Personality and the location of identity1

Abstract

It was hypothesized that individuals vary in their general environmental orientation: some are oriented to the internal and some to the extemal environment. We next predicted that this'-difEMence would be reflected in the location of those characteristics by which such persons define their identity. A sample of 150 persons judged the location of a set of 22 identity^ chafactensfics. TEesecKarkctieristics were rated on importance for self and then correlated with personality tests assumed to assess individual differences in environmental orientation. Authoritarianism, Snyder's self-monitoring, and Rotter's extemal locus of control were taken as measiires of an external environmental orientation; Laird's locus of causal attribution and Sampson's measure of internal orientation (IO) were taken as measures of an intemal environmental orientation. With all scales but Rotter's, strong support for the predictions was found: i.e., authoritarianism and self-monitoring were positively correlated with externally located identity characteristics; a dispositional attributional bias and the IO were positively correlated with internally located identity characteristics. These findings were discussed in terms of a process of identity mastery.

The State of Psychological Ownership: Integrating and Extending a Century of Research

“…While recognizing individual differences in terms of importance of possessions for personal identity (e.g., Sampson, 1978), Prelinger (1959 provided support for the proposed relationship between self and control over objects. Specifically, he found that objects over which the respondent had control, could manipulate, or objects by which she/he could be affected, were more likely to be perceived as parts of the self than objects for which neither was the case.…”

Identity and Spirituality: Conventional and Transpersonal Perspectives

“…As an extension of this, Friedman adopted the position of a psychological cartographer and advanced a two-dimensional model of self-concept expansiveness which permits the understanding of the self-concept in terms of its boundaries in demarcating aspects of the Self that are, and are not, experienced by the individuals as components of their personal identities. The dimensions themselves are a combination of Sampson's (1978) notion of identity spatiality (i.e., locus of identity in space) and Shostrom's (1963) concept of temporality of self-concept (i.e., the degree of present-centeredness versus past or future orientedness of identity). In essence, Friedman created a two dimensional framework that can be used to map the self-concept onto the Self.…”

Reassessing the Structure of Enduring Leisure Involvement

“…To facilitate self-verification, individuals establish and maintain self-verification contexts. Identity theorists suggest that individuals play an active role in confirming their identity (Burke & Stets, 1999, 2009Leary, Wheeler, & Jenkins, 1986;Sampson, 1978;Snyder, 1981;Stryker & Burke, 2000;Swann, 1987;Swann & Hill, 1982;Swann, Pelham, & Krull, 1989;Swann & Read, 1981). People alter or create contexts in which their identity can be affirmed more often and maintain these contexts once they have been established (Burke & Stets, 1999, 2009Stryker & Burke, 2000).…”