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124 Personal Identity Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Personal Identity Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Personal identity is a complex and multi-faceted concept that encompasses how individuals perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others. Exploring personal identity can lead to a deeper understanding of oneself and one's place in the world. In this article, we will provide you with 124 personal identity essay topic ideas and examples to help inspire your writing.

• The role of culture in shaping personal identity
• How do social media profiles influence personal identity?
• The impact of family background on personal identity
• Exploring the concept of self-identity
• How do personal experiences shape one's identity?
• The relationship between personal identity and self-esteem
• The influence of gender on personal identity
• How do personal values shape one's identity?
• The impact of education on personal identity
• The role of religion in shaping personal identity
• How does race and ethnicity influence personal identity?
• The impact of language on personal identity
• The influence of societal norms on personal identity
• How does personal identity change over time?
• Exploring the concept of multiple identities
• The impact of social class on personal identity
• The relationship between personal identity and mental health
• How do personal relationships shape one's identity?
• The influence of physical appearance on personal identity
• The role of personal beliefs in shaping identity
• How does personal identity influence career choices?
• The impact of trauma on personal identity
• Exploring the concept of collective identity
• The relationship between personal identity and social identity
• How does personal identity influence decision-making?
• The influence of media on personal identity
• The impact of technology on personal identity
• The role of personal interests in shaping identity
• How do personal goals influence one's identity?
• The influence of political beliefs on personal identity
• Exploring the concept of national identity
• The impact of globalization on personal identity
• The relationship between personal identity and self-expression
• How does personal identity influence social interactions?
• The influence of personal experiences on cultural identity
• The impact of migration on personal identity
• The role of language in shaping cultural identity
• How do personal values influence cultural identity?
• The relationship between cultural identity and national identity
• Exploring the concept of hybrid identity
• The impact of globalization on cultural identity
• The influence of media on cultural identity
• The role of education in shaping cultural identity
• How does cultural identity influence social interactions?
• The impact of colonialism on cultural identity
• The relationship between cultural identity and language
• Exploring the concept of diaspora identity
• The influence of religion on cultural identity
• The role of food in shaping cultural identity
• How do cultural traditions influence identity?
• The impact of migration on cultural identity
• How does cultural identity influence personal relationships?
• The influence of societal norms on cultural identity
• The role of music in shaping cultural identity
• Exploring the concept of intercultural identity
• The impact of technology on cultural identity
• The influence of fashion on cultural identity
• The relationship between cultural identity and social identity
• How does cultural identity influence decision-making?
• The impact of globalization on national identity
• The role of history in shaping national identity
• Exploring the concept of ethnic identity
• The influence of language on national identity
• The relationship between national identity and cultural identity
• How does national identity influence political beliefs?
• The impact of colonialism on national identity
• The role of symbols in shaping national identity
• Exploring the concept of regional identity
• The influence of geography on national identity
• The relationship between national identity and social identity
• How does national identity influence personal values?
• The impact of migration on national identity
• The role of education in shaping national identity
• Exploring the concept of national pride
• The influence of media on national identity
• The relationship between national identity and global identity
• How does national identity influence decision-making?
• The impact of nationalism on national identity
• The role of sports in shaping national identity
• Exploring the concept of national heritage
• The influence of language on regional identity
• The relationship between regional identity and cultural identity
• How does regional identity influence social interactions?
• The impact of history on regional identity
• The role of geography in shaping regional identity
• Exploring the concept of local identity
• The influence of traditions on regional identity
• The relationship between regional identity and national identity
• How does regional identity influence personal relationships?
• The impact of migration on regional identity
• The role of education in shaping regional identity
• Exploring the concept of regional pride
• The influence of media on regional identity
• The relationship between regional identity and social identity
• How does regional identity influence decision-making?
• The impact of globalization on regional identity
• The role of sports in shaping regional identity
• Exploring the concept of regional heritage
• The influence of language on local identity
• The relationship between local identity and cultural identity
• How does local identity influence social interactions?
• The impact of history on local identity
• The role of geography in shaping local identity
• Exploring the concept of community identity
• The influence of traditions on local identity
• The relationship between local identity and national identity
• How does local identity influence personal relationships?
• The impact of migration on local identity
• The role of education in shaping local identity
• Exploring the concept of local pride
• The influence of media on local identity
• The relationship between local identity and social identity
• How does local identity influence decision-making?
• The impact of globalization on local identity
• The role of community events in shaping local identity
• Exploring the concept of community heritage
• The influence of language on community identity
• The relationship between community identity and cultural identity
• How does community identity influence social interactions?
• The impact of history on community identity
• The role of geography in shaping community identity
• Exploring the concept of neighborhood identity
• The influence of traditions on community identity

In conclusion, personal identity is a complex and nuanced concept that is shaped by a variety of factors, including culture, social interactions, personal experiences, and more. By exploring different facets of personal identity, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them. We hope that the essay topic ideas and examples provided in this article will inspire you to further explore the concept of personal identity and its impact on individuals and society as a whole.

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Personal Identity

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons ). This contrasts with questions about ourselves that arise by virtue of our being living things, conscious beings, moral agents, or material objects. Many of these questions occur to nearly all of us now and again: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Others are more abstruse. They have been discussed since the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about them. (There is also a rich but challenging literature on the topic in Eastern philosophy: see the entry on Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy .)

The topic is sometimes discussed under the protean term self . This term is sometimes synonymous with ‘person’, but often means something different: a sort of unchanging, immaterial subject of consciousness, for instance (as in the phrase ‘the myth of the self’). It is often used without any clear meaning and will be avoided here.

After surveying the main questions of personal identity, the entry will focus on our persistence through time.

1. The Problems of Personal Identity

2. understanding the persistence question, 3. accounts of our persistence, 4. psychological-continuity views, 6. the too-many-thinkers objection, 7. animalism and brute-physical views, 8. wider themes, other internet resources, related entries.

There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected and not always distinguished. Here are the most familiar:

Characterization. Outside of philosophy, the term ‘personal identity’ commonly refers to properties to which we feel a special sense of attachment or ownership. My personal identity in this sense consists of those properties I take to “define me as a person” or “make me the person I am”. (The precise meaning of these phrases is hard to pin down.) To have an “identity crisis” is to become unsure of what my most characteristic properties are—of what sort of person I am in some deep and fundamental sense. This individual personal identity contrasts with my gender, ethnic, and national identity, which consist roughly of the sex, ethnic group, or nation I take myself to belong to and the importance I attach to this.

Someone’s personal identity in this sense is contingent and temporary: the way I define myself as a person might have been different, and can vary from one time to another. It is a subset, usually a small one, of the properties someone has: it could happen that being a philosopher and a parent belong to my identity but not being a man or a cyclist, while someone else has the same four properties but feels differently towards them, so that being a man and a cyclist belong to his identity but not being a philosopher or a parent. Someone may not even need to have the properties belonging to her identity: if I become convinced that I am Napoleon, being an emperor could be one of the properties central to the way I define myself and thus part of my identity, even though the belief is false.

What determines someone’s personal identity in this sense is sometimes called the characterization question (Schechtman 1996: 1). It asks, in the expectation of a deep and revealing psychological answer, Who am I? (Glover 1988: part 2 and Ludwig 1997 are useful discussions.)

Personhood. What is it to be a person, as opposed to a nonperson? What have we people got that nonpeople haven’t got? The question often arises in connection with specific cases: we may ask, for example, at what point in our development from a fertilized egg there comes to be a person, or what it would take for a chimpanzee or a Martian or a computer to be a person, if they could ever be. An ideal account of personhood would be a definition of the word ‘person’, filling the blanks in the formula ‘Necessarily, x is a person at time t if and only if … x … t …’.

The most common answer is that to be a person is to have certain special mental properties. Locke, for instance, said that a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” (1975: 335; Baker 2000: ch. 3 is a detailed account of this sort). Others propose a less direct connection between personhood and these special mental properties: for example that to be a person is be capable of acquiring them (Chisholm 1976: 136f.), or to belong to a kind whose members typically have them when healthy and mature (Wiggins 1980: ch. 6). (A very different answer is mentioned in section 6.)

Persistence. What does it take for a person to persist from one time to another—to continue existing rather than cease to exist? What sorts of things is it possible, in the broadest sense of the word ‘possible’, for you to survive, and what sort of event would necessarily bring your existence to an end? What determines which past or future being is you? Suppose you point to a child in an old class photograph and say, “That’s me.” What makes you that one rather than one of the others? What is it about the way she relates then to you as you are now that makes her you? For that matter, what makes it the case that anyone at all existing back then is you? This is sometimes called the question of personal identity over time , as it has to do with whether the earlier and the later being are one thing or two—that is, whether they are numerically identical. An answer to it is an account of our persistence conditions .

Historically this question often arises from the thought that we might continue existing after we die (as in Plato’s Phaedo ). Whether this could happen depends on whether biological death necessarily brings our existence to an end. Imagine that after your death there really will be someone, in this world or the next, who resembles you in certain ways. How would she have to relate to you as you are now in order to be you, rather than someone else? What would the Higher Powers have to do to keep you in existence after your death? Or is it even possible? The answer to these questions depends on the answer to the persistence question.

Evidence. How do we find out who is who? What evidence bears on the question of whether the person here now is the one who was here yesterday? One source of evidence is first-person memory: if you remember doing some particular action (or seem to), and someone really did do it, this supports the claim that that person is you. Another source is physical resemblance: if the person who did it looks just like you—or better, if she is in some way physically or spatio-temporally continuous with you—that too supports her being you. Which of these sources is more fundamental? Does first-person memory count as evidence all by itself, or only insofar as we can check it against physical facts? What should we do when these considerations support opposing verdicts?

Suppose Charlie’s memories are erased and replaced with accurate memories (or apparent memories) of the life of someone long dead—Guy Fawkes, say (Williams 1956–7). Ought we to conclude on these grounds that the resulting person is not actually Charlie, but Guy Fawkes brought back to life? Or should we instead infer on the basis of physical continuity that he’s just Charlie with different memories? What principle would answer this question?

The evidence question dominated the anglophone literature on personal identity from the 1950s to the 1970s (Shoemaker 1963, 1970 and Penelhum 1967 are good examples). It’s important to distinguish it from the persistence question. What it takes for you to persist through time is one thing; how we ought to evaluate the relevant evidence is another. If the criminal had fingerprints just like yours, the courts may rightly conclude that he is you, but having your fingerprints is not what it is for a past or future being to be you: it’s neither necessary (you could survive without any fingers at all) nor sufficient (someone else could have fingerprints just like yours).

Population. If the persistence question is about which of the characters introduced at the beginning of a story have survived till the end of it, we may also ask how many are on the stage at any one time. What determines how many of us there are right now? If there are eight billion people on the earth at present, what facts—biological, psychological, or what have you—make that the right number?

You may think the number of people at any given time (or at least the number of human people) is simply the number of human organisms there are then. But this is disputed. Some say that cutting the main connections between the cerebral hemispheres results in radical disunity of consciousness so that two people share a single organism (Nagel 1971; for skeptical views see Wilkes 1988: ch. 5 and van Inwagen 1990: 188–212). Others say that a human being with multiple personality could literally be the home of two or more thinking beings (Wilkes 1988: 127f., Rovane 1998: 169ff.; see also Olson 2003, Snowdon 2014: ch. 7). Still others argue that two people can share an organism in cases of conjoined twinning (Campbell and McMahan 2016; see also Olson 2014).

The population question is sometimes called the problem of “synchronic identity”, as opposed to the “diachronic identity” of the persistence question; but these terms need careful handling. They are apt to give the mistaken impression that identity comes in two kinds, synchronic and diachronic. The truth is simply that there are two kinds of situations where we can ask how many people (or other things) there are: those involving just one moment and those involving several. To make matters worse, the term ‘synchronic identity’ is sometimes used to express the personhood question.

Personal ontology. What are we? What properties of metaphysical importance do we human people have, in addition to the mental properties that make us people? What, for instance, are we made of? Are we composed entirely of matter, as stones are, or are we partly or wholly immaterial? Where do our spatial boundaries lie, if we are spatially extended at all? Do we extend all the way out to our skin? If so, what fixes those boundaries? Do we have temporal as well as spatial parts? Are we substances—metaphysically independent beings—or is each of us a state or an activity of something else?

