other than you. More generally, facts about numerical identity—about who is who—have no practical importance. All that matters is who is psychologically continuous with whom. Psychological-continuity views are often said to be superior to brute-physical views in accounting for what matters in identity. Fission cases threaten this claim. (Lewis 1976 and Parfit 1976 debate whether the multiple-occupancy view can preserve the conviction that identity is what matters practically.)

Another objection to psychological-continuity views is that they rule out our being biological organisms (Carter 1989, Ayers 1990: 278–292, Snowdon 1990, Olson 1997: 80f., 100–109). This is because no sort of psychological continuity appears to be either necessary or sufficient for a human organism to persist.

We can see that it’s not necessary by noting that each human organism persists as an embryo without psychological continuity. And we can see that it’s not sufficient by imagining that your brain is transplanted. In that case the recipient would be uniquely psychologically continuous with you, and this continuity would be continuously physically realized. Any psychological-continuity view implies that she would be you. More generally, any person would go with her transplanted brain. But it does not appear as if any organism would go with its transplanted brain. It looks as if the operation would simply move an organ from one organism to another, like transplanting a liver. It follows that if you were an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head, contrary to psychological-continuity views.

Psychological-continuity views do not merely rule out our being essentially or “fundamentally” organisms, but our being organisms at all. They say that each person has the property of persisting by virtue of psychological continuity: of being such that psychological continuity (perhaps with a non-branching restriction) is both necessary and sufficient for it to continue existing. But no organism has this property. (Or at least no human organism does, and we are clearly not non-human organisms.) Or again: every person would go with her transplanted brain, but no organism would do so. And if every person has a property that no organism has, then no person is an organism.

That is said to be a problem for psychological-continuity views because healthy, adult human organisms appear to be conscious and intelligent. Suppose they are. And suppose, as psychological-continuity views appear to imply, that we ourselves are not organisms. Three awkward consequences follow.

First, you are one of two intelligent beings sitting there and reading this entry: there is, in addition to you, an organism reading it. More generally, there are two thinking beings wherever we thought there was just one, a person and an organism distinct from it.

Second, we would expect the organism not just to be intelligent, but to be psychologically indistinguishable from you. That would make it a person, if being a person amounts to having mental special properties (as on Locke’s definition)—a second person in addition to you. In that case it cannot be true that all people (or even all human people) persist by virtue of psychological continuity, contrary to psychological-continuity views. Some—those who are organisms—would have brute-physical persistence conditions.

Third, it’s hard to see how you could know whether you yourself were the nonanimal person with psychological persistence conditions or the animal person with brute-physical ones. If you thought you were the nonanimal, the organism would use the same reasoning to conclude that it was too. For all you could ever know, it seems, you might be the one making this mistake.

We can illustrate the nature of this epistemic problem by imagining a three-dimensional duplicating machine. When you step into the “in” box, it reads off your complete physical (and mental) condition and uses this information to assemble a perfect duplicate of you in the “out” box. The process causes momentary unconsciousness but is otherwise harmless. Two beings wake up, one in each box. The boxes are indistinguishable. Because each being will have the same apparent memories and perceive identical surroundings, each will think, for the same reasons, that he or she is you—but only one will be right. If this happened to you, it’s hard to see how you could know, afterwards, whether you were the original or the duplicate. (Suppose the technicians who work the machine are sworn to secrecy and immune to bribes.) You would think, “Who am I? Did I do the things I seem to remember doing, or did I come into being only a moment ago, complete with false memories of someone else’s life?” And you would have no way of answering these questions. In the same way, psychological-continuity views raise the questions, “What am I? Am I a nonanimal that would go with its brain if that organ were transplanted, or an animal that would stay behind with an empty head?” And here too there seem to be no grounds on which to answer them.

This is the “too-many-thinkers” or “thinking-animal” objection to psychological-continuity views. The most popular defense against it is to say that, despite sharing our brains and showing all the outward signs of consciousness and intelligence, human organisms do not think and are not conscious. There simply are no thinking animals to create problems for psychological-continuity views (Shoemaker 1984: 92–97, Lowe 1996: 1, Johnston 2007: 55; Baker 2000 offers a more complex variant).

