Dr Stephanie Chen London Business School

Host: Dr Sam Johnson

Causal Beliefs in the Self-Concept and Identity-Based Choice

Personal identity is an important determinant of behavior, yet how people mentally represent their self-concepts is not well understood. Building on ideas from conceptual representation, I propose a novel approach to the self-concept that emphasizes people’s beliefs about how the features of the self-concept (e.g., memories, moral qualities, social categories) are causally related to each other. In this talk, I first use this approach to explore beliefs about what defines the self-concept and demonstrate that changes to causally central features (features perceived as having many cause-effect links with other features of the self) are seen as more disruptive to self-continuity than features that are perceived as being more causally peripheral. Second, I explore the role of causal centrality in identity-based choice and provide evidence that among people who belong to the same social category, those who believe that the associated identity is more causally central are more likely to engage in behaviours consistent with the social category relative to those who believe that the same identity is more peripheral.

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