Identity As Adaptation
Journal of Adolescence 1996, 19, 405–416
Identity as adaptation to social, cultural, and historical context ROY F. BAUMEISTER AND MARK MURAVEN
Adaptation may be the best way to conceptualize the complex, multilateral relationship between individual identity and sociocultural context, because it recognizes the causal importance of culture yet also recognizes individual choice and change. This argument is developed by considering how several historical changes in the sociocultural context (i.e. increasing freedom of choice, changed interpersonal patterns, loss of traditional value bases, and rising tension between desire for uniqueness and difficulty of achieving it) have led to changes in the nature of identity. Although identity …show more content…
Pursuing love, caring for family members, and doing what is best for the children are all widely accepted as ways of doing the right thing—and they do not require further justification. No one asks you to explain why you should bother doing what is good for your children. Self and family are therefore two of the most powerful modern values. The potential for conflict between them is therefore one important aspect of the modern context for identity.
Such conflict would presumably take the form of dilemmas in which what is best for the self is not necessarily what is best for the family. Zube’s (1972) study of the moral messages in women’s magazines showed how the culture’s thinking about such conflict evolved over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1940s, the consistent message was that family needs should take precedence, and so the needs of the self had to be subjugated to what was best for the marriage. By the 1960s, however, this priority had reversed, and so it
412
R. F. Baumeister and M. Muraven
was depicted as a right and even a duty to break free of an unsatisfying marriage for the sake of benefiting and cultivating the
Identity as adaptation to social, cultural, and historical context ROY F. BAUMEISTER AND MARK MURAVEN
Adaptation may be the best way to conceptualize the complex, multilateral relationship between individual identity and sociocultural context, because it recognizes the causal importance of culture yet also recognizes individual choice and change. This argument is developed by considering how several historical changes in the sociocultural context (i.e. increasing freedom of choice, changed interpersonal patterns, loss of traditional value bases, and rising tension between desire for uniqueness and difficulty of achieving it) have led to changes in the nature of identity. Although identity …show more content…
Pursuing love, caring for family members, and doing what is best for the children are all widely accepted as ways of doing the right thing—and they do not require further justification. No one asks you to explain why you should bother doing what is good for your children. Self and family are therefore two of the most powerful modern values. The potential for conflict between them is therefore one important aspect of the modern context for identity.
Such conflict would presumably take the form of dilemmas in which what is best for the self is not necessarily what is best for the family. Zube’s (1972) study of the moral messages in women’s magazines showed how the culture’s thinking about such conflict evolved over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1940s, the consistent message was that family needs should take precedence, and so the needs of the self had to be subjugated to what was best for the marriage. By the 1960s, however, this priority had reversed, and so it
412
R. F. Baumeister and M. Muraven
was depicted as a right and even a duty to break free of an unsatisfying marriage for the sake of benefiting and cultivating the