But although this is easy to say, it’s hard to defend. If human organisms cannot be conscious and intelligent, it would seem to follow that no biological organism could have any mental properties at all. This threatens to imply that human organisms are “zombies” in the philosophical sense: beings physically identical to conscious beings, with the same behavior, but lacking consciousness (Olson 2018). And it leaves us wondering why organisms cannot be conscious. The best proposed answer is given by Shoemaker (1999, 2008, 2011), who argues that it is because organisms have the wrong persistence conditions, but it’s highly controversial.

A second option is to concede that human organisms are psychologically indistinguishable from us, but try to explain how we can still know that we are not those organisms. The best-known proposal of this sort focuses on personhood and first-person reference. It says that not just any being with mental properties of the sort that you and I have—rationality and self-consciousness, for instance—counts as a person (contrary to anything like Locke’s definition). A person must also persist by virtue of psychological continuity. It follows that human animals are not people (thus avoiding the second awkward consequence, about personhood).

Further, personal pronouns such as ‘I’, and the thoughts they express, refer only to people in this sense. So when your animal body says or thinks ‘I’, it refers not to itself but to you, the person. The organism’s statement ‘I am a person’ does not express the false belief that it is a person, but the true belief that you are. So the organism is not mistaken about which thing it is: it has no first-person beliefs about itself at all. And you’re not mistaken either. You can infer that you are a person from the linguistic facts that you are whatever you refer to when you say ‘I’, and that ‘I’ never refers to anything but a person. You can know that you are not the animal thinking your thoughts because it is not a person and personal pronouns never refer to nonpeople (thus avoiding the third, epistemic consequence; see Noonan 1998, 2010, Olson 2002; for a different approach see Brueckner and Buford 2009).

The too-many-thinkers problem arises on the assumption that we are not organisms, which appears to follow from psychological-continuity views because organisms don’t seem to persist by virtue of psychological continuity. But some say that human organisms do persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Although you are an organism, the transplant operation would not move your brain from one organism to another, but would cut an organism down to the size of a brain, move it across the room, and then give it new parts to replace the ones it lost. The view is sometimes called “new animalism” (Madden 2016, Noonan 2021; see also Langford 2014, Olson 2015: 102–106).

Animalism says that we human people are organisms. This does not imply that all organisms, or even all human organisms, are people: as we saw earlier, human embryos and animals in a vegetative state are not people on the most common definitions of that term. Being a person may be only a temporary property of us, like being a student. Nor does it imply that all people are organisms: it is consistent with there being wholly inorganic people such as gods or intelligent robots. Animalism is not an answer to the personhood question. (It is consistent, for instance, with Locke’s definition of ‘person’.)

The dominant view among both animalists and their opponents is that organisms persist by virtue of some sort of brute-physical continuity with no psychological element. So most animalists accept a brute-physical account of our persistence. And most advocates of brute-physical views take us to be organisms. This suggests that we have the same persistence conditions as certain nonpeople, such as oysters. And our persistence conditions differ from those of immaterial people, if there could be such things, so that there are no persistence conditions for people as such. Though some object to this (Baker 2000: 124), many psychological-continuity theorists say that all beings with mental properties have the same persistence conditions (Shoemaker 2008, Unger 2000), which has the same implication.

The most common objection to brute-physical views (and, by extension, to animalism) focuses on their implication that transplanting your brain into my head would not give you a new body, but would give me a new brain. You would stay behind with an empty head (e.g. Unger 2000; for an important related objection see Johnston 2007, 2016). Animalists generally concede that this is counterintuitive, but take this fact to be outweighed by other considerations: that we appear to be organisms, for example, that it’s hard to say what sort of non organisms we might be, and that our being organisms would avoid the too-many-thinkers problem. And animalism is compatible with our beliefs about who is who in real life: every actual case in which we take someone to survive or perish is a case where a human organism does so. Psychological-continuity views, by contrast, conflict with the appearance that each of us was once a foetus. When we see an ultrasound picture of a 12-week-old foetus, we ordinarily think we’re seeing something that will, if all goes well, be born, learn to speak, and eventually become an adult human person, yet no person is in any way psychologically continuous with a 12-week-old foetus.