Here are some of the main proposed accounts of what we are (Olson 2007):

• We are biological organisms (“animalism”: van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997, 2003a).
• We are material things “constituted by” organisms: a person is made of the same matter as a certain animal, but they are different things because what it takes for them to persist is different (Baker 2000, Johnston 2007, Shoemaker 2011).
• We are temporal parts of animals: each of us stands to an organism as your childhood stands to your life as a whole (Lewis 1976).
• We are spatial parts of animals: something like brains, perhaps (Campbell and McMahan 2016, Parfit 2012), or temporal parts of brains (Hudson 2001, 2007).
• We are partless immaterial substances—souls—as Plato, Descartes, and Leibniz thought (Unger 2006: ch. 7), or compound things made up of an immaterial soul and a biological organism (Swinburne 1984: 21).
• We are collections of mental states or events: “bundles of perceptions”, as Hume said (1978 [1739]: 252; see also Quinton 1962, Campbell 2006).
• There is nothing that we are: we don’t really exist at all (Russell 1985: 50, Unger 1979, Sider 2013).

There is no consensus or even a dominant view on this question.

What matters in survival. What is the practical importance of facts about our persistence? Why does it matter ? If you had to choose between continuing to exist or being annihilated and replaced by someone else exactly like you, what reason would you have to prefer one over the other? And what reason do you have to care about what will happen to you, as opposed to what will happen to other people? Or is there any such reason? Imagine that surgeons are going to put your brain into my head and that neither of us has any choice about this. The resulting person will be in terrible pain after the operation unless one of us pays a large sum in advance. If we were both entirely selfish, which of us would have a reason to pay? Will the resulting person—who will think he is you—be responsible for your actions or for mine? (Or both, or neither?) These questions are summarized in the phrase what matters in survival .

The answer may seem to turn entirely on whether the resulting person would be you or I. Only I can be responsible for my actions. The fact that some person is me, by itself, gives me a reason to care about him. Each person has a special, selfish interest in her own future and no one else’s. Identity itself (numerical identity) is what matters in survival. But some say that I could have an entirely selfish reason to care about someone else’s future for his own sake. Perhaps what gives me a reason to care about what happens to the man people will call by my name tomorrow is not that he is me, but that he is then psychologically continuous with me as I am now (see Section 4). If someone else were psychologically continuous tomorrow with me as I am now, he would have what matters to me and I ought to transfer my selfish concern to him. Likewise, someone else could be responsible for my actions, and not for his own. Identity itself has no practical importance. (Sosa (1990) and Merricks (2022) argue for the importance of identity; Parfit (1971, 1984: 215, 1995) and Martin (1998) argue against.)

That completes our survey. Though some of these questions may bear on others, they are to a large extent independent. Many discussions of personal identity leave it unclear which one is at stake.

Turn now to the persistence question. Few concepts have led to more misunderstanding than identity over time. The persistence question is often confused with others or stated in a tendentious way.

It asks roughly what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future being to be someone existing now. If we point to you now, then describe someone or something existing at another time, we can ask whether we are referring twice to one thing or once to each of two things. The persistence question is what determines the answer to such queries. (And there are precisely analogous questions about the persistence of other things, such as dogs or stones.)

Here are three common misunderstandings of this question. Some take it to ask what it means to say that a past or future being is you. This would imply that we can answer it simply by reflecting on our linguistic knowledge—on what we mean by the word ‘person’, for example. The answer would be knowable a priori. It would also imply that necessarily all people have the same persistence conditions—that the answer to the question is the same no matter what sort of people we considered. Though some endorse these claims (Noonan 2019b: 84–93), they are disputed. What it takes for us to persist might depend on whether we are biological organisms, which we cannot know a priori. And if there could be immaterial people—gods or angels, say—what it takes for them to persist might differ from what it takes for a human person to persist. In that case our persistence conditions could not be established by linguistic or conceptual analysis.

Second, the persistence question is often confused with the question of what it takes for someone to remain the same person (as in this passage by Bertrand Russell (1957: 70): “Before we can profitably discuss whether we shall continue to exist after death, it is well to be clear as to the sense in which a man is the same person as he was yesterday.”) If Baffles were to change in certain ways—if she lost much of her memory, say, or changed dramatically in character, or became severely disabled—we might ask whether she would still be the person she was before, or instead become a different person. This is not a question about persistence—about numerical identity over time. To ask whether Baffles is the same person that she was before, or to say that she is a different person from the one she used to be, presupposes that she herself existed at the earlier time. The question arises only when numerical identity is assumed. To ask about Baffles’ persistence, by contrast, is to ask not whether she has continued to be the same person, but whether she has continued to exist at all.

When we speak of someone’s remaining the same person or becoming a different one, we mean remaining or ceasing to be a certain sort of person. For someone no longer to be the same person is for her still to exist, but to have changed in some important way. This typically has to do with her individual identity in the sense of the characterization question—with changes in respect of those properties that “define someone as a person.”

Third, the persistence question is often taken to ask what it takes for the same person to exist at two different times. The most common formulation is something like this:

• If a person x exists at one time and a person y exists at another time, under what possible circumstances is it the case that x is y ?

This asks, in effect, what it takes for a past or future person to be you, or for you to continue existing as a person . We have a person existing at one time and a person existing at another, and the question is what is necessary and sufficient for them to be one person rather than two.

This is narrower than the persistence question. We may want to know whether each of us was ever an embryo, or whether we could survive in an irreversible vegetative state (where the resulting being is biologically alive but has no mental properties). These are clearly questions about what it takes for us to persist. But as personhood is most commonly defined (recall Locke’s definition quoted earlier), something is a person at a given time only if it has certain special mental properties at that time. Embryos and human beings in a vegetative state, having no mental properties at all, are thus not people when they’re in that condition. And in that case we cannot infer anything about whether you were once an embryo or could exist in a vegetative state from a principle about what it takes for a past or future person to be you.

We can illustrate the point by considering this answer to question 1:

Necessarily, a person x existing at one time is a person y existing at another time if and only if x can, at the first time, remember an experience y has at the second time, or vice versa.

That is, a past or future person is you just if you (who are now a person) can now remember an experience she had then, or she can then remember an experience you’re having now. Call this the memory criterion . (It too is often attributed to Locke, though it’s uncertain whether he actually held it: see Behan 1979.)

The memory criterion may seem to imply that if you were to lapse into an irreversible vegetative state, you would cease to exist (or perhaps pass to the next world): the resulting being could not be you because it would not remember anything. But no such conclusion follows. Assuming that an organism in a vegetative state is not a person, this is not a case involving a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time. The memory criterion can only tell us which past or future person you are, not which past or future being generally. It says what it takes for someone to persist as a person , but not what it takes for someone to persist without qualification. So it implies nothing about whether you could exist in a vegetative state or even as a corpse, or whether you were once an embryo. As stated, it’s compatible with your surviving with no memory continuity at all, as long as this happens when you are not a person (Olson 1997: 22–26, Mackie 1999: 224–228).

No advocate of the memory criterion would accept this. The view is intended to imply that if a person x exists now and a being y exists at another time—whether or not it’s a person then—they are one just if x can now remember an experience y has at the other time or vice versa. But this not an answer to Question 1: what it takes for a person existing at one time and a person existing at another time to be one rather than two. It’s an answer to a more general question: what it takes for something that is a person at one time to exist at another time as well, whether or not it’s a person then:

• If a person x exists at one time and something y exists at another time, under what possible circumstances is it the case that x is y ?

Those who ask Question 1 are commonly assuming that every person is a person essentially : nothing that is in fact a person could possibly exist without being a person. (By contrast, no student is a student essentially: something that is in fact a student can exist without being a student.) This claim, “person essentialism,” implies that whatever is a person at one time must be a person at every time when she exists, making Questions 1 and 2 equivalent.

But person essentialism is controversial (Olson and Witt 2020). Combined with a Lockean account of personhood, it implies that you were never an embryo: at best you may have come into being when the embryo that gave rise to you developed certain mental capacities. Nor could you exist in a vegetative state. It rules out the brute-physical view described in the next section. Whether we were once embryos or could exist in a vegetative state, or whether we are people essentially, would seem to be substantive questions that an account of our persistence should answer, not matters to be presupposed in the way we frame the debate.

Three main sorts of answers to the persistence question have been proposed. Psychological-continuity views say that our persistence consists in some psychological relation, the memory criterion mentioned earlier being an example. You are that future being that in some sense inherits its mental features from you—beliefs, memories, preferences, the capacity for rational thought, and so on—and you are that past being whose mental features you have inherited in this way. There is dispute over what sort of inheritance this has to be—whether it must be underpinned by some kind of physical continuity, for instance, and whether it requires a “non-branching” restriction—and about what mental features need to be inherited. (We will return to some of these points.) But most philosophers writing on personal identity since the early 20th century have endorsed some version of this view: e.g. Dainton 2008, Hudson (2001, 2007), Johnston (1987, 2016), Lewis (1976), Nagel (1986: 40), Parfit (1971; 1984: 207; 2012), Shoemaker (1970; 1984: 90; 1997; 1999, 2008, 2011), Unger (1990: ch. 5; 2000).

A second answer is that our persistence consists in a physical relation not involving psychology: you are that past or future being that has your body, or that is the same biological organism as you are, or the like. Call these brute-physical views. (Advocates include Ayers (1990: 278–292), Carter (1989), Olson (1997), Snowdon (2014), van Inwagen (1990: 142–188), and Williams (1956–7, 1970).)

Some try to combine these views, saying that we need both mental and physical continuity to survive, or that either would suffice without the other (Nozick 1981: ch. 1, Langford 2014, Madden 2016, Noonan 2021).

Both views agree that there is something that it takes for us to persist—that there are informative, nontrivial, necessary and sufficient conditions for a person existing at one time to exist at another time. A third view, anticriterialism , denies this. Psychological and physical continuity are evidence for persistence, it says, but do not always guarantee it and may not be required. The clearest advocate of this view is Merricks (1998; see also Swinburne 1984, Lowe 1996: 41ff., 2012; Langford 2017; for criticism see Zimmerman 1998, Shoemaker 2012). There is also debate about how anticriterialism should be understood (Olson 2012, Noonan 2011, 2019a).

Most people—most Western philosophy teachers and students, anyway—feel immediately drawn to psychological-continuity views. If your brain were transplanted, and that organ carried with it your memories and other mental features, the resulting person would be convinced that he or she was you. This can make it easy to suppose that she would be you, and this would be so because of her psychological relation to you. But there is no easy path from this thought to an attractive answer to the persistence question.

What psychological relation might it be? We have already mentioned memory: a past or future being might be you just if you can now remember an experience she had then or vice versa. This proposal faces two historical objections, dating to Sergeant and Berkeley in the 18th century (see Behan 1979) but more famously discussed by Reid and Butler (see the snippets in Perry 1975).

First, suppose a young student is fined for overdue library books, and as a middle-aged lawyer remembers paying the fine. In her dotage, however, she remembers her law career but has entirely forgotten not only paying the fine but all the other events of her youth. According to the memory criterion the young student is the middle-aged lawyer, the lawyer is the elderly woman, but the elderly woman is not the young student. This is an impossible result: if x and y are one and y and z are one, x and z cannot be two . Identity is transitive; memory continuity is not.

Second, it seems to belong to the very idea of remembering that you can remember only your own experiences. To remember paying a fine (or the experience of it) is to remember yourself paying. That makes it uninformative to say that you are the person whose experiences you can remember—that memory continuity is sufficient for us to persist. It’s uninformative because we could not know whether someone genuinely remembers a past experience without already knowing whether she is the one who had it. Suppose we ask whether Blott, who exists now, is the same as Clott, whom we know to have existed at some past time. The memory criterion tells us that Blott is Clott just if Blott can now remember an experience Clott had then. But Blott’s seeming to remember one of Clott’s experiences counts as genuine memory only if Blott actually is Clott. So we should already have to know whether Blott is Clott before we could apply the principle that is supposed to tell us whether she is. (There is, however, nothing uninformative about the claim that memory connections are necessary for us to persist—that you cannot survive in a condition in which you are unable to remember anything, for example.)

