ABSTRACT
Rigorous thinking about the nature and sources of human identity, and about the links between identity and culture, is vitally important for understanding a variety of significant social problems. Students of the subject have pondered why people embrace one identity rather than another, and how their convictions in this regard affect their economic performance. Numerous, conflicting conceptions of identity can be found in the literature. Psychologists draw a fundamental distinction between social identity, which deals with how an individual is perceived and categorized by others, and personal identity (sometimes called “ego identity”), which invokes a person’s answer to the question, “Who am I?” 1 Goffman (1963) describes an individual’s social identity as “the categories and attributes anticipated by others during routines of social intercourse in established settings.” 2 Social psychologists also use the concept of collective identity to ask how a group of distinct individuals might come to embrace a common answer to the “Who am I?” question, and what follows from their having done so. 3 Thinking about collective identity leads naturally to a reflection on how social interaction influences the formation and maintenance of personal identities which, in turn, leads naturally into a discussion of “culture.”