And the “transplant objection” may be less compelling than it first appears (Snowdon 2014: 234). Suppose you had a tumor that would kill you unless your brain were replaced with a healthy donated organ. This would have grave side-effects: it would destroy your memories, plans, preferences, and other mental properties. It may not be clear whether you could survive it, even if the operation were successful. But is it really obvious that you could not survive it? Maybe it could save your life, though at great cost. And this might be so, the argument goes, even if the new brain gave you memories, plans, and preferences from the donor. But if it’s not obvious that the brain recipient would not be you, then it’s not obvious that it would be the donor. A brain transplant might be metaphysically analogous to a liver transplant. Again, the claim is not that this is obviously true, but only that it’s not obviously false. And in that case it’s not obvious that a person must go with her transplanted brain. (Williams 1970 argues in a similar way.)

The debate between psychological-continuity and brute-physical views cannot be settled without considering more general matters outside of personal identity. For instance, psychological-continuity theorists need to explain why human organisms are unable to think as we do. This will require an account of the nature of mental properties. Or if human organisms can think, psychological-continuity theorists will want an account of how we can know that we are not those organisms. This will turn on how the reference of personal pronouns and proper names works, or on the nature of knowledge.

Some general metaphysical views suggest that there is no unique right answer to the persistence question. The best-known example is the ontology of temporal parts mentioned in section 5. It says that for every period of time when you exist, short or long, there is a temporal part of you that exists only then. This gives us many likely candidates for being you—that is, many different beings now sitting there and reading this. Suppose you are a material thing, and that we know what determines your spatial boundaries. That should tell us what counts as your current temporal part or “stage”—the temporal part of you located now and at no other time. But that stage is a part of a vast number of temporally extended objects (Hudson 2001: ch. 4).

For instance, it is a part of a being whose temporal boundaries are determined by relations of psychological continuity (Section 4) among its stages. That is, one of the beings thinking your current thoughts is an aggregate of person-stages, each of which is psychologically continuous with each of the others and with no other stage. If this is what you are, then you persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Your current stage is also a part of a being whose temporal boundaries are determined by relations of psychological connectedness . That is, one of the beings now thinking your thoughts is an aggregate of person-stages, each of which is psychologically connected with each of the others and to no other stage. This may not be the same as the first being, as some stages may be psychologically continuous with your current stage but not psychologically connected with it. If this is what you are, then psychological connectedness is necessary and sufficient for you to persist (Lewis 1976). What’s more, your current stage is a part of an organism, which persists by virtue of brute-physical continuity, and a part of many bizarre and gerrymandered objects (Hirsch 1982, ch. 10). Some even say that you are your current stage itself (Sider 2001a, 188–208). And there would be many other candidates.

The temporal-parts ontology implies that each of us shares our current thoughts with countless beings that diverge from one another in the past or future. If this were true, which of these things should we be? Of course, we are the things we refer to when we say ‘I’, or more generally the referents of our personal pronouns and proper names. But these words would be unlikely to succeed in referring to just one sort of thing—to only one of the many candidates on each occasion of utterance. There would probably be some indeterminacy of reference, so that each such utterance referred ambiguously to many different candidates. That would make it indeterminate what things, and even what sort of things, we are. And insofar as the candidates have different histories and different persistence conditions, it would be indeterminate when we came into being and what it takes for us to persist (Sider 2001b).