One response to the first problem (about transitivity) is to modify the memory criterion by switching from direct to indirect memory connections: the old woman is the young student because she can recall experiences the lawyer had at a time when the lawyer remembered the student’s life. The second problem is commonly met by replacing memory with “quasi-memory”, which is just like memory but without the identity requirement: even if it’s impossible to remember doing something you didn’t do but someone else did, you could still “quasi-remember” it (Penelhum 1970: 85ff., Shoemaker 1970; for criticism see McDowell 1997).

But there remains the obvious problem that there are many times in our pasts that we cannot remember or quasi-remember at all, and to which we are not linked even indirectly by an overlapping chain of memories. There is no time when you could recall anything that happened to you while you dreamlessly slept last night. The memory criterion has the absurd implication that you have never existed at any time when you were unconscious, and that the person sleeping in your bed last night was someone else.

A better solution replaces memory with the more general notion of causal dependence (Shoemaker 1984, 89ff.). We can define two notions, psychological connectedness and psychological continuity. A being is psychologically connected , at some future time, with you as you are now just if she is in the psychological states she is in then in large part because of the psychological states you are in now (and this causal link is of the right sort: see Shoemaker 1979). Having a current memory (or quasi-memory) of an earlier experience is one sort of psychological connection—the experience causes the memory of it—but there are others. The important point is that our current mental states can be caused in part by mental states we were in at times when we were unconscious. For example, most of your current beliefs are the same ones you had while you slept last night: they have caused themselves to continue existing. You are then psychologically continuous , now, with a past or future being just if some of your current mental states relate to those he or she is in then by a chain of psychological connections.

That would enable us to say that a person x who exists at one time is the same thing as something y existing at another time just if x is, at the one time, psychologically continuous with y as it is at the other time. This avoids the most obvious objections to the memory criterion.

It still leaves important questions unanswered, however. Suppose we could somehow copy all the mental contents of your brain to mine, much as we can copy the contents of one computer drive to another, thereby erasing the previous contents of both brains. Whether this would be a case of psychological continuity depends on what sort of causal dependence counts. The resulting being (with my brain and your mental contents) would be mentally as you were before, and not as I was. He would have inherited your mental properties in a way—but a funny one. Is it the right way? Could you literally move from one organism to another by “brain-state transfer”? Psychological-continuity theorists disagree. (Shoemaker (1984: 108–111, 1997) says yes; Unger (1990: 67–71) says no; see also van Inwagen 1997.)

A more serious worry for psychological-continuity views is that you could be psychologically continuous with two past or future people at once. If your cerebrum—the upper part of the brain largely responsible for mental features—were transplanted, the recipient would be psychologically continuous with you by anyone’s lights, and any psychological-continuity view will imply that she would be you. If we destroyed one of your cerebral hemispheres, the resulting being would also be psychologically continuous with you. (Hemispherectomy—even the removal of the left hemisphere, which controls speech—is sometimes carried out as a treatment for severe epilepsy: see Shurtleff et al . 2021.) And it would be the same if we did both at once, destroying one hemisphere and transplanting the other: the recipient would be you on any psychological-continuity view.

But now suppose that both hemispheres are transplanted, each into a different empty head. (We needn’t pretend that the hemispheres are exactly alike.) The two recipients—call them Lefty and Righty—will each be psychologically continuous with you. The psychological-continuity view as we have stated it implies that any being who is psychologically continuous with you must be you. It follows that you are Lefty and also that you are Righty. But that again is an impossible result: if you and Lefty are one and you and Righty are one, Lefty and Righty cannot be two. And yet they are: there are evidently two people after the operation. One thing cannot be numerically identical with two different things.

Psychological-continuity theorists have proposed two different solutions to this problem. One, sometimes called the “multiple-occupancy view”, says that if there is fission in your future, then there are two of you, so to speak, even now. What we think of as you is really two people, who are now exactly similar and located in the same place, doing the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The surgeons merely separate them (Lewis 1976, Perry 1972, Noonan 2019b: 141–144).

The multiple-occupancy view is usually combined with the general metaphysical claim that people and other persisting things are composed of temporal parts (often called “four-dimensionalism”; see Hudson 2001, Sider 2001a, Olson 2007: ch. 5). For each person, there is, for example, such a thing as her first half: an entity just like the person only briefer, like the first half of a meeting. On this account, the multiple-occupancy view is that Lefty and Righty coincide before the operation by sharing their pre-operative temporal parts or “stages”, then diverge by having different temporal parts located afterwards. They are like two roads that coincide for a stretch and then fork, sharing some of their spatial parts but not others. Much as the roads are just like one road where they overlap, Lefty and Righty are just like one person before the operation when they share their temporal parts. Even they themselves can’t tell that they are two. There are two coinciding people before the operation because of what happens later, just as there may be coinciding two roads here because of what’s the case elsewhere. Whether we really are composed of temporal parts, however, is disputed. (Its consequences are explored further in section 8.)

The solution more commonly proposed by psychological-continuity theorists abandons the claim that psychological continuity by itself suffices for us to persist, and says that a past or future being is you only if she is then psychologically continuous with you and no other being then is. (There is no circularity in this. We need not know the answer to the persistence question in order to know how many people there are at any one time: that comes under the population question.) So neither Lefty nor Righty is you: they both come into existence when your cerebrum is divided. If both your cerebral hemispheres are transplanted, you cease to exist—though you would survive if only one were transplanted and the other destroyed. Fission is death. (Shoemaker 1984: 85, Parfit 1984: 207; 2012: 6f., Unger 1990: 265).

This proposal, the “non-branching view”, has the surprising consequence that if your brain is divided, you will survive if only one half is preserved, but you will die if both halves are. That looks like the opposite of what we should expect: if your survival depends on the functioning of your brain (because that’s what underlies psychological continuity), then the more of that organ we preserve, the greater ought to be your chance of surviving.

In fact the non-branching view implies that transplanting one hemisphere and leaving the other in place would be fatal. Its consequences are especially surprising if brain-state transfer counts as psychological continuity: in that case, even copying your total brain state to another brain without doing you any physical harm would kill you.

These consequences are not only hard to believe, but mysterious as well. Keeping half your brain functioning is normally sufficient for your survival, according to psychological-continuity views. Why then would you not survive if the other half too were kept functioning, separate from the first? How could an event that would normally ensure your survival destroy you if accompanied by a second such event having no causal effect on the first (Noonan 2019b: 128–141)?

The non-branching view is largely responsible for the interest in the question of what matters in identity. Faced with the prospect of having one of your hemispheres transplanted, there is no evident reason to want the other one to be destroyed. Most of us, it seems, would rather have both preserved, even if they go into different heads. Yet on the non-branching view that is to prefer death over continued existence. This leads Parfit and others to say that that is precisely what we ought to prefer. We have no reason to want to continue existing, at least for its own sake. What you have reason to want (assuming that your life is going well) is that there be someone in the future who is psychologically continuous with you, whether or not she is you. The usual way to achieve this is to continue existing yourself, but on the non-branching view it’s not necessary.

Likewise, even the most selfish person may have a reason to care about the welfare of the beings who would result from her undergoing fission, whether or not either of them would be her. The non-branching view suggests that the sorts of practical concerns you ordinarily have for yourself can apply to someone other than you. More generally, facts about numerical identity—about who is who—have no practical importance. All that matters is who is psychologically continuous with whom. Psychological-continuity views are often said to be superior to brute-physical views in accounting for what matters in identity. Fission cases threaten this claim. (Lewis 1976 and Parfit 1976 debate whether the multiple-occupancy view can preserve the conviction that identity is what matters practically.)

Another objection to psychological-continuity views is that they rule out our being biological organisms (Carter 1989, Ayers 1990: 278–292, Snowdon 1990, Olson 1997: 80f., 100–109). This is because no sort of psychological continuity appears to be either necessary or sufficient for a human organism to persist.

We can see that it’s not necessary by noting that each human organism persists as an embryo without psychological continuity. And we can see that it’s not sufficient by imagining that your brain is transplanted. In that case the recipient would be uniquely psychologically continuous with you, and this continuity would be continuously physically realized. Any psychological-continuity view implies that she would be you. More generally, any person would go with her transplanted brain. But it does not appear as if any organism would go with its transplanted brain. It looks as if the operation would simply move an organ from one organism to another, like transplanting a liver. It follows that if you were an organism, you would stay behind with an empty head, contrary to psychological-continuity views.

Psychological-continuity views do not merely rule out our being essentially or “fundamentally” organisms, but our being organisms at all. They say that each person has the property of persisting by virtue of psychological continuity: of being such that psychological continuity (perhaps with a non-branching restriction) is both necessary and sufficient for it to continue existing. But no organism has this property. (Or at least no human organism does, and we are clearly not non-human organisms.) Or again: every person would go with her transplanted brain, but no organism would do so. And if every person has a property that no organism has, then no person is an organism.

That is said to be a problem for psychological-continuity views because healthy, adult human organisms appear to be conscious and intelligent. Suppose they are. And suppose, as psychological-continuity views appear to imply, that we ourselves are not organisms. Three awkward consequences follow.

First, you are one of two intelligent beings sitting there and reading this entry: there is, in addition to you, an organism reading it. More generally, there are two thinking beings wherever we thought there was just one, a person and an organism distinct from it.

Second, we would expect the organism not just to be intelligent, but to be psychologically indistinguishable from you. That would make it a person, if being a person amounts to having mental special properties (as on Locke’s definition)—a second person in addition to you. In that case it cannot be true that all people (or even all human people) persist by virtue of psychological continuity, contrary to psychological-continuity views. Some—those who are organisms—would have brute-physical persistence conditions.

Third, it’s hard to see how you could know whether you yourself were the nonanimal person with psychological persistence conditions or the animal person with brute-physical ones. If you thought you were the nonanimal, the organism would use the same reasoning to conclude that it was too. For all you could ever know, it seems, you might be the one making this mistake.

We can illustrate the nature of this epistemic problem by imagining a three-dimensional duplicating machine. When you step into the “in” box, it reads off your complete physical (and mental) condition and uses this information to assemble a perfect duplicate of you in the “out” box. The process causes momentary unconsciousness but is otherwise harmless. Two beings wake up, one in each box. The boxes are indistinguishable. Because each being will have the same apparent memories and perceive identical surroundings, each will think, for the same reasons, that he or she is you—but only one will be right. If this happened to you, it’s hard to see how you could know, afterwards, whether you were the original or the duplicate. (Suppose the technicians who work the machine are sworn to secrecy and immune to bribes.) You would think, “Who am I? Did I do the things I seem to remember doing, or did I come into being only a moment ago, complete with false memories of someone else’s life?” And you would have no way of answering these questions. In the same way, psychological-continuity views raise the questions, “What am I? Am I a nonanimal that would go with its brain if that organ were transplanted, or an animal that would stay behind with an empty head?” And here too there seem to be no grounds on which to answer them.

This is the “too-many-thinkers” or “thinking-animal” objection to psychological-continuity views. The most popular defense against it is to say that, despite sharing our brains and showing all the outward signs of consciousness and intelligence, human organisms do not think and are not conscious. There simply are no thinking animals to create problems for psychological-continuity views (Shoemaker 1984: 92–97, Lowe 1996: 1, Johnston 2007: 55; Baker 2000 offers a more complex variant).

But although this is easy to say, it’s hard to defend. If human organisms cannot be conscious and intelligent, it would seem to follow that no biological organism could have any mental properties at all. This threatens to imply that human organisms are “zombies” in the philosophical sense: beings physically identical to conscious beings, with the same behavior, but lacking consciousness (Olson 2018). And it leaves us wondering why organisms cannot be conscious. The best proposed answer is given by Shoemaker (1999, 2008, 2011), who argues that it is because organisms have the wrong persistence conditions, but it’s highly controversial.

A second option is to concede that human organisms are psychologically indistinguishable from us, but try to explain how we can still know that we are not those organisms. The best-known proposal of this sort focuses on personhood and first-person reference. It says that not just any being with mental properties of the sort that you and I have—rationality and self-consciousness, for instance—counts as a person (contrary to anything like Locke’s definition). A person must also persist by virtue of psychological continuity. It follows that human animals are not people (thus avoiding the second awkward consequence, about personhood).

