Chapter 8

The Positive Identity Reinforcement

Which character from Game of Thrones are you? Which Hogwarts house would you belong to? Are you an introvert or an extrovert? An optimist or a realist? Take this Facebook quiz …

People love to learn about themselves, as evidenced by the wild popularity of personality tests. On the surface, this might seem like an exercise in pure egotism, about as productive as gazing into a mirror for hours on end. But as the science shows, trying to really understand yourself fully and accurately—by examining your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors—is one of the most practically useful things you can ever do.

Most people see themselves (rightly or wrongly) as helpful, because being helpful is part of what it means to be a good person. So helpfulness is generally an important aspect of a typical person’s identity. In addition, being a helpful person is a particularly potent way to boost self-esteem, at least in theory. There are, of course, rules and limits involved. So using the potential for positive identity as a reinforcement, just like in-group reinforcement, requires an understanding of how it works.

Know Thyself

Two aspects of your own self-knowledge dramatically influence you (whether or not you realize it). The first is your identity, or self-concept. In other words, what you think you are like—your traits, your strengths and weaknesses, your attitudes and preferences. You use this knowledge, largely unconsciously, to make hundreds of choices every day. Will you put your hat in the ring for that promotion? What will you do on your next day off? What will you eat for breakfast? Are you going to start watching Stranger Things? Your sense of your own identity guides all of these decisions. So knowing what you are like—and being accurate about it—is pretty important. It allows you to choose the best path for you, the one that leads to maximum happiness and success, because it fits you.

Self-knowledge comes from two primary sources. The first is self-perception—quite literally, observing yourself just as you would others. You draw conclusions about yourself and your skills, abilities, and character traits by taking note of your own thoughts and actions. You might assume this would naturally lead to a highly accurate assessment. After all, who knows what you think, feel, and do better than you do?

Unfortunately, self-perception is a tricky thing. Because so much of what drives our behavior isn’t fully conscious, we aren’t always aware of everything going on in our own brains. So we only have, at best, a partial view of the “why” behind what we do. In addition, human memory is an imperfect thing. What we can remember—and how easily—can make a big impact on the conclusions we draw about ourselves.

Imagine that I asked you to recall six instances when you behaved assertively. That’s probably not that hard for you to do, right? Maybe last week you spoke up in a meeting to challenge a colleague’s point of view. And then the other day, you sent your steak back because the chef had undercooked it. This is easy, you think. I must be pretty assertive.

Now imagine that instead of asking for six instances, I asked for twelve. A bit more challenging, no? After seven or eight, you start running out of memories, straining to come up with more examples. No surprise, then, that people who are asked to think of six times that they were assertive rate themselves as significantly more assertive than those who are asked for twelve.¹ Because no matter how assertive you are, coming up with a dozen specific instances when you behaved that way is hard. And people say to themselves, if I really was assertive, I should be able to come up with twelve times … so I guess I must not be.

Of course, the other way we know ourselves is through the eyes of others. Our earliest sense of self comes pretty much directly from our childhood caregivers. If Mommy thinks I’m smart or funny, then I must be. As we age, we look to our peers and relationship partners, our colleagues and acquaintances, to gather information about what we are like.

Judge Thyself

The second aspect of self-knowledge that shapes your world is how you feel about your identity. Do you, generally speaking, like you? Do you think you have mostly good qualities, or bad? A lot of ability, or very little? These evaluations contribute to your self-esteem.

Self-esteem is something like an internal identity thermometer. It moves up and down as you get feedback from the world around you about yourself—going up with successes and compliments, and down with setbacks and criticism. But for most of us, these are not wild fluctuations. Much like Oslo or Mexico City, the temperature stays within a certain range. People with high self-esteem tend to not dip down that much, and people with low self-esteem don’t enjoy a reprieve from hating themselves for too long.

Self-esteem matters because it provides you with a key piece of information—How am I doing? Do I have what it takes to navigate the world—personally, socially, professionally—in such a way that I can reach my goals? High self-esteem says, “Yes. Yes, you can.” Consequently, it gives you the confidence and resilience to push through the rough times. Research shows that people with high self-esteem experience more positive and less negative emotions overall. They engage in more effective coping strategies and persist longer when things go wrong. They have greater psychological protection from debilitating life events, like the loss of a job, relationship, or loved one. And they enjoy superior health outcomes across the board, including faster recovery from illness or surgery.