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• Zimmerman, D., 1998, ‘Criteria of Identity and the “Identity Mystics”’, Erkenntnis , 48: 281–301.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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animalism | identity | identity: relative | Locke, John | mind: in Indian Buddhist Philosophy | personal identity: and ethics | temporal parts | zombies

Acknowledgments

Some material in this entry appeared previously in E. Olson, ‘Personal Identity’, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind , edited by S. Stich and T. Warfield, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Copyright © 2023 by Eric T. Olson < e . olson @ shef . ac . uk >

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Bibliotherapy

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic approach employing books and other forms of literature, typically alongside more traditional therapy modalities, to support a patient’s mental health. Though the books recommended by therapists can encompass any genre or theme—from philosophy to memoir to self-help —bibliotherapists typically make use of fiction.

Reading specific pieces of literature and talking about them with a therapist (or in a group therapy setting) is thought to help patients understand perspectives other than their own, make sense of a difficult past or upsetting symptoms, or experience feelings of hope, contentment, and empathy. More generally, reading is also thought to improve self-esteem, self-awareness, and feelings of self-efficacy .

Some in the field recognize two distinct branches of bibliotherapy, although the dividing line between them isn’t always clear. Developmental bibliotherapy is used in community or educational settings, to help children or adults address common life challenges, such as bullying , for example. Clinical or therapeutic bibliotherapy is the use of books in a professional therapy context to treat a diagnosed disorder or alleviate the negative impacts of a diagnosed mental or physical disorder.

• When It's Used
• What to Expect
• How It Works
• What to Look for in a Bibliotherapist

Bibliotherapy can be applied to patients suffering from anxiety , depression , or other mood disorders; those struggling with trauma or addiction ; or those going through grief , a divorce , or other relationship-related challenges.

Bibliotherapy can be practiced in either individual or group therapy sessions, or without the guidance of a therapist at all. When conducted with a therapist, bibliotherapy is rarely used as a primary or sole modality of treatment; rather, it tends to be used in conjunction with other approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or psychodynamic therapy.

Bibliotherapy is inexpensive and easy to apply . Thus, it may be particularly useful for patients short on time, those with limited funds, or those whose mental health concerns are mild to moderate.

Typically, a bibliotherapist will recommend a book or books based on their preferred modality and on the patient’s specific challenges. A cognitive-behavioral therapist, for instance, may recommend a self-help workbook outlining research-supported CBT principles; a therapist specializing in trauma, on the other hand, may recommend a novel about a character who endured childhood abuse.

The patient will then, on their own time, read the book or complete the workbook exercise as prescribed. Upon returning to therapy, the book or exercise will be discussed and used as a jumping-off point to explore coping mechanisms, personal history, or other factors relevant to the therapeutic experience.

Because patients must read between sessions, bibliotherapy does require additional effort and cost outside of the therapy room. However, many therapists who use bibliotherapy report that the practice increases patient engagement and commitment to the therapeutic process.

The idea that reading books has a positive effect on mood and mind is not new; indeed, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Egyptians, viewed libraries as sacred spaces with (metaphorical) healing properties.

Beginning in the 20th century, psychologists began to conduct formal research on the potential benefits of reading more generally and on bibliotherapy specifically. Overall, the literature suggests that reading books—particularly those offering a new perspective or taking a reader outside their comfort zone—can increase empathy, tolerance for others, and interpersonal skills, such as the ability to read the emotions of others.

In a therapeutic setting, bibliotherapy is thought to be effective because it provides an additional outlet for patients to work through problems and can help an individual recognize that they are not alone in their struggles. This process may occur in four stages:

• Identification: The reader affiliates with a character in the text and identifies with their problems and goals .
• Catharsis: The reader experiences the character’s emotions, struggles, and hopes from a safe, removed position.
• Insight: The reader recognizes similarities between the characters or situations in the text and the reader’s own circumstances and the decision to apply ideas from the text to the reader’s life.
• Universalization: The reader realizes they are not alone. Others have experienced similar challenges and found ways to navigate them.

Bibliotherapy may also help increase engagement in the therapeutic process, which is critical for overall success.

Therapists who utilize a wide variety of modalities may make use of bibliotherapy. Thus, when searching for a bibliotherapist, it may be helpful to learn about their primary modality and discuss with them how bibliotherapy will be incorporated into a treatment plan.