Further, personal pronouns such as ‘I’, and the thoughts they express, refer only to people in this sense. So when your animal body says or thinks ‘I’, it refers not to itself but to you, the person. The organism’s statement ‘I am a person’ does not express the false belief that it is a person, but the true belief that you are. So the organism is not mistaken about which thing it is: it has no first-person beliefs about itself at all. And you’re not mistaken either. You can infer that you are a person from the linguistic facts that you are whatever you refer to when you say ‘I’, and that ‘I’ never refers to anything but a person. You can know that you are not the animal thinking your thoughts because it is not a person and personal pronouns never refer to nonpeople (thus avoiding the third, epistemic consequence; see Noonan 1998, 2010, Olson 2002; for a different approach see Brueckner and Buford 2009).

The too-many-thinkers problem arises on the assumption that we are not organisms, which appears to follow from psychological-continuity views because organisms don’t seem to persist by virtue of psychological continuity. But some say that human organisms do persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Although you are an organism, the transplant operation would not move your brain from one organism to another, but would cut an organism down to the size of a brain, move it across the room, and then give it new parts to replace the ones it lost. The view is sometimes called “new animalism” (Madden 2016, Noonan 2021; see also Langford 2014, Olson 2015: 102–106).

Animalism says that we human people are organisms. This does not imply that all organisms, or even all human organisms, are people: as we saw earlier, human embryos and animals in a vegetative state are not people on the most common definitions of that term. Being a person may be only a temporary property of us, like being a student. Nor does it imply that all people are organisms: it is consistent with there being wholly inorganic people such as gods or intelligent robots. Animalism is not an answer to the personhood question. (It is consistent, for instance, with Locke’s definition of ‘person’.)

The dominant view among both animalists and their opponents is that organisms persist by virtue of some sort of brute-physical continuity with no psychological element. So most animalists accept a brute-physical account of our persistence. And most advocates of brute-physical views take us to be organisms. This suggests that we have the same persistence conditions as certain nonpeople, such as oysters. And our persistence conditions differ from those of immaterial people, if there could be such things, so that there are no persistence conditions for people as such. Though some object to this (Baker 2000: 124), many psychological-continuity theorists say that all beings with mental properties have the same persistence conditions (Shoemaker 2008, Unger 2000), which has the same implication.

The most common objection to brute-physical views (and, by extension, to animalism) focuses on their implication that transplanting your brain into my head would not give you a new body, but would give me a new brain. You would stay behind with an empty head (e.g. Unger 2000; for an important related objection see Johnston 2007, 2016). Animalists generally concede that this is counterintuitive, but take this fact to be outweighed by other considerations: that we appear to be organisms, for example, that it’s hard to say what sort of non organisms we might be, and that our being organisms would avoid the too-many-thinkers problem. And animalism is compatible with our beliefs about who is who in real life: every actual case in which we take someone to survive or perish is a case where a human organism does so. Psychological-continuity views, by contrast, conflict with the appearance that each of us was once a foetus. When we see an ultrasound picture of a 12-week-old foetus, we ordinarily think we’re seeing something that will, if all goes well, be born, learn to speak, and eventually become an adult human person, yet no person is in any way psychologically continuous with a 12-week-old foetus.

And the “transplant objection” may be less compelling than it first appears (Snowdon 2014: 234). Suppose you had a tumor that would kill you unless your brain were replaced with a healthy donated organ. This would have grave side-effects: it would destroy your memories, plans, preferences, and other mental properties. It may not be clear whether you could survive it, even if the operation were successful. But is it really obvious that you could not survive it? Maybe it could save your life, though at great cost. And this might be so, the argument goes, even if the new brain gave you memories, plans, and preferences from the donor. But if it’s not obvious that the brain recipient would not be you, then it’s not obvious that it would be the donor. A brain transplant might be metaphysically analogous to a liver transplant. Again, the claim is not that this is obviously true, but only that it’s not obviously false. And in that case it’s not obvious that a person must go with her transplanted brain. (Williams 1970 argues in a similar way.)

The debate between psychological-continuity and brute-physical views cannot be settled without considering more general matters outside of personal identity. For instance, psychological-continuity theorists need to explain why human organisms are unable to think as we do. This will require an account of the nature of mental properties. Or if human organisms can think, psychological-continuity theorists will want an account of how we can know that we are not those organisms. This will turn on how the reference of personal pronouns and proper names works, or on the nature of knowledge.

Some general metaphysical views suggest that there is no unique right answer to the persistence question. The best-known example is the ontology of temporal parts mentioned in section 5. It says that for every period of time when you exist, short or long, there is a temporal part of you that exists only then. This gives us many likely candidates for being you—that is, many different beings now sitting there and reading this. Suppose you are a material thing, and that we know what determines your spatial boundaries. That should tell us what counts as your current temporal part or “stage”—the temporal part of you located now and at no other time. But that stage is a part of a vast number of temporally extended objects (Hudson 2001: ch. 4).

For instance, it is a part of a being whose temporal boundaries are determined by relations of psychological continuity (Section 4) among its stages. That is, one of the beings thinking your current thoughts is an aggregate of person-stages, each of which is psychologically continuous with each of the others and with no other stage. If this is what you are, then you persist by virtue of psychological continuity. Your current stage is also a part of a being whose temporal boundaries are determined by relations of psychological connectedness . That is, one of the beings now thinking your thoughts is an aggregate of person-stages, each of which is psychologically connected with each of the others and to no other stage. This may not be the same as the first being, as some stages may be psychologically continuous with your current stage but not psychologically connected with it. If this is what you are, then psychological connectedness is necessary and sufficient for you to persist (Lewis 1976). What’s more, your current stage is a part of an organism, which persists by virtue of brute-physical continuity, and a part of many bizarre and gerrymandered objects (Hirsch 1982, ch. 10). Some even say that you are your current stage itself (Sider 2001a, 188–208). And there would be many other candidates.

The temporal-parts ontology implies that each of us shares our current thoughts with countless beings that diverge from one another in the past or future. If this were true, which of these things should we be? Of course, we are the things we refer to when we say ‘I’, or more generally the referents of our personal pronouns and proper names. But these words would be unlikely to succeed in referring to just one sort of thing—to only one of the many candidates on each occasion of utterance. There would probably be some indeterminacy of reference, so that each such utterance referred ambiguously to many different candidates. That would make it indeterminate what things, and even what sort of things, we are. And insofar as the candidates have different histories and different persistence conditions, it would be indeterminate when we came into being and what it takes for us to persist (Sider 2001b).

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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animalism | identity | identity: relative | Locke, John | mind: in Indian Buddhist Philosophy | personal identity: and ethics | temporal parts | zombies

Acknowledgments

Some material in this entry appeared previously in E. Olson, ‘Personal Identity’, in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind , edited by S. Stich and T. Warfield, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Copyright © 2023 by Eric T. Olson < e . olson @ shef . ac . uk >

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Essay Samples on Personal Identity

Personal identity encompasses the fundamental question of “Who am I?” It delves into the complex layers of our individuality, examining the factors that define and distinguish us as unique beings. Exploring personal identity involves introspection and contemplation of various aspects, such as our beliefs, values, experiences, and relationships. It invites us to unravel the intricacies of our self-perception and the influences that shape our identities in personal identity essay examples.

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Best topics on Personal Identity

1. How Does Society Shape Our Identity

2. How Does Family Influence Your Identity

3. Exploring the Relationship Between Illness and Identity

4. Evolving Identities: The Concept of Self-Identity and Self-Perception

5. Free Cultural Identity: Understanding of One’s Identity

6. My Cultural Identity and Relationship with God

7. My Cultural Identity and Preserving Ancestors’ Traditions

8. Gregor Samsas` Burden In “The Metamorphosis” By F. Kafka

9. Reflections On Personal Intercultural Experience

10. Literature of African Diaspora as a Postcolonial Discourse

11. The Ideology of Giving People Status or Reward

12. Features And Things That Shape Your Identity

13. Identity Crisis: What Shapes Your Identity

14. My Passion And Searching What You Are Passionate About

15. The Importance Of Inner Beauty Over Outer Beauty

• Immanuel Kant
• Enlightenment
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• Euthyphro Dilemma
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Dynamics of Identity Development in Adolescence: A Decade in Review

Susan branje.

1 Utrecht University

Elisabeth L. de Moor

Jenna spitzer, andrik i. becht.

2 Erasmus University Rotterdam

One of the key developmental tasks in adolescence is to develop a coherent identity. The current review addresses progress in the field of identity research between the years 2010 and 2020. Synthesizing research on the development of identity, we show that identity development during adolescence and early adulthood is characterized by both systematic maturation and substantial stability. This review discusses the role of life events and transitions for identity and the role of micro‐processes and narrative processes as a potential mechanisms of personal identity development change. It provides an overview of the linkages between identity development and developmental outcomes, specifically paying attention to within‐person processes. It additionally discusses how identity development takes place in the context of close relationships.

In the current review, we discuss progress in the field of identity research between 2010 and 2020. One of the key developmental tasks in adolescence and young adulthood is to develop a coherent sense of self and identity (Erikson, 1968 ). Personal identity refers to one’s sense of the person one genuinely is, including a subjective feeling of self‐sameness and continuity over contexts and time. From early adolescence onwards, adolescents begin to question and explore their identity, that is, the person they are and want to be, the roles they want to occupy in adulthood, and their place in society (Meeus, Van De Schoot, Keijsers, Schwartz, & Branje, 2010 ). They become aware of their distinctiveness and uniqueness from others, coherence and similarity across domains, and continuity across time and situations (van Doeselaar, Becht, Klimstra, & Meeus, 2018 ). As they try to find out who they are and what they want to become in their lives, adolescents re‐examine the identifications they formed in childhood as they consider different identity possibilities (e.g., what kind of occupation fits my interests and abilities, what kind of relationships do I want to have), and form new commitments to identifications.

One way in which adolescents attempt to create continuity and self‐sameness is by integrating their past, present, and future selves into a personal narrative about their lives (McAdams, 2001 ; Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006 ). By constructing a sense of identity in the form of autobiographical stories, adolescents recognize that they are the same person across time and different contexts. Importantly, these life narratives are based on real experiences but are also highly subjective, as adolescents form them according to their own understanding of what was important for who they have become, and are also subject to change, as what adolescents find important for their identity may change over time. Individuals’ life stories differ in certain characteristics that are seen as indicative of identity, such as their level of autobiographical reasoning, complexity, dominant themes, and structure.

Dual‐cycle identity models focus on development of the dynamic identity processes of exploration and commitment that operate along two interrelated cycles. In the identity formation cycle, adolescents consider identity alternatives (i.e., in‐breadth exploration) and form identity commitments. The identity maintenance cycle serves the function to maintain and further strengthen chosen commitments in a dynamic between identity commitment and in‐depth exploration of current commitments. When adolescents’ in‐depth exploration results in increased identity uncertainty about their commitments, they may reconsider their commitments and go back to the identity formation cycle (Crocetti, 2017 ). Moreover, self‐concept clarity, or the extent to which individuals describe themselves consistently and feel sure of themselves (Campbell, 1990 ), has been described as a key ingredient of personal identity (Schwartz et al., 2011 ). Whereas dual‐cycle models of identity account for how the self‐concept is formed, self‐concept clarity might indicate how well the process of developing one’s own identity is going (Schwartz et al., 2011 ), or one’s identity synthesis.

Personal identity concerns self‐sameness and continuity of perceptions of who one is across multiple domains or aspects in life. Salient domains of identity during adolescence are the educational and vocational domain, which involve questions such as which kind of education or profession one wants to obtain, and the relational domain, which involves questions such as what kind of friendships or intimate relationship one wants to have. Other important identities are gender identity, ethnic identity, religious identity, and (mental) illness identity. Although global personal identity reflects the integration of one’s self‐concept across these domains, individuals do not necessarily experience similar levels of self‐sameness and continuity in all domains, particularly in adolescence when identity is still under development. At the same time, experiences in different domains will be intertwined and mutually influence each other. This distinction between global and domain‐specific identity is also apparent in the narratives that individuals construct. Individuals may construe narratives about several life domains, and their narratives may differ depending on the life domain (e.g., Dunlop, 2015 ; Galliher, McLean, & Syed, 2017 ) and on whether these narratives encompass one or multiple life domains (McLean, Syed, Yoder, & Greenhoot, 2016 ).

