State Authenticity as Fit to Environment: The Implications of Social Identity for Fit, Authenticity, and Self-Segregation

Abstract

People seek out situations that "fit," but the concept of fit is not well understood. We introduce State Authenticity as Fit to the Environment (SAFE), a conceptual framework for understanding how social identities motivate the situations that people approach or avoid. Drawing from but expanding the authenticity literature, we first outline three types of person-environment fit: self-concept fit, goal fit, and social fit. Each type of fit, we argue, facilitates cognitive fluency, motivational fluency, and social fluency that promote state authenticity and drive approach or avoidance behaviors. Using this model, we assert that contexts subtly signal social identities in ways that implicate each type of fit, eliciting state authenticity for advantaged groups but state inauthenticity for disadvantaged groups. Given that people strive to be authentic, these processes cascade down to self-segregation among social groups, reinforcing social inequalities. We conclude by mapping out directions for research on relevant mechanisms and boundary conditions.

Seeking authenticity in diverse contexts: How identities and environments constrain “free” choice

“…Thus, authenticity does not describe the person ( she is authentic ) or one's volitional actions ( just be yourself ). Rather, authentic is what one feels when the environment is a good fit to salient or important aspects of one's identity (Schmader & Sedikides, ). Once in a setting, individuals might have little control over how authentic they feel or can choose to be, and yet these feelings of authenticity guide their approach and avoidance of some contexts over others.…”

“…As described by Schmader and Sedikides (), members of devalued social groups are prone to experiencing inauthenticity and disfluency in environments created primarily for and by the advantaged majority group. Research on social identity threat illuminates how members of stigmatized social groups are more likely to engage in effortful processing of self‐relevant information (Johns & Schmader, ; Schmader & Beilock, ; Schmader, Forbes, Zhang, & Mendes, ; Schmader, Johns, & Forbes, ), which directly impedes a sense of cognitive fluency and increases the salience of one's own identity.…”

Bolstering trust and reducing discipline incidents at a diverse middle school: How self-affirmation affects behavioral conduct during the transition to adolescence

“…This can lead them to mistrust critical feedback (Cohen, Steele, & Ross, 1999;Yeager et al, 2014) and increases the chances that teacher intentions will be misread (Yeager et al, 2017). Moreover, research finds that feeling stereotyped increases norm deviance (Belmi, Barragan, Neale, & Cohen, 2015), and that people tend to avoid, disengage from, or de-identify with domains where they feel negatively stereotyped (Major, Spencer, Schmader, Wolfe, & Crocker, 1998;Schmader & Sedikides, 2018;Steele, 1992). Feeling disrespected or ostracized increases the likelihood of aggression (Twenge, Baumeister, Tice, & Stucke, 2001;Thomaes, Bushman, de Castro, Cohen, & Denissen, 1999;Dodge & Somberg, 1987) and reduces feelings of school identity and individual self-worth (Huo, Binning, & Molina, 2010).…”

The Authentic Moral Self: Dynamic Interplay between Perceived Authenticity and Moral Behaviors in the Workplace

“…Feeling authentic at work bears important implications for work engagement, job satisfaction and a variety of other positive work-related outcomes (e.g., van den Bosch & Taris, 2014b;Ménard & Brunet, 2011;Yagil & Medler-Liraz, 2014). Previous research mostly viewed workplace authenticity is as engendered by the degree to which one "fits" into his or her environment (van den Bosch & Taris, 2014a;Schmader & Sedikides, 2017). We believe that immoral behaviors may be one reason people experience lack of fit and authenticity at workplace at the first place.…”

“…In organizational settings, for example, authenticity has been studied in terms of functional leadership styles (e.g., Gardner, Avolio, & Walumbwa, 2005;Luthans & Avolio, 2003;Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008), or as a state of subjective experience that occurs within work-specific contexts (Gagné & Deci, 2005;Lopez & Ramos, 2016;Ménard & Brunet, 2011;Metin, Taris, Peeters, van Beek, & van den Bosch, 2016;van den Bosch & Taris, 2014a, 2014b. In both cases, authenticity remains a robust predictor of positive outcomes in workplace, including psychological well-being of oneself or coworkers (Ménard & Brunet, 2011;Yagil & Medler-Liraz, 2014), work engagement (Metin, et al, 2016;6;Schmader & Sedikides, 2017), and job performance (van den Bosch & Taris, 2014b). The current research followed the latter approach, studying authenticity at work as a sense of being able to live up to and express the "core" attributes of true self in workplaces.…”