Some organizations, such as the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, offer certifications for interested practitioners and have set official guidelines for the practice of bibliotherapy.

Regardless of a therapist’s training or preferred modality, it is, above all, important for patients to work with a clinician with whom they feel comfortable. Patients may want to ask the therapist a few questions before committing to work with them. Questions may include:

• How would they help with your particular concerns?
• Have they dealt with this type of problem before?
• What is their process?
• What is their timeline for treatment?
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At any moment, someone’s aggravating behavior or our own bad luck can set us off on an emotional spiral that threatens to derail our entire day. Here’s how we can face our triggers with less reactivity so that we can get on with our lives.

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bibliography

Definition of bibliography

Examples of bibliography in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bibliography.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

probably from New Latin bibliographia , from Greek, the copying of books, from bibli- + -graphia -graphy

1689, in the meaning defined at sense 1

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Cite this Entry

“Bibliography.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bibliography. Accessed 18 May. 2024.

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Self-Portrait Mastery: Writing a Biography About Yourself

Learn to write an engaging autobiography about yourself. Unlock your story's power and captivate readers. Start crafting your narrative today!

Last updated on May 13th, 2024

When you click on affiliate links on QuillMuse.com and make a purchase, you won’t pay a penny more, but we’ll get a small commission—this helps us keep up with publishing valuable content on QuillMuse.  Read More .

Table of Contents

A personal biography, often shortened to just my self-biography, is a brief statement summarizing your skills and achievements. You can write a bio to differentiate yourself from other candidates, gain new clients, or connect with social media followers. 

Learning how to write a biography about yourself can help you build your brand and market yourself effectively. In this article, we are going to discuss biography with steps, tips, and strategies to help you write how to write a biography about yourself. 

Before writing, how to write a biography of yourself. First, we have to know what a personal biography is.

What is a personal biography?

A personal biography [1] is a brief introduction summarizing your experience, references, education, and personal or professional achievements. This can help you convey your brand and show others what makes you unique. You can use your profile as a marketing tool when applying for jobs, attracting potential clients, or encouraging people to follow you on social media.

A personal biography often conveys the purpose or goal of writing the biography, such as talking to a client or getting a job. In your biography, you can include details about your personal or professional achievements, such as awards you’ve won or positive feedback you’ve received from customers. 

You don’t have just to write an essay about you. You may choose to discuss your personal or professional background in your biography, such as your current position, years of experience in the industry, or your motivation for pursuing your career path. 

A personal biography typically mentions your education and other qualifications, such as internships, certifications, or professional development training.

What to include in a personal bio?

Here are some of the elements a personal bio might include:

• Name : [Your Name]
• Profession : [Your Job Title/Role]
• Experience : Briefly outline your relevant professional experience.
• Accomplishments : Highlight any notable achievements or milestones in your career.
• Skills : List key skills or areas of expertise relevant to your profession.
• Interests : Mention any hobbies or interests that showcase your personality outside of work.
• Unique Qualities : Highlight any unique traits or experiences that set you apart.
• Education : Include your educational background if relevant.
• Contact Information : Provide a way for people to contact you if they want to connect or collaborate.

Where To Show Personal Bio 

Many people use their biography when looking for a job to explain to the hiring manager why they are the ideal candidate for the job. You can also use your biography in other ways. Some places you can post your biography include:

Shine Online:

• Concise & Catchy: Twitter and Instagram bios thrive on brevity. Use keywords to grab attention and reflect your interests (e.g., “Foodie, Bookworm, Aspiring Cloud Architect”).
• Professional: LinkedIn allows for a more comprehensive bio. Craft a compelling summary that highlights your career journey, key skills, and achievements.
• Personal Website or Blog : If you have your own digital space, a dedicated “About Me” section is ideal. Here, you can delve deeper into your background, passions, and what makes you tick.
• Guest Posting Platforms : When contributing articles to other websites, some may have an author bio section. Craft a concise bio that piques the reader’s interest and potentially links back to your own website.