Personal identity is also strongly intertwined with social identity, which concerns those aspects of individuals’ self‐concept that are derived from the social groups they belong to. Individuals try to maintain a balance between their social identity of belonging to certain groups in comparison with outgroups, and their personal identity, which contains elements of distinctiveness in comparison with other members of the group. Those aspects of social identity that reflect individual’s social orientations or attitudes toward that domain can be considered a part of personal identity (Schwartz, Zamboanga, & Weisskirch, 2008 ). For example, whereas one’s social gender identity reflects the extent to which one perceives oneself as belonging to men, women, or other groups, one’s personal gender identity reflects the extent to which one perceives oneself as unique within the specific gender group. Personal and social identity are likely to reinforce each other and are integrated in the self‐concept (Crocetti, Prati, & Rubini, 2018 ) and identity narrative (Galliher et al., 2017 ). In the current review, we do not focus on social identity per se but include aspects of social identity that are relevant for adolescents’ personal identity, such as their engagement in exploration of their social‐cultural background and forming a clearer sense of what this background or group identity means for their self‐concept.

Even though adolescents increasingly know who they are and who they want to become, identity continues to develop into young adulthood (Schwartz, Côté, & Arnett, 2005 ). Contemporary Western society is characterized by prolonged education and a delay of transitions into adult roles such as work, stable partner relationships, and family life (Schoon, 2015 ). Thus, it might take well into adulthood before individuals reach a mature identity across these various identity domains and are able to create a coherent and relatively stable narrative of their self. The process of establishing a coherent sense of identity can be very stressful. For instance, ongoing identity uncertainty in adolescence and young adulthood has been related to the development of a range of psychosocial adjustment problems (for reviews see Meeus, 2011 ; van Doeselaar, Becht, et al., 2018 ; van Doeselaar, Klimstra, et al., 2018 ). Understanding how and why some individuals develop a coherent identity, whereas others remain highly uncertain about who they are and want to become, is therefore vital for supporting healthy development.

This review aims to synthesize research on the development of personal identity during adolescence. The review will predominantly focus on studies from the perspectives of the dual‐cycle models of identity development (e.g., Crocetti, Rubini, & Meeus, 2008 ; Luyckx, Goossens, & Soenens, 2006 ; Meeus et al., 2010 ) and of narrative identity (McAdams, 2001 ; McLean & Pasupathi, 2012 ), but will also include research using other approaches to personal identity, such as studies focusing on self‐concept clarity or identity processing styles. Narrative processes may be considered one of the key mechanisms of personal identity change (e.g., van Doeselaar, McLean, Meeus, Denissen, & Klimstra, 2020 ; McLean & Pasupathi, 2012 ), and such a synthesis may thus provide more insight into both strands of research, as well as their intersection. This focus aligns with the recently proposed framework for the study of identity development by Galliher et al. ( 2017 ), in which identity is understood as enacted at the micro‐level of real‐time interactions. In these interactions, different personal identity domains are pivotal and intersect, creating an integrated subjective sense of self. These micro‐processes take place within the context of the social roles that adolescents uptake.

By focusing on the underlying processes of identity development, and providing examples from a variety of identity domains, we integrate the current knowledge and offer directions for future research. We cannot give a full account of all the different identity domains, and instead, we focus predominantly on mechanisms underlying personal identity development, thereby giving examples from different identity domains. In our review of the adolescent identity field between 2010 and 2020, we address recent developments on the role of life events and transitions in identity development and discuss the role of within‐person micro‐processes in identity development. We particularly focus on the daily experiences and relational contexts with parents and peers in which identity emerges and is enacted, as these real‐time experiences are the driving mechanisms of intraindividual identity development.

INTRAINDIVIDUAL PROCESSES AND INTERINDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Mean level development of identity.

The development of personal identity has predominantly been studied using dual‐cycle models of identity (Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Luyckx et al., 2006 ; Meeus et al., 2010 ). Longitudinal studies have shown that these identity processes mature systematically (for a review on development of commitments see van Doeselaar, Becht, et al., 2018 ; van Doeselaar, Klimstra, et al., 2018 ), but these changes are modest and there is also quite some evidence for stability in identity processes during adolescence and young adulthood. For instance, decreasing mean levels of identity reconsideration in the educational and relational domain indicate that with age, adolescents become more certain about the commitments they have made (Klimstra, Hale, Raaijmakers, Branje, & Meeus, 2010 ), yet mean levels of educational and relational identity commitments are relatively stable in adolescence (Klimstra et al., 2010 ) and young adulthood (Shirai, Nakamura, & Katsuma, 2016 ). In addition, the less adaptive identity statuses of diffusion and moratorium, which are characterized by relatively weak commitments, systematically decrease, while the frequency of the most advanced identity status, identity achievement, increases from early‐to‐late adolescence (Hirschi, 2012 ; Meeus, van de Schoot, Keijsers, & Branje, 2012 ; Meeus et al., 2010 ). Despite these changes, however, the majority of individuals remains in the same identity status during adolescence (ages 12–20, Meeus et al., 2010 ) and young adulthood (ages 25–29, Carlsson, Wängqvist, & Frisén, 2015 ). A study using daily measures of identity in 15 weeks spread across a period of 5 years also found mostly stable patterns: Around 50% of the sample showed relatively high and stable commitment levels, while the other 50% of adolescents experienced a temporal discontinuity of identity commitments, indicated by a dip in commitments during middle adolescence (Becht et al., 2016 ).

Moderate increases during adolescence have been found for self‐concept clarity as well. Although one study showed that self‐concept clarity significantly increased over time in a sample of 12‐ to 21‐year‐olds (Wu, Watkins, & Hattie, 2010 ), this study did not further differentiate age to examine age‐related change patterns. Two other longitudinal studies showed that levels of self‐concept clarity between the ages of 13 and 18 were stable for girls and slightly increasing and then decreasing for boys (Crocetti, Moscatelli, et al., 2016 ) and that self‐concept clarity developed nonlinearly between the ages 17 and 23, with an initial decline from 16 to 17 years of age, followed by an increase until age 23 (Crocetti, Rubini, Branje, Koot, & Meeus, 2016 ).

For development of cultural and gender identity, the evidence thus far also suggests stability combined with some increase. In a sample of Black American boys, the centrality of race and gender to the self and the personal evaluation of one’s race and gender were either stable or decreased (Rogers, Scott, & Way, 2015 ). No developmental changes between the ages 15 to 18 were found in ethnic exploration and belonging of American adolescents with Latinx American, Asian, and European backgrounds (Kiang, Witkow, Baldelomar, & Fuligni, 2010 ). Comparably, among Asian American adolescents followed over a 4‐year period, ethnic Asian American identity remained stable, yet American identity increased over time (Kiang, Witkow, & Champagne, 2013 ).

Overall, these findings show that there is considerable stability in identity synthesis, identity statuses, and the underlying identity processes of commitment, exploration, and reconsideration across adolescence and young adulthood, but when there is developmental change, this change is mostly in the direction of maturation in identity. Also, there is substantial heterogeneity in development of identity processes across individuals and domains, with some adolescents showing changes toward lower self‐certainty and more identity confusion, and some domains showing more stability than others.

Most individuals may not reach a mature identity characterized by an integrated sense of self across multiple identity domains until well into adulthood (Branje & Koper, 2018 ; Kroger, Martinussen, & Marcia, 2010 ). Attesting to this principle of ongoing identity maturation, changes in commitment and exploration processes in educational and interpersonal identity domains have been found to become more strongly intertwined over time into late adolescence (Albarello, Crocetti, & Rubini, 2018 ). Also, young adults (18–23 years of age) showed relatively high identity congruence when comparing developmental patterns of identity commitment across identity domains, such as intimate relationships, parents, and education (Kunnen, 2010 ). That is, 73% of the young adults showed similar patterns in four out of six identity domains, and by young adulthood, most individuals showed an achieved identity as indicated by strong commitments and high levels of exploration across domains. However, only a limited amount of congruence in young adults’ identity statuses was found across vocational and relational identity, with only 18% showing strong commitments in both domains (Luyckx, Seiffge‐Krenke, Schwartz, Crocetti, & Klimstra, 2014 ). Similarly, a second‐order factor analysis showed that global identity processes could only partly explain domain‐specific identity processes in young adulthood (Vosylis, Erentaitė, & Crocetti, 2018 ). Thus, also in young adulthood, it remains important to distinguish between identity domains.

Beyond Mean Level Identity Development

More recently the focus of research has shifted from understanding mean level change to understanding the more complex developmental mechanisms underlying identity maturation. Studies have increasingly focused on intraindividual processes of identity development, and on the transitional periods or salient life events that might require adolescents to reconsider who they are and change their identity. Moreover, in addition to the annual or biannual measures of identity typically employed, micro‐level assessments of identity processes have emerged to offer a more detailed picture of the mechanisms underlying identity development.

Intraindividual associations among identity processes

Research has typically examined developmental changes in identity processes and their associations by focusing on the group level, such as changes in means or interindividual differences. In line with the dual‐cycle model of identity formation, studies have consistently shown negative associations between commitment making and exploration in breadth, positive associations between exploration in depth and identification with commitments, and negative associations between reconsideration and identification with commitments (Waterman, 2015 ). Although these studies offer valuable knowledge about why some individuals develop differently than others, they have not captured the intraindividual processes of identity development, such as whether and how intraindividual changes arise over time. For example, a mean change in identity commitments across adolescents does not tell us how these changes unfold within‐individual adolescents. Additionally, despite relatively stable interindividual differences in adolescent identity, changes within individuals may occur, as processes at the group level are unrelated to processes at the individual level (i.e., at the within‐person level, Molenaar, 2004 ).

The importance of examining intraindividual processes becomes evident when investigating central theories of identity development more closely. These theories in fact describe developmental processes at the intraindividual level; adolescents’ identity formation is expected to take place within individuals across time. For instance, adolescents are thought to experience an identity crisis before developing a clear and stable identity (Erikson, 1968 ). Tests of this hypothesis with interindividual analyses have shown that adolescents who experience more uncertainty about the self than their peers, for example by having weaker commitments and exploring more, typically remain more uncertain than those peers across adolescence (Meeus et al., 2010 ). One might conclude from this research that an identity crisis is not necessary for developing a coherent and mature identity, but these findings do not rule out that individual adolescents go through periods of uncertainty before establishing a more mature identity, irrespective of their level of identity certainty relative to their peers.

In the last decade, research has increasingly focused on how these reorganizations occur within‐individual adolescents. At the within‐person level, although the pattern of concurrent associations is similar to between‐person associations, the over‐time patterns seem to be different. In a 5‐year study among Dutch adolescents (Becht et al., 2017 ), within‐person cross‐lagged models showed that within the same waves, reconsideration was moderately to strongly negatively associated with commitment in the educational and interpersonal domain. That is, in years when adolescents reported higher than usual reconsideration, they also reported lower than usual commitments. Prospectively, when adolescents reported lower educational commitments in a particular year, they reported higher than usual reconsideration in the subsequent year. For interpersonal identity, however, higher reconsideration in a particular year was followed by stronger commitments the next year (Becht et al., 2017 ). Relatedly, within‐person cross‐lagged models indicated that when adolescents scored higher on identity synthesis than usual, they reported higher proactive exploration processes than usual 1 year later (Bogaerts et al., 2019 ). These within‐person findings suggest that reaching a degree of identity synthesis is a prerequisite for proactive identity exploration, and that reconsideration goes hand in hand with weaker commitments, but might be a prerequisite to find new commitments, consistent with the shift from the evaluation cycle to the formation cycle of identity. These findings offer initial support for the Eriksonian idea that commitments result from identity uncertainty.

Development of identity in relation to life transitions and events

Adolescents and young adults develop a sense of self during a phase of life that involves many role changes. These salient transitional periods, such as entering tertiary education, initiating intimate relationships, and joining the workforce, may form an important context that increases the salience of identity processes, and may go hand in hand with identity change. Indeed, much of the narrative tradition is built on the idea that individuals need to integrate important experiences in their lives into their identity (McAdams, 2001 ). Also, identity theory (Bosma & Kunnen, 2008 ; Marcia, 1966 ; Waterman, 1982 ) predicts that identity maturation occurs as the result of individuals’ investment in social roles that require them to engage in mature and socially responsible behavior.