Understanding the importance of these two aspects of self-knowledge—having an accurate view of who you are, and liking who you are—psychologists eventually turned to the next logical question: Which is more important? Do people prioritize being right about themselves or thinking highly of themselves?

Evidence suggests that, despite the many twists and contortions people seem to go through to see themselves in a positive light (more on that in a moment), knowing yourself is actually the higher priority. People find it so disturbing when they face the possibility that they don’t know themselves, or have the wrong opinion of themselves, that they react in some highly surprising ways.

Take, for example, a famous study led by psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin.² The researchers invited college student participants into the lab and measured their self-esteem using a questionnaire. Next, they asked them to write a few paragraphs about themselves as part of a personality test that three other college students would evaluate. The researcher later showed the participants the three evaluations (which were fake)—one was positive, one was negative, and one was relatively neutral. Finally, the researcher asked the participants to rate how much they would like to meet each of their reviewers.

Now you might be thinking that everyone would want to meet the person who reviewed them favorably, and you’d be mostly right. But as Swann’s research showed, that’s because most people view themselves favorably. Among those participants who had negative self-views, however, the preference was overwhelmingly for the negative reviewer.

When studies like these were first published, many psychologists were skeptical. For years, accepted wisdom was that pretty much everyone would want to interact with other people who would lift their self-esteem, especially those who were a bit down in the dumps about themselves. But it’s since become clear that the desire to see oneself positively, while strong, is secondary to the desire to see oneself accurately. If I think I am pretty lousy, then anyone who thinks differently has the potential to cause me great unease. Their views undermine the legitimacy of my own. No thank-you.

You may have seen this phenomenon in action in yourself. Have you ever given a friend or romantic partner a sincere compliment, only to watch them visibly recoil? Or even argue with you?

In the moment, it can feel inexplicable, ungrateful, even hurtful. But such is the intensity of the drive to know yourself accurately. If Susan sees herself as an awful cook—if that’s the story she’s been telling herself about herself—your compliment might threaten her in ways even she doesn’t fully understand. And people who feel threatened, even implicitly, behave badly.

Really, Though, I’m Pretty Great

That said, the vast majority of us do enjoy compliments, because we have largely positive opinions of ourselves. So there is no contradiction. This may surprise you, in so far as you have actually met other people and have often found them to be terrible. How do we manage to see ourselves so favorably, despite our many flaws? Well, we humans have no shortage of clever ways to accomplish this trick.

There but for the Grace of God …

First, we engage in something called downward social comparison, or, as you may have heard it expressed, “Hey, at least I’m not that guy.” These are the C students who compare themselves to the F students, rather than the A students. The person in an unhappy marriage who focuses on the turmoil of her friend’s divorce, and the divorcee who is grateful to no longer be among the unhappily married. We compare ourselves to one another constantly—often not entirely consciously—and those comparisons aren’t random. They are targeted, often with the aim of finding some poor fool who is worse off, to make us feel better.

Explain Yourself

Do me a favor. Take a quick moment to think about the last time you had a win—a time when you felt successful. (I’ll wait.) OK, now, why do you think you were successful?

Next, take a moment to think about your last setback. A time when you felt a bit like a failure. Got it? Why do you think you had that setback?

Now, notice anything different about how you explained your success and failure? If you are like most people with relatively high self-esteem, you probably explained your success in terms of your skills and abilities, but explained your failure as being the result of the circumstances. I scored that big account because of my persistence and creative thinking. I lost that big account because my boss has put too much on my plate for me to give them the time they need.

Psychologists call this a difference in attribution or explanatory style, and what we attribute our wins and losses to turns out to be intimately related to our sense of self-esteem. It’s also a critical factor in predicting who experiences helplessness and depression. People with the optimistic explanatory style that leads to higher self-esteem and greater resilience tend to attribute their successes to something about themselves that is internal and stable—for example, their intelligence, creativity, work ethic, and so on. In contrast, they attribute their failures to something that is changeable and circumstantial, saying things like: I didn’t get the support I needed, I didn’t apply the right strategy, People are working against me. (OK, that last one is perhaps more paranoid than anything else, but you get the idea.)