Offline Bio Beacons:

• Resumes & Cover Letters : In the professional realm, tailor your bio to resonate with the specific job or company. Highlight relevant skills and experiences that showcase your qualifications for the role.
• Networking Events : Prepare a succinct “elevator pitch” that summarizes your background and interests in a captivating way. This is your chance to make a lasting impression in a short interaction.
• Business Cards (Optional) : While not a necessity, some people include a bio or tagline on their business cards. This can be a creative way to spark conversation and leave a memorable impression.
• Portfolios or Presentations : If you’re in a creative field, consider incorporating a bio section into your portfolio or presentation. This can add a personal touch and help potential clients or collaborators connect with you on a deeper level.

Remember, the key is to tailor your bio to the specific platform or situation. Think about your target audience and the message you want to convey. By strategically placing your bio in these online and offline spaces, you can effectively introduce yourself to the world and leave a lasting impression.

How to Write a Biography About Yourself 

When you think you have to do something for your better career you must be alert about how to write a bio . Here’s an expanded take on how to craft a captivating biography about yourself in 6 steps:

1. Find Your Focus

Don’t just list facts, tell a story! Think about who will be reading it like a boss, classmate, or everyone. What’s the goal? Is it to show your skills for a job, your creative side, or everything about you?

This helps you decide what to write. For a job, focus on work experience, achievements, and skills that make you a good fit. For creative writing, mention what inspires you and the artists you like.

Think of important moments, big achievements, and things that make you unique. Then, write them down in a clear order, either by time (like your life story) or by topic (like focusing on skills).

2. Start Strong with a Hook

The first sentence is your chance to shine. Instead of a snoozer intro, write something that makes people curious. This could be a surprising fact about what you do, a quick story that hints at your personality, or even a question that sparks the reader’s imagination. 

Think about how you’d introduce yourself to someone you really admire. What would you say to make them want to chat more? Do that in your first sentence. It’ll turn your bio into a “must-read.” After all, you’re an interesting person, so show it off from the very beginning.

Imagine you’re starting a conversation with someone you want to impress – how would you introduce yourself in a way that compels them to listen? So, I think you know how to write an introduction .

3. Showcase Your Journey

This is the heart of your biography, where your experiences come alive. Don’t just list accomplishments; delve deeper and showcase the challenges overcome, turning points that shaped you, and the triumphs you’ve achieved. 

Instead of just stating you received a prestigious award, describe the project you tackled or the problem you solved that led to the recognition. Highlight the skills you honed along the way and how they contribute to your overall value.

Tell your story. Don’t just list your achievements. Show the interesting parts. What problems did you solve? What were the big moments? How did you learn and grow?

Pick things that impress the people you’re writing for. If it’s a job application, show skills that fit the job. If it’s for friends, tell fun stories. Use details to make your story come alive. Maybe you won an award. Instead of just saying that, tell them about the project you did.

4. Add Personality with Details and Voice

Spice it up! Don’t just tell people what you did, show them! Instead of saying “I won an award,” describe the cool project you worked on or the tricky problem you solved to earn it. Mention things you saw, heard, or even smelled that made the experience memorable. 

A funny story shows you’re quick-witted, and a story about overcoming a challenge shows you’re a problem-solver. Write like you’re chatting with a friend. Don’t worry about using big words or sounding fancy. Just write the way you normally talk. 

Are you known for your jokes? Let your sense of humor shine through. Are you super passionate about something? Let your enthusiasm jump off the page. The more you sound like yourself, the more interesting your story will be.

5. Keep it short 

The length of your biography can vary depending on the focus and goals. On your social media site, you can write a brief professional biography of two or three sentences. Other bios, such as a website bio, can be several paragraphs long. No matter where you plan to display your biography, keep it short to grab readers’ attention and encourage them to learn more about you or connect with you.

6. Refine and Polish Your Work

Once you have a solid draft, take a critical eye and become your own editor. Proofread meticulously for typos, grammatical errors , and any awkward phrasing. Ensure the flow of your writing is smooth and the information is presented clearly. 