In the last decade, empirical research has increasingly focused on the associations between transitions to new roles and the development of identity. Interindividual differences in identity may affect how individuals navigate through life transitions and take on new social roles. A study of over 1000 adolescents found that educational and relational identity processes in adolescence did not predict involvement in work or an intimate relationship in young adulthood 5 years later, but did predict vocational and relational identity processes in young adulthood (Branje, Laninga‐Wijnen, Yu, & Meeus, 2014 ). These findings suggest that identity processes in adolescence contribute to successful fulfillment of adult roles once these role transitions in young adulthood are made. At the same time, transitions might also affect identity processes. A study on heterogeneity in the development of educational identity across the transition to tertiary education (Christiaens, Nelemans, Meeus, & Branje, 2021 ) revealed that many adolescents show stable patterns of commitment and reconsideration surrounding this transition, yet a sizable minority has either more or less adaptive patterns after the transition, which are meaningfully associated with sociodemographic, academic, individual, and relational characteristics. Thus, transitioning into adult roles may foster the development of the self, but might also confront some adolescents with challenges to their identity.

In addition to normative life transitions, incidental and stressful life events, such as the death of a relative, a breakup of a relationship, or an accident, can serve as turning points in the development of identity (Slotter & Gardner, 2011 ; Waterman, 2020 ). Stressful life events can induce feelings of discontinuity and force adolescents to reconsider their identity. In particular, traumatic events, such as the experience of war, might result in a diminished sense of sameness and continuity of the self (Erikson, 1968 ). This may be reflected in weaker commitments and more exploration and reconsideration especially in identity domains related to the event (Kroger, 1996 ), and an overall sense of identity diffusion (Penner, Gambin, & Sharp, 2019 ). The sense of discontinuity may make individuals reconsider their identity and try to integrate the experienced event into a new sense of identity (Anthis, 2002 ; McAdams, 2001 ). This autobiographical integration of the event into one’s identity is thought to alleviate stress and restore one’s sense of self‐continuity (Habermas & Köber, 2015 ).

Two recent studies examined the longitudinal associations between stressful life events and identity processes. The first study (van Doeselaar, Becht, et al., 2018 ; van Doeselaar, Klimstra, et al., 2018 ) used a two‐sample design and did not find evidence for longitudinal effects between interpersonal commitments and stressful life events in either sample. Although bidirectional negative effects were found between career commitments and stressful life events in one of the samples, only an inconsistent effect of career commitment on subsequent stressful life events was found in the other sample. Thus, adolescents who experienced more negative life events had weaker career commitments, but the evidence for longitudinal effects remains inconsistent. The second study examined within‐person effects of specific life events on identity commitments, exploration, and reconsideration (de Moor, van der Graaff, van Dijk, Meeus, & Branje, 2019 ). Adolescents with fewer commitments and higher levels of reconsideration were more likely to repeat a grade, but the study found no evidence that the experience of a single life event resulted in subsequent changes in identity processes. Hence, while theory suggests that events should be important for identity change, this is not found empirically. A closer focus on how adolescents deal with events and integrate them into their identity may be needed to better understand the role of life events in identity formation.

Micro‐processes of identity

In the last decade, researchers have paid increasing attention to the micro‐level processes that underlie developmental changes in identity commitment and exploration (Lichtwarck‐Aschoff, van Geert, Bosma, & Kunnen, 2008 ). These micro‐level processes refer to the real‐time experiences and expressions of identity in adolescents’ daily lives and are thought to accumulate in the macro‐level development of identity processes (Bosma & Kunnen, 2001 ; Grotevant, 1987 ; Kerpelman, Pittman, & Lamke, 1997 ; Korobov, 2015 ). That is, identity commitments are thought to emerge from the here‐and‐now interactions of adolescents in their daily context. These real‐time micro‐processes are sensitive to context and are more variable than macro‐level identity processes.

To understand the micro‐processes that unfold within individuals over shorter periods of time and their associations with macro‐level identity processes, researchers have developed daily identity measures. A study among 13‐year‐old Dutch adolescents measured daily identity processes for commitment and reconsideration in the interpersonal and educational domain across three 5‐day weeks (Klimstra et al., 2010 ), and found that interindividual differences in daily commitment and reconsideration in the interpersonal identity domain were negatively and reciprocally related, but daily reconsideration in the educational domain negatively predicted next‐day commitment. A study using the same data (Schwartz et al., 2011 ) showed that adolescents with higher levels of reconsideration reported less self‐concept clarity the next day, but self‐concept clarity and commitments were reciprocally associated across days, in which adolescents with stronger global identity commitments on a particular day were more likely to have a clearer self‐concept the next day and vice versa. These studies reveal that day‐to‐day changes in identity processes are associated with each other, and that daily processes differentiate adolescents from each other. How these daily identity processes operate might differ across different identity domains, however.

These findings suggest that especially identity reconsideration might trigger daily change in commitments. When adolescents start reconsidering alternative commitments, it may be functional that the strength of the individual’s current commitment decreases to open‐up the possibility to explore and commit to new identity choices. However, to be able to draw such conclusions regarding how adolescents’ daily identity processes play a role in identity formation at the individual level, we need to investigate intraindividual identity processes at the micro‐level, particularly as such within‐person analyses at the macro‐level suggested that reconsideration was followed by an increase in commitments (Becht et al., 2017 ). Applying an intensive longitudinal design among 31 female university students, van der Gaag, de Ruiter, and Kunnen ( 2016 ) showed that when students reported more than usual daily commitment in the educational domain, they reported less than usual exploration of fit (resembling exploration in depth) and reconsideration, and more than usual exploration of self at the within‐individual level. The negative association between commitment and exploration at the within‐person daily level was consistent with the within‐person association at the annual level (Becht et al., 2017 ). However, the study by Van der Gaag and colleagues also revealed a large amount of heterogeneity between individuals in these within‐person day‐to‐day associations. Although about 50–60% of individuals showed a negative correlation between exploration and commitment, a minority showed a positive or negligible relation. These results stress the importance of examining which individual and contextual factors can explain the large variation that exists in within‐person, micro‐level identity processes.

Even though these studies on micro‐processes of identity have offered new insights into the dynamics of identity development across different time scales, so far micro‐processes have mostly been assessed in a rather abstract and global way, for example by asking whether adolescents felt certain on a particular day regarding their identity. Alternative, more concrete ways to grasp the real‐time experiences that contribute to identity formation are needed, particularly as many identity processes might be unconscious (Schachter, 2018 ). A recent qualitative study examined the concrete micro‐level exploration behaviors adolescents engage in during real‐time interactions with their peers and showed three overarching interaction patterns that advanced exploration: creating a safe environment for exploration, clarifying and elaborating an idea, and a process in which finding a keyword and repeating it helped adolescents explore an aspect of identity and find tentative, emerging commitments (Sugimura, Gmelin, van der Gaag, & Kunnen, 2021 ). Also, among students conducting a clinical internship, real‐time fulfillment versus frustration of the need for competence, relatedness, and autonomy was related to stronger and weaker commitments, respectively (Kunnen, 2021 ). Future research should include such meaningful assessments of the concrete micro‐level behaviors adolescents engage in to form their identity (see also Klimstra & Schwab, 2021 ). Particularly, micro‐level assessments during transitional periods are required to understand identity change.

Daily emotions and identity processes

Daily emotions and experiences may play a particularly important role in the heterogeneity of identity processes, as emotions might have a feedback function to the individual that is relevant to their identity and identity processes in daily life might thus be strongly related to emotions (Kunnen, Bosma, van Halen, & van der Meulen, 2001 ). Using within‐person analyses of daily associations between identity processes and mood in early adolescence, Klimstra et al. ( 2016 ) showed that negative mood was positively associated with educational and interpersonal reconsideration, and weakly positively with in‐depth educational exploration. In addition, negative mood was weakly negatively associated with interpersonal commitment, and strongly negatively with educational commitment. Thus, experiencing negative emotions can elicit uncertainty regarding one’s identity and lead to increased exploration, while experiencing positive emotions can reinforce identity commitments, resulting in increased identification with current identity‐relevant choices. However, the process of identity formation can be stressful and might itself also elicit mood disruptions (Erikson, 1968 ).

In addition to mood, van der Gaag, Albers, and Kunnen ( 2017 ) showed that among first year university students, both positive and negative emotional experiences that were personally important and had impacted their attitude toward their education were related to increases in micro‐level educational commitment. The study used weekly measures of commitment, exploration, and emotional experiences across 22–30 weeks. For most individuals, emotional experiences had a stronger impact on commitment than exploration. Surprisingly, for a minority of students, positive experiences predicted a decrease in educational commitment. As the content of the experiences did not necessarily relate to the domain of education (e.g., forming a romantic relationship), it might be that positive experiences competing with educational commitment resulted in a decrease of educational commitment. Similarly, negative experiences in other domains might result in an increased commitment to one’s education. The finding that negative emotional experiences resulted in increased commitment could also be due to assimilation processes. Following the assimilation‐accommodation perspective (Bosma & Kunnen, 2001 ), a single negative experience might result in assimilation, in which the interpretation of the experience changes to keep the commitment intact. When negative experiences accumulate, individuals may need to accommodate, resulting in a decrease in commitment (Kunnen, 2006 ). Thus, both positive and negative emotional experiences are important in micro‐level educational commitment development. Future research should explore which adolescents are more likely to assimilate their experiences into their identity commitments and how positive and negative emotional experiences within and outside current commitments accumulate to result in identity change.

Narratives as micro‐processes

Narrative processes are also considered micro‐processes that can be studied to examine how individuals engage in commitment and exploration processes. For instance, individuals’ narratives about personally relevant moments in their lives (e.g., low points, high points, and turning points) are thought to be important accounts of continuity or change in their identity (Kunnen & Bosma, 2000 ). Moreover, the function of narratives of creating continuity (McAdams, 2001 ; Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006 ) is thought to be related to establishing commitments (Erikson, 1968 ). For example, young adults with gender narratives reflecting equality positions reported higher identity exploration and lower commitment than young adults with traditional gender narratives, suggesting that identity exploration is related to engagement with alternative narratives and that engagement with traditional narratives is related to conventionality comparable to identity foreclosure (McLean, Shucard, & Syed, 2017 ). Also, increases in young adults’ ethnic identity commitments were not only related to changes in narrative themes, but also to changes in narratives about prejudice or connection to culture (Syed & Azmitia, 2010 ).

Forming commitments can also change the narratives that individuals construe. For example, Swedish young adults who were in identity achievement generally reported a deepening of their life narrative across 4 years, in terms of the way they derived meaning from new experiences, handled changes, and determined their own direction in life (Carlsson et al., 2015 ). However, no clear pattern of narrative development was found for young adults in the stably committed status of identity foreclosure. Also, in a sample of Dutch adolescents, autobiographical reasoning and agency were found to be related to commitment and exploration processes both cross‐sectionally and longitudinally (van Doeselaar et al., 2020 ). However, the size of these associations was small, indicating that narratives and dual‐cycle processes may capture different parts of adolescents’ identity. Thus, narrative processes might be linked to processes of commitment and exploration and might form the underlying mechanism behind identity development more broadly. Future research should further explore how these different approaches toward studying identity development can be used to complement and extend one another.

The role of variability in the development of the self

Another aspect of micro‐level processes relevant for identity development is the amount of variability in identity processes, or the within‐person fluctuations in commitments and exploration across days and weeks. A dynamic system approach suggests that identity micro‐processes fluctuate and change on a daily basis (Lichtwarck‐Aschoff et al., 2008 ). Developmental changes are thought to be nonlinear (Lewis, 2000 ) and may particularly occur at times of transitions or life events that motivate identity development. These transitional periods are thought to be marked by a substantial temporary increase in intraindividual variability (Lichtwarck‐Aschoff et al., 2008 ), or fluctuations in identity processes, after which a restabilization occurs and a more mature identity emerges. Indeed, when adolescents showed a temporal increase in their educational commitment fluctuations across days (i.e., more ups and downs in their commitments), they reported higher educational commitment levels 1 year later (Becht et al., 2017 ). These temporal fluctuations might indicate a period of active reflection on present commitments to support identity development. Identity processes also have been found to be meaningfully related to variability in identity salience among ethnically diverse adolescents (Wang, Douglass, & Yip, 2017 ). Adolescents with stronger ethnic–racial identity commitment reported higher daily mean salience and less variability in salience 6 months later, and adolescents who reported more daily variability in salience engaged in more exploration 6 months later, suggesting that daily experiences might trigger exploration and that commitment might be consolidated in daily ethnic salience experiences. Thus, variability in micro‐processes of identity may be the underlying mechanism that marks the dynamic of identity development.

