Amygdala speaks: The looking-glass self*

"I'm not what I think I am, I'm not what you think I am, I'm what I think you think I am."

I stumbled upon this quote a while ago. Parsing it took me a couple of reads, and then it fascinated me. I started digging up the internet for possible interpretations of this, and found a wealth of information. I'm linking a couple of them below. The Ribbonfarm article is very comprehensive and might take you a quite a bit of time to read(I thought some of my posts were long-form, and then I found Riboonfarm and understood what long-form blogging actually is:P), but it was quite insightful. Anyway, without further ado, here goes.

I am someone who used to think that I was largely unaffected by others' opinions of me. Take a moment, and think about this. Who are you? What is your identity? What are all the attributes you associate with yourself? How did you come to think of yourself in those terms? Is your identity entirely based on your own opinion of yourself? If you answered yes to that, think about the various manifestations of your identity. Do you exhibit the exact same behavior to everyone you interact with? Or is your identity more fluid, subject to situation, context and people? Maybe by now, you're thinking that your identity is dictated by others' opinion of you. But let's face it, for the most part, we have no access to that information. It is a black box to us-- beyond our innermost circle, we do not have the faintest inkling of what people genuinely think of us.

How, then, does this work? How do we form our identities? How are we able to tailor them according to specific people or situations? Cooley answered that question with what he called the looking-glass theory. If you want to understand the theory in a nutshell, it is that quote that begins this article. Succinct, yet profound. We do not know what others think of us, but we imagine what they think of us. Identity is therefore a reflection of a reflection- our perception of others' perceptions of us. :)

Getting too twisted? Fret not, here comes an example. I, as the author of this blog, have no idea what you think of it. But maybe you tell me that you liked it quite a bit, although you actually didn't. I have no access to what you really thought, only to what I gleaned from your message. Now, in my mental model of you, there's information that you like what I write, and that will very likely shape my interaction with you, and in that sense, my identity with you. In this case, language was the interface or the mirror, which need not always be the case.

Image taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking-glass_self

As human beings, so much of our identity is thus shaped by social interactions. We learn to become socially intelligent beings, to adapt and tune our identity, and our behavior. Think of the equation you share with your childhood friend, with your grandmother, with your spouse, with a colleague, with your parents. Maybe you learn to be funny with your friend, because you think she finds you funny. Maybe you try to be smart around your colleague, because in your mind, that's how he sees you. And these varied perceptions of our identity lead us to reinforce/contradict those perceptions by donning various hats. By displaying various facets of our personalities. This leads me to an interesting aspect: social media. Here, we've started tuning our behavior by platform. We're different people on Linkedin and Instagram, for instance.

What do you think about this mechanism of forming our identity? Do you think it would have been better to just be able to use our own opinions entirely? I will use the control theory explanation: having some kind of closed-loop feedback system lends stability in most cases. We'd have no way to error correct if what we thought of ourselves had nothing to do with other people--this would very quickly lead to delusions. Rochat has an interesting insight on this:

"There is a profound irreconcilability or dissonance between first-and third-person perspectives on the self once objectified and valued. This dissonance shapes behaviors in crucial ways, as individuals try to reconcile their own and others’ putative representations about them. These two representational systems are always at some odds or in conflict, always in need of readjustment. It is so because these systems are open, and they do not share the same informational resources: direct, permanent, and embodied for the first-person perspective on the self; indirect, more fleeting, and disembodied for the third-person perspective on the self."

What is the direct implication of this? That our identity is heavily based on the feedback that we get from people- language, ritual, non-verbal communication. We must be adept at reading these if we want a genuine picture of our identity. Yet, we must always be conscious that could be a gap between what other people genuinely think of us and what we think they think. Perhaps this takes on new meanings in today's world, as social media appears in the picture once again. You assume that your enormous follower count means that you are popular, that all those likes mean that people genuinely like you, but is there more to it? There could be. Looking from the other side, we must also acknowledge that our behavior shapes others' identities, and be more conscious of the signals we project. That you do not greet your co-worker may help shape his perception that you dislike him, and accordingly adjust his behavior to you, although you might have never felt that way.