Read your biography aloud to catch inconsistencies or areas that feel clunky. Having a trusted friend or colleague review it for clarity and impact can also be beneficial. Their fresh perspective might help you identify areas for improvement or ensure your message resonates with the intended audience. You don’t need to check for plagiarism .

7. Leave a Lasting Impression

The final sentence is your chance to create a memorable closing. This could be a powerful summary of your core values, a glimpse into your aspirations for the future, or a call to action that invites the reader to connect with you in some way. 

This could be a quick summary of what’s important to you, a hint about your future goals, or even an invitation for the reader to connect in some way. The ending should leave a lasting impression that reflects who you truly are. Maybe you could end with a question that sparks a conversation or a quote that sums up your way of thinking.

8. Regularly update your profile 

You are constantly learning new skills and achieving new goals in your career. Keeping these achievements to yourself will only limit your opportunities. 

Instead, you should take a few minutes to update your various profiles every time you go through a major life event. This way, your biography will always accurately reflect who you are and what you have to offer, allowing you to gain better exposure, gain the respect of your peers, and ultimately be recruited.

9. Match the word count to the platform 

While you analyze how to write a biography about yourself you should concern yourself with the word limit of the biography. The time it takes to write your biography is up to you unless you’re filling out the biography section of your profile and are only allowed a certain number of words. However, you should keep in mind your background and what your audience is looking for when deciding how much to write. 

For example, people reading a biography on a job site may be screening many candidates, so it’s best to keep the biography on these sites short, between 300 and 500 words. Otherwise, readers may be tempted to ignore them. 

For a biography on your website, a longer biography (between 1500 and 2000) is often better because you can include more details. Search engines also prefer longer bios, so they often rank higher in search results, making your bio more visible.

Tips for making your biography noticeable

1. hook from the start: .

Skip the boring intro! Start your bio with something awesome! Think of a cool sentence, a surprising detail, or a question that makes people think. Imagine meeting someone interesting at a party. What would you say to grab their attention and make them want to chat more? This first line is super important because it sets the tone for your whole bio and makes people want to read on.

2. SEO Savvy: 

If your bio is online, consider yourself a tiny search engine magnet! Strategically sprinkle in relevant keywords that people might use to find someone like you. Research keywords related to your profession, interests, or skills. For instance, an aspiring chef might include a “culinary student” or “food enthusiast” to attract potential employers or collaborators.

3. Paint a Picture with Words: 

Instead of a laundry list of skills or interests, use vivid language and action verbs to showcase your passions. Don’t just say you’re “creative” – describe yourself as “brainstorming innovative solutions” or “transforming blank canvases into vibrant masterpieces.” This paints a picture for the reader and allows them to connect with your energy and enthusiasm.

4. Infuse Personality with a Pinch of Spice: 

Let your unique voice and perspective shine through! A dash of humor (if the platform allows) can make your bio relatable and memorable. Are you known for your infectious laugh? Mention your “contagious enthusiasm for life’s adventures.” Do you have a quirky hobby or hidden talent? Share it! This personal touch allows people to connect with you on a deeper level.

5. Storytelling Power: 

Weave a short, impactful anecdote that reveals something interesting about you. This personalized touch is far more engaging than a simple list of facts. Did a volunteer experience spark a passion? Briefly describe it! Did an unexpected encounter change your perspective? Share a snippet!

6. Sharp and Focused: 

While you want to showcase your personality, remember bio real estate is precious! Strive for a concise and focused bio. Aim for a length suitable for the platform. Twitter thrives on brevity, so keep it short and sweet. LinkedIn allows for a more comprehensive summary but avoids rambling.

7. Intrigue with a Call to Action (Optional): 

Depending on the context, consider including a call to action (CTA) at the end. This could be an invitation to connect with you on another platform, learn more about your work on a website or portfolio, or even a prompt to start a conversation. A strong CTA leaves a lasting impression and encourages further interaction.

Examples of Biography

1. Bio for getting a job

I’m [Your Name], a highly motivated and results-oriented IT professional with [Number] years of experience in [Your area of expertise]. Throughout my career, I’ve thrived in fast-paced environments, and consistently exceeded expectations by troubleshooting complex technical issues and implementing innovative solutions.