Although higher variability may be necessary for individuals to adapt and reorganize themselves effectively in response to varying contextual changes (Moskowitz & Zuroff, 2004 ), higher levels of variability might also indicate behavioral lability, or variability in behavior that is not well‐controlled or very adaptive (Charles & Pasupathi, 2003 ). So far, with the exception of Becht et al. ( 2017 ) and Wang et al. ( 2017 ), higher levels of fluctuations in identity processes have mostly been associated with poorer outcomes in several domains. Stronger fluctuations in reconsideration (but not commitment or self‐concept clarity) across days were associated with lower levels of macro‐level interpersonal and educational commitments and higher levels of reconsideration (Klimstra et al., 2010 ), as well as with later symptoms of anxiety and depression, controlling for previous levels of anxiety and depression (Schwartz et al., 2011 ). These findings suggest that reconsideration might particularly create a sense of disequilibrium and distress when this sense of uncertainty fluctuates across days, regardless of the level of reconsideration.

Thus, while these findings mostly suggest that variability in identity processes is negatively related to psychosocial functioning, stronger increases in variability in specific transitional periods may also reflect developmental changes in identity. Variability in transitional periods might be associated with poorer well‐being because individuals experience the period as stressful, resulting temporarily in declines in adjustment. To shed light on the role of fluctuations in identity processes in macro‐development of identity, future research should examine variability in identity and self‐concept clarity during transitional and nontransitional periods and link this variability to developmental processes in identity.

In sum, instead of focusing on interindividual differences, recent studies have sought to analyze identity processes at the intraindividual, micro‐level—that is, at the level where development is taking place: within the person, in here‐and‐now experiences. Knowledge of these micro‐level processes might be particularly informative for interventions in youth who struggle with identity development. For example, Blaauw et al. ( 2019 ) recently developed the u‐can‐act platform, a tool to study individual processes of identity development in the context of early school leaving and the preventative behaviors of youth’s mentors to help youth cope with their educational identity development at individual level.

IDENTITY AND PSYCHOSOCIAL ADJUSTMENT

Identity is quite consistently related to a broad range of psychosocial adjustment outcomes across cultures, underlining the importance of identity in adolescents’ lives. Adolescents with stable and strong identity commitments have consistently been found to report higher levels of psychosocial adjustment over time than adolescents with ongoing identity uncertainty (Crocetti et al., 2008 ; Hatano, Sugimura, & Schwartz, 2018 ; Meeus et al., 2010 ). Prior studies revealed that adolescents with a weaker sense of identity and ongoing reconsideration of identity alternatives are at increased risk for the development of aggressive behavior (Becht et al., 2016 ; Crocetti, Klimstra, Hale, Koot, & Meeus, 2013 ; Morsunbul, 2015 ), delinquent behavior (Levey, Garandeau, Meeus, & Branje, 2019 ), and substance use (de Moor, Sijtsema, Weller, & Klimstra, 2020 ). Similarly, adolescents with ongoing identity uncertainty were more likely to show increasing (school) anxiety levels over time (Becht et al., 2016 ), higher loneliness (Kaniušonytė, Truskauskaitė‐Kunevičienė, Žukauskienė, & Crocetti, 2019 ), and higher levels of depressive symptoms (van Doeselaar, Becht, et al., 2018 ; van Doeselaar, Klimstra, et al., 2018 ; Meeus et al., 2012 ).

In addition to negative psychosocial adjustment, individual differences in dual‐cycle identity processes predict positive adjustment as well. For instance, those individuals with strong and stable identity commitments report higher self‐esteem (Luyckx et al., 2013 ) and higher levels of experienced meaning in life (Negru‐Subtirica, Pop, Luyckx, Dezutter, & Steger, 2016 ). Also, adolescents with an ethnic identity profile characterized by high exploration, strong resolution (resembling commitments), and high centrality of their ethnic–racial background within their self‐concept reported higher academic engagement, life satisfaction, and self‐esteem than adolescents with an ethnic identity profile characterized by low exploration and resolution (regardless of centrality; Wantchekon & Umaña‐Taylor, 2021 ). Although ethnic–racial identity exploration did not predict civic beliefs, adolescents who reported greater increases in ethnic–racial identity resolution across 2 years of middle school did report greater increases in civic beliefs on the need to advance the well‐being of their communities (Bañales, Hoffman, Rivas‐Drake, & Jagers, 2020 ). Moreover, a meta‐analysis showed that stronger commitments and composite scores of ethnic–racial identity processes can buffer the associations of discrimination with adjustment problems, yet higher levels of exploration increased associations of discrimination with adjustment problems (Yip, Wang, Mootoo, & Mirpuri, 2019 ). Furthermore, identity processes have been linked to academic and career functioning. The development of career adaptability and vocational identity commitment are dynamically intertwined across adolescence (Negru‐Subtirica, Pop, & Crocetti, 2015 ). Identity development in college students positively affected their sense of competence and motivational beliefs to master their study (Perez, Cromley, & Kaplan, 2014 ). In contrast, higher academic achievement predicted higher levels of commitment and lower levels of reconsideration (Pop, Negru‐Subtirica, Crocetti, Opre, & Meeus, 2016 ), and school engagement positively predicted information‐oriented identity processing, while school burnout positively predicted the use of normative and diffuse‐avoidant identity styles (Erentaitė, Vosylis, Gabrialavičiūtė, & Raižienė, 2018 ).

Although evidence for the directionality of effects between identity processes and psychosocial and academic adjustment is not consistent, these findings suggest that intervening in identity processes might be an auspicious way to promote adolescents’ well‐being. Indeed, the Identity Project intervention, which was designed for delivery in high school for youth in middle adolescence to target ethnic–racial identity exploration and resolution, showed promising effects on adolescents’ identity processes and adjustment (Umaña‐Taylor, Douglass, Updegraff, & Marsiglia, 2018 ; Umaña‐Taylor et al., 2018 ). The intervention consisted of eight sessions that were designed to help adolescents understand between‐ and within‐group differences and how various groups had been marginalized throughout history, and to help adolescents engage in activities to facilitate the exploration of their ethnic–racial background. The Identity Project intervention resulted in increases in adolescents’ ethnic–racial identity exploration and, subsequently, increases in resolution or sense of clarity of their ethnic–racial identity (Umaña‐Taylor, Douglass, et al., 2018 ). In turn, these changes in exploration and resolution were related to adolescents’ higher global identity cohesion, lower depressive symptoms, higher self‐esteem, and better grades 1 year later (Umaña‐Taylor et al., 2018).

Characteristics of adolescents’ narrative identity are also linked to psychosocial adjustment. The various narrative characteristics that have been studied in relation to adjustment can be categorized in one of three broader factors (Adler, Lodi‐Smith, Philippe, & Houle, 2016 ; McLean et al., 2020 ): autobiographical reasoning (or integrative meaning), motivational and affective themes, and structure. Autobiographical reasoning refers to individuals’ ability to reflect on their past, present, and future, and link these three together into a continuous narrative (Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ; McAdams, 2001 ). The making of self‐event connections reflects individuals’ autobiographical attempts to explicitly link an event to an aspect of their self (Pasupathi, Mansour, & Brubaker, 2007 ). Adolescents with better‐developed autobiographical reasoning and more self‐event connections report higher well‐being (van Doeselaar et al., 2020 ; McLean, Breen, & Fournier, 2010 ). Initial findings further suggest that this association might vary by developmental period: Although autobiographical reasoning is related to better well‐being in late adolescence, early adolescents who engage in autobiographical reasoning reported lower well‐being than peers who do not (McLean et al., 2010 ; McLean & Mansfield, 2011 ). Moreover, different themes may be dominant in identity narratives, such as redemption (McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001 ), agency, and communion (Adler, 2012 ; McAdams, 2001 ). Adolescents who have identity narratives high on themes of redemption, agency, and communion tend to report higher well‐being (van Doeselaar et al., 2020 ; Dunlop, Harake, Gray, Hanley, & McCoy, 2018 ; Holm, Thomsen, & Bliksted, 2018 ; McAdams & McLean, 2013 ). Finally, when comparing the structure of individuals’ narratives in clinical and population samples, narrative coherence is generally lower in clinical samples (Adler, Chin, Kolisetty, & Oltmanns, 2012 ), and individuals who write more coherent narratives report fewer psychological difficulties and greater well‐being (Reese et al., 2011 ; Waters & Fivush, 2015 ; Waters, Shallcross, & Fivush, 2013 ). This might show that identity in the initial stages of development might go together with uncertainty and lower adjustment.

In sum, there is a vast body of literature highlighting the associations between personal identity development and psychosocial outcomes, providing evidence that adolescents with a more well‐adjusted identity tend to fair better in many different areas of life. Conversely, this research underlines how adolescents with issues in their identity may be stuck in broader maladaptive development. Findings concerning the direction of effects are less consistent. Probably, different processes play a role for different groups of youth: In some, identity synthesis might result in better adjustment, in others adjustment problems might trigger identity uncertainty, and yet in others, external factors might result in a change in both identity and adjustment. More work is needed examining the direction of effects, particularly at the within‐person level, to gain a better understanding of developmental processes linking identity and adjustment and to improve interventions aimed at strengthening adolescents’ identity processes.

Within‐Person Associations of Identity and Psychosocial Adjustment

In the last decade, research has started to examine these within‐person linkages between identity development and psychosocial adjustment (Lichtwarck‐Aschoff et al., 2008 ). To this end, Becht et al. ( 2019 ) examined the intraindividual longitudinal linkages between identity and depressive symptoms in two large longitudinal Dutch and Belgian adolescent samples. In both samples, a within‐person increase in identity uncertainty predicted a within‐person increase in depressive symptoms 1 year later but not vice versa. These findings suggest a role of ongoing identity uncertainty in the development of depressive symptoms over time. Similarly, Mercer, Crocetti, Branje, van Lier, and Meeus ( 2017 ) showed bidirectional intraindividual linkages between identity and delinquency, such that increasing delinquency predicted weaker identity commitments and more identity reconsideration and vice versa. When adolescents showed an increase of in‐depth exploration, their delinquency levels decreased 1 year later. Together, these findings suggest that identity struggles might result in feelings of despair and ways of coping that help adolescents find an alternative (delinquent or negative) identity.

More generally, these findings speak to the importance of considering the content of adolescents’ identity. In some cases, youth may develop a negative identity in which they identify with roles opposed to societal expectations (Hihara, Sugimura, & Syed, 2018 ), and psychopathology or deviancy may even become the content of identity (Cruwys & Gunaseelan, 2016 ). For instance, rejection of delinquent behaviors within society may further strengthen delinquent or negative identities for some youth, as illustrated in the example of radicalization of youth (Meeus, 2015 ). Critically, the longitudinal associations between identity processes and psychosocial adjustment might depend on the content of identity. For example, adolescents with achieved but content‐wise distinct ethnic–racial identities might show different levels of adjustment on individual and group‐relevant outcomes (Umaña‐Taylor et al., 2014 ). Comparably, a recently proposed framework for understanding the associations of identity and psychopathology points out the many alternative ways in which identity and adjustment may be connected and suggests that when identity formation goes awry, psychopathology may become part of one’s identity (Klimstra & Denissen, 2017 ).

More broadly, individuals’ identities should be understood within the context in which adolescents are embedded. Syed, Juang, and Svensson ( 2018 ) provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding ethnic–racial identity within ethnic–racial settings, or the objective and subjective nature of group representation within an individual’s context. Similarly, identity narratives are shaped by the culture in which adolescents live (e.g., McAdams, 2001 , 2006 ). The master narrative of the culture may provide important clues to individual members about how their narrative identity is supposed to look like in terms of structure and themes (for an integrative framework, see McLean & Syed, 2016 ). This culture may also moderate the associations between young people’s narratives and their well‐being (Eriksson, McLean, & Ann Frisén, 2020 ; McLean & Syed, 2016 ). However, so far this work was situated in adult samples, and more research is needed to extend these findings toward adolescents.