Run Away!

Never underestimate the human capacity for denial. One of the most common—and in the short term, reasonably effective—strategies for maintaining high self-esteem is to simply choose to ignore the bad stuff. Most of us have lots of places we can choose to put our attention, so we can, when necessary, choose to put it somewhere other than on our failures and shortcomings. (For example, I can and do avoid my reflection like the plague on days when I’m sleep-deprived and know I look like I’ve been run over by a truck.) This strategy involves some risk, however, because these things tend to catch up to you. Deny to yourself that you are disorganized or bad with time and you stand little hope of improving on either score. Deny to yourself that you can’t see well at night when driving, and you may end up wrapped around a tree.

A close cousin of denial is another ultimately ineffective strategy called “self-handicapping.” In essence, the idea is to sabotage your own performance deliberately, so that when you fail, you can blame it on the sabotage rather than something about you—something about your ability or character. Students sometimes self-handicap by deliberately not studying for difficult exams. Romantic partners may engage in distancing or other damaging behaviors that undermine the relationship. In both cases, when things fail—and they will—the failure can be blamed on the lack of study, or the distancing. Both are ultimately less of a blow to one’s self-esteem than allowing for the possibility that I’m not good enough.

No, but Seriously, I’m Pretty Great

Just as we can choose to ignore our setbacks and weaknesses, so too can we choose to focus our attention like a laser on our best and brightest qualities. We can revel in our own awesomeness, brag to friends and coworkers, and engage in positive self-talk in our bathroom mirrors. Studies show that something as simple as taking a moment to think about our values, like honesty, compassion, generosity, can result in tangible boosts to self-esteem.

Which brings us back, finally, to the topic of this book.

What Helping You Says about Me

People do kind and generous things all the time, often because the situation pretty much calls for it. If you see someone struggling with the door, you hold it open for them. If someone drops their papers in front of you, you stop to help pick them up. You do this with barely a thought, because the norms of society dictate that, much like driving on a particular side of the road or not urinating in public, this is what you do if you want to live among us. When we behave in a helpful manner, we don’t necessarily get a reinforcement unless that behavior is explicitly connected to our identity. In other words, it’s not that I did something helpful; it’s that I am a helpful person. The latter is where the reinforcement—and consequently the added motivation and benefits to well-being—lies.

Studies show, for example, that in children as young as three, being told that they could “be a helper” was more motivating and led to more effort than simply “helping” in tasks like assisting another child in cleaning up blocks.

Similarly, people are reliably more likely to vote if you ask them, “How important is it to you to be a voter?” the day before an election than, “How important is it to you to vote?”³ And people make bigger contributions to charity when asked if they would like to be a “generous donor” than they do if they are simply asked to donate.

Making a direct connection to how helpfulness relates to the kind of person you are is also essential for tapping into a very powerful source of positive identity reinforcement: gratitude. You read a lot these days about research showing that practicing gratitude—making a deliberate point of being grateful for the good things in your life—has all sorts of benefits for happiness and well-being. These articles usually end with a call to the reader to start keeping a gratitude journal to reap the full personal benefits of being thankful.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s also worth-while to keep in mind gratitude’s other, arguably even more important purpose: to strengthen our relationships with those upon whom we rely and make them more likely to support us again in the future.

Historically, most of the research on gratitude has focused on its social function, not its impact on our own brains. This body of research has found, to put it bluntly, that expressing gratitude to someone who helps you keeps them interested and invested in having a relationship with you over the long haul. It makes their time, effort, and inconvenience seem worth it.

In the same vein, there is nothing quite like ingratitude to sour an otherwise happy relationship. Most of us can recall a time when we were shocked at how unappreciative and thoughtless someone was in response to our generosity. (And if you are a parent, chances are you just have to think back to this morning’s breakfast.) Without some sort of acknowledgment, people very quickly stop wanting to help you. In a set of studies by Francesca Gino and Adam Grant, the absence of thanks for previous help given saw future helping rates cut immediately in half.⁴

Gratitude is a glue that binds you and your benefactor together, allowing you to hit the same well over and over again when you need support, knowing that it won’t run dry.