My passion lies in [Specific area of IT you enjoy most]. In my previous role at [Previous company], I spearheaded the [Project name] initiative, which resulted in a [Quantifiable achievement related to the project]. I’m proficient in [List of relevant technical skills] and possess a strong understanding of [Industry knowledge related to your field].

Beyond technical expertise, I’m a strong communicator, adept at collaborating with cross-functional teams to bridge the gap between technical aspects and real-world business needs. I’m also a quick learner, always eager to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the ever-evolving IT landscape.

I’m confident that my [Specific skills] combined with my [Positive personality traits] make me a valuable asset to any team. I’m particularly interested in opportunities that allow me to leverage my skills in [Areas you want to focus on] to contribute to [Desired company goals].

2. Examples of a biography that focuses on career and journey

They say curiosity is the seed of all discovery. Well, for me, it felt more like an insatiable fire. Growing up in Warsaw, science wasn’t exactly a woman’s domain, but the pull I felt toward unraveling the mysteries of the universe was undeniable.

It wasn’t easy. Sacrifices had to be made to chase my dream. Paris, with its grand Sorbonne University, became my new home. There, amidst towering stacks of books and endless lab experiments, I met Pierre. He wasn’t just my love, but a brilliant mind who shared my passion for the unknown. Together, we delved into the world of radiation, a realm then shrouded in mystery.

Our discoveries were like unearthing hidden treasures. Polonium, a new element I named after my homeland, then the wonder of radium – each revelation fueled our scientific hunger. Then came the heartbreaking loss of Pierre. Devastated, I considered giving it all up. But his spirit, his unwavering belief in our work, propelled me forward.

Becoming the first woman to win a Nobel Prize felt surreal, an acknowledgment of the battles fought and the path paved. Yet, the greatest reward was the knowledge that our research held the potential to heal, to illuminate the darkest corners of medicine.

The irony isn’t lost on me. The very force I dedicated my life to understanding, radiation, ultimately took its toll. But even as my health declined, the fire of curiosity never truly dimmed. I hope that my journey, with all its struggles and triumphs, inspires others, especially young women, to chase their scientific dreams.

When applying for a job, one crucial factor that most individuals overlook is their “personal history.” Candidates’ dry and uninteresting personal histories don’t give them the credit they deserve because they don’t have enough time or aren’t aware of how important they are. 

To pass difficult technical interviews in different companies, in addition to thorough preparation, creating and presenting the best personal biography is extremely important. 

This article shows you how to write a biography about yourself and how to create the best personal biography to increase your chances of making a good impression and landing your dream job.

Why should I write a biography about myself?

Writing your biography can be a powerful way to reflect on your life journey, document your achievements, and share your story with others. It can also be a valuable tool for personal branding and professional development.

What should I include in my biography?

Your biography should include important milestones, significant life events, challenges you’ve overcome, passions, interests, and goals. You can also include anecdotes, quotes, and insights that reveal your personality and values.

How do I structure my biography?

There’s no one-size-fits-all structure for a biography, but a common approach is to start with an introduction that grabs the reader’s attention, followed by chronological or thematic sections that explore different aspects of your life, and a conclusion that ties everything together.

Should I include personal details in my biography?

It’s up to you how much personal information you want to include in your biography. While sharing some personal details can make your story more relatable and engaging, it’s essential to strike a balance and maintain your privacy.

How long should my biography be?

The length of your biography will depend on its purpose and where it will be published. For personal websites or social media profiles, a shorter bio of around 100-200 words may be sufficient. For more detailed accounts, aim for 500-1000 words or more.

How we've reviewed this article

Our content is thoroughly researched and fact-checked using reputable sources. While we aim for precision, we encourage independent verification for complete confidence.

1. Learn more about biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biography

We keep our articles up-to-date regularly to ensure accuracy and relevance as new information becomes available.

• Current Version
• May 13th, 2024
• Oct 24th, 2023

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