The critical thing to remember when providing positive identity reinforcement is to put the emphasis—either in your initial request, or in your subsequent expression of thanks—on the kind of person the helper is, and how providing you with support is an expression of who they are. Remember what we covered in chapter 6: saying thank-you the right way means praising the other person for being kind, generous, selfless, and good-looking. (OK, maybe not the last one.) It does not mean talking about how their help let you enjoy a hard-earned vacation or helped you impress the boss. You may be the one who needs help, but if you want it to be motivating and rewarding, it needs to be all about them.

The Helper’s Identity Matters, Not Yours

On that note, remember that what would give you a positive identity boost isn’t, necessarily, what will do it for them. Asking me to donate to the Humane Society so I can be a “friend to all animals” really only works if I want to be friend to all animals. Maybe I hate animals. In which case, asking me to donate so I can help get stray animals in shelters and be a “defender of our community” against the scourge of wild dogs is going to be a much better pitch.

Often, the same exact behavior we’re trying to solicit for support can be framed as serving multiple purposes and thus enhancing different positive identities. The key is finding the right one.

For example, studies suggest that pro-environment messages are often framed exclusively in relatively narrow moral terms that appeal specifically to liberal values, evoking concepts like injustice, harm, or care.⁵ Consequently, these messages are motivating only to liberals, for whom they hold the potential to create positive identity. However, when researchers frame these same messages in moral terms that appeal to conservatives, including concepts like purity and sanctity, respect for authority, and patriotism, a different pattern emerges:

Researchers found that when pro-environment messages matched the political and moral values of participants, they emerged with greater intentions to engage in pro-environment behaviors and stronger endorsement of the danger of climate change.⁶ So to maximize positive identity reinforcement, know your audience and emphasize what matters to them, not to you.

Obi-Wan Kenobi, You’re My Only Hope

In a previous chapter, we talked about the importance of avoiding diffusion of responsibility when making requests for support. Sending an email to fifty people asking for the same favor makes it all too easy for any one of them to say, “I don’t need to do this. Someone else will.”

But there is another critical insight about helper motivation that is often overlooked here: the very fact that someone else could help you undermines the potential positive identity reinforcement for me. Because what people really want to give is unique or, to use the technical term, “nonsubstitutable” help. Help that only they can give. Because the more unique the help, the more closely tied it is to who they are.

Studies show that giving that involves your “essence”—your name (in the form of your signature), your personal possessions, or physical body (e.g., blood donation)—increases self-perceptions of generosity and commitment to ongoing support, compared to other gifts of equal value, like money. Being asked to give of the “self” has also been linked to greater generosity when people are given a future opportunity to help.⁷

For instance, in one study, researchers gave participants pens and then asked them on their way out of the study to donate the pen to children in developing countries. Those who had been given the pen at the beginning of the study rated themselves more generous and committed than those given it at the end, because enough time had passed to make it feel as if the pen was really their possession.

In a second study, people who purchased cookies to support a charity and wrote their name on the order felt more generous and committed than those who simply paid for the cookie.

There are really two things going on here. The first is that giving of the self—giving something only you can give—results in an increased subjective value of the donation. Because one of the most robust findings in all of psychology is something called the endowment effect, namely, that we all think that our own stuff is worth more just because it’s ours. (A quick example from a typical experiment: an undergraduate walks into the lab. You show them a really nice mug with their university insignia on it and ask them how much of their own money they’d be willing to spend to buy it. They say, “Three dollars.” A second undergraduate walks into the lab. You give them the really nice mug. And now you ask them how much you have to pay them to get it back. They say, “Five dollars.” Because now that they own the mug, it just seems more valuable. And this, in essence, is why every real estate transaction is pretty much a total nightmare.)

The second thing happening is that unique helping provides greater integration of the generous act into one’s own self-concept. After all, helping that only I can give must say something pretty great about me.

So to activate the positive identity reinforcement, find ways to convey that the helper is in a unique position to help you—that they, like Obi-Wan, are really your only hope.

It Helps to Remember