IDENTITY AND RELATIONSHIPS

The development of a coherent sense of self and identity takes place in the context of close relationships, such as with family members and peers. Identity concerns not only the experience of self‐sameness and continuity of the self, but also the extent to which this experience corresponds with the sameness and continuity of one’s meaning to significant others. Interactions with family members and friends are therefore crucial. In these interactions, adolescents receive self‐relevant feedback (Grotevant & Cooper, 1985 ; Koepke & Denissen, 2012 ), which they can use to strengthen or adjust their identity commitments. Supportive relationships with family members and friends who are sensitive and responsive to adolescents’ changing need also form a secure base from which adolescents can confidently explore identity options. In interactions with close others, adolescents narrate about their life events and experiences and link these experiences to who they are and how they want to become. These interactions may help adolescents make sense of their experiences and ultimately create more coherent and meaningful identity narratives (e.g., through scaffolding behavior; Fivush, Reese, & Haden, 2006 ). For example, when young adults and their conversation partners agreed about the meaning that could be derived from the narrative they told, they were more likely to retain that meaning for a longer period (McLean & Pasupathi, 2011 ). In addition, as adolescents develop a clearer sense of identity, they are better able to engage in positive interactions with others (Swann, 2000 ; Swann, Milton, & Polzer, 2000 ).

Autonomy support is considered particularly important for identity development. As adolescents start to develop their identity, they also begin to renegotiate autonomy in their relationships with parents and peers. Parents and adolescents have to reallocate responsibilities and power in their relationships to become more egalitarian, with more reciprocity and equality in exchanges, power, and decision‐making (Branje, Laursen, & Collins, 2012 ; de Goede, Branje, & Meeus, 2009 ). Adolescents’ relationships with friends also change toward greater autonomy. Toward middle adolescence, their increased perspective‐taking skills and greater self‐certainty allow friends to respect each other’s individuality without jeopardizing their mutual sense of connectedness (Brechwald & Prinstein, 2011 ; Selfhout, Branje, & Meeus, 2009 ). Friendships also become more supportive over the course of adolescence (de Goede, Branje, Delsing, et al., 2009 ). When parents are unable to release control and adapt toward a more reciprocal relationship, and when friends have difficulties accepting each other’s individuation, adolescents might be likely to develop a less optimal identity, characterized by internal conflict and feelings of alienation from one’s sense of self.

Family Relationships and Identity Processes

Indeed, several recent studies provided evidence for the role of relationships with family members in identity development. Sugimura et al. ( 2018 ) found consistent negative associations of emotional separation and positive associations of parental trust with identity consolidation across Lithuania, Italy, and Japan. Although the identity processes commitment and reconsideration were reciprocally associated with support and conflict in relationships with parents and siblings in a six‐wave study spanning from age 13 to 18 (Crocetti et al., 2017 ), commitment and in‐depth exploration were more likely to positively affect relationship quality with parents and siblings than vice versa. Reconsideration was predicted by low levels of maternal support and worsened the quality of the paternal relationship. Parental support has also been found to be related to higher levels of adolescents’ exploration of their romantic identity (Pittman, Kerpelman, Soto, & Adler‐Baeder, 2012 ). Parental psychological control had a more complex and indirect relation with romantic identity: It was related to an elevated feeling of both avoidance and anxiety in romantic relationships, and while avoidance was in turn related to less exploration of romantic identity, anxiety was related to more exploration. On the level of parent–child interactions, adolescents whose parents stimulate them in their story‐telling to derive meaning from experiences have been found to engage in more autobiographical reasoning (McLean & Jennings, 2012 ). For ethnic identity, parental ethnic socialization was positively related to adolescents’ ethnic identity exploration and resolution (Hu, Zhou, & Lee, 2017 ), and significantly predicted ethnic identity exploration and commitment 1 year later (Else‐Quest & Morse, 2015 ). Moreover, at the within‐person level, increases in family cohesion were associated with increases in ethnic belonging (Kiang et al., 2010 ). These findings confirm that adolescents’ identity development is strengthened in the context of close and supportive family relationships. In addition vice versa, adolescents who have higher commitment and in‐depth exploration also improve their relationships with their family members. Adolescents’ optimal development of identity goes together with high levels of closeness and relatedness.

In addition to parent–adolescent relationship quality and parenting characteristics, parents’ own identities might affect adolescents’ identity development (Schachter, 2018 ). Among Roma minority families, ethnic identity of both parents was strongly and positively associated with adolescent ethnic identity (Dimitrova, Ferrer‐Wreder, & Trost, 2015 ). In a longitudinal study from early‐to‐late adolescence, parental self‐concept clarity was found to unidirectionally predict adolescents’ self‐concept clarity (Crocetti, Moscatelli, et al., 2016 ). Also, caregiver identity commitment was significantly related to adolescent identity distress, over and above adolescents’ own identity commitment and exploration (Wiley & Berman, 2012 ). Therefore, parents with a more coherent identity not only provide an example for adolescents as to how they can explore self‐relevant issues, but they also are better able to provide their children with support as they explore those issues and make commitments.

Peer Relationships and Identity Processes

Although significantly less research has been conducted in this area, peer relationships are also positively related to identity development (for a review, see Ragelienė, 2016 ). In fact, a recent study found that especially support from friends, compared to support from parents, was related to relational and educational identity (de Moor et al., 2019 ). Having a high‐quality relationship with one’s best friend has also been associated with making redemption sequences and self‐event connections in one’s identity narrative (de Moor, van der Graaff, van Doeselaar, Klimstra, & Branje, 2021 ), both of which are seen as characteristics of well‐adjusted narratives. On the level of interactions, adolescents whose friends listen more actively and who stimulate meaning‐making tend to engage in greater autobiographical reasoning (McLean & Jennings, 2012 ; Pasupathi & Hoyt, 2009 ). A 4‐year study of adolescents aged 14–18 years revealed that autonomy support from friends significantly predicted adolescents' reconsideration, and was predicted by in‐depth exploration and, although less consistent, commitment (van Doeselaar, Meeus, Koot, & Branje, 2016 ). These findings suggest that higher autonomy support from a friend reduces adolescents' problematic educational reconsideration, and adaptive educational identity processes foster autonomy‐supportive interactions. A study applying within‐person cross‐lagged analyses indicated that although relationship quality with parents—and not with friends—affected subsequent self‐concept clarity, self‐concept clarity affected subsequent relationship quality with both parents and friends, although results varied across reporters (Becht et al., 2017 ). Thus, higher friendship quality facilitates identity formation, and adaptive identity processes foster supportive and high‐quality interactions.

The development of personal identity is also strongly embedded within the context of the broader peer group. Adolescents’ identification with their classmates and with their group of friends over time predicted stronger interpersonal identity commitment and exploration, as well as lower reconsideration (Albarello et al., 2018 ). These findings suggest that when adolescents are comfortable and at ease in their larger peer groups, they have a basis from which they can explore their personal identity.

Identity is not only directly related to relationship quality; it also affects how susceptible youth are to the influence of others. Adolescents with lower self‐concept clarity were more susceptible to the influence of their friends’ delinquency and subsequently showed more delinquency themselves (Levey et al., 2019 ). Similarly, in more controlling peer groups, adolescents with stronger identity commitment engaged in less risk behavior than adolescents with weaker identity commitment (Dumas, Ellis, & Wolfe, 2012 ), suggesting that identity might protect against peer pressure. A clearer identity might help adolescents compare their views of themselves and the world to those of their peers, while at the same time differentiating themselves as a separate, autonomous person. As a result, they may have greater respect for their own boundaries and be able to resist negative peer influences.

In sum, adolescents who do not experience closeness or supportiveness in their relationships with parents and peers, or adolescents whose parents and peers do not accept their individual needs, tend to experience more difficulties in developing a clear identity. In the process of discovering their own identity and negotiating their needs for autonomy, these adolescents might become overly dependent on others or, alternatively, struggle with feelings of dependence. This may especially be the case in Western cultures, because individuality is emphasized and dependence on others tends to be viewed as a sign of weakness that should be discouraged. Although most research has focused on the role of relationships with parents and friends in adolescents’ identity formation, other relationships offer an important relational context for identity development as well. For example, adolescents with avoidant or anxious attachment, who are less comfortable with romantic partners, were found to have lower relational identity commitments and a higher tendency to use a diffuse/avoidant style for identity exploration (Kerpelman et al., 2012 ), and the extent to which teachers serve as role models predicts student identity development (Rich & Schachter, 2012 ).

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

The current review discussed progress in the field of adolescent personal identity research between 2010 and 2020. Concerning mean level change, research in this decade has further confirmed that there is considerable stability in identity across adolescence and young adulthood. At the same time, there is substantial heterogeneity in identity development, and when there is developmental change, this change is in the direction of identity maturation.

Excitingly, studies have increasingly begun to go beyond the study of mean level identity change and examine the underlying mechanisms of identity development. It should be noted that many of the developments discussed in this review are emerging developments in the field of identity research, and more research is needed to replicate these findings and provide more knowledge on the robustness and strength of the findings. Nevertheless, these findings suggest identity development requires a focus on transitional periods that pose a challenge to adolescents’ personal identity, as well as a focus on the micro‐processes of identity development. Whereas theory suggests that life transitions and life events might trigger identity change, so far not much empirical support for the effect of life events on personal identity has been found. Future research should examine identity development across life transitions and compare personal identity processes before, during, and after the transition. As the most used identity measures tap into quite global aspects of identity that might not always optimally reflect the process of personal identity formation (Waterman, 2015 ), measures tapping into more concrete commitment making and exploration processes are needed. Also, a closer focus on how adolescents deal with events and integrate them into their identity may be needed to better understand the role of life events in identity. So far, results suggest that micro‐level and macro‐level identity processes tap into qualitatively different processes. To further enhance our knowledge on how micro‐level processes shape macro‐level identity development, future research needs to incorporate the assessment of micro‐level processes in long‐term longitudinal studies that assess processes at the macro‐level.

Recent findings on the associations of identity with psychosocial adjustment confirm that certainty about oneself and the direction one is going in is closely related to better functioning in multiple domains. Increased attention to the intraindividual associations between identity and adjustment (Lichtwarck‐Aschoff et al., 2008 ) shows how within‐person developmental processes in personal identity might affect future adjustment and well‐being and suggests that ongoing identity uncertainty might result in feelings of despair and less adaptive ways of coping. In future research, we need to consider the content of adolescents’ identity in addition to the process of identity formation, as psychopathology may become the content of identity when identity formation goes awry (Klimstra & Denissen, 2017 ).

Research on the social context of identity shows that identity development is closely embedded in relationships with family members and friends. Particularly, parents have an important role in shaping adolescent identity: Instead of turning away from parents, adolescents’ development of identity is fostered by high levels of closeness and relatedness to parents. In addition, parents’ own identities also affect adolescents’ identity development. Although peers seem to have a weaker influence on adolescent identity development compared to parents, a more mature identity helps adolescents establish high‐quality friendships. Identity is not only directly related to relationship quality; it also affects how susceptible youth are to the influence of peers, as adolescents with a more uncertain identity tend to be more vulnerable to negative peer influences.

Last, research is starting to empirically reunify the narrative and dual‐cycle identity approach (e.g., van Doeselaar et al., 2020 ; McLean & Pasupathi, 2012 ), showing how narrative processes may be considered one of the key mechanisms of identity change, providing information on real‐time identity processes. Excitingly, research on narrative processes has also recently started to examine factors such as developmental contexts and content of narratives that moderate the narrative identity–well‐being link. To further this work, it is important that more studies adopt an approach that examines multiple narratives by the same individual, to understand better what aspects of narrative identity are specific to certain narratives, and which are true across narratives and life domains. Although several studies already do so (e.g., Lilgendahl & McLean, 2020 ; McLean, Syed, Yoder, et al., 2016 ), broader implementation of this approach is likely to yield exciting new, robust, and generalizable discoveries. Also, future research could examine narratives of adolescents prompted to discuss the same experience, such as a school transition, to allow for greater comparability between individuals and to enable a greater focus on the actual content of the narrative. Linking such narratives to long‐term intraindividual identity formation processes will increase our understanding of the underlying real‐time mechanisms in personal identity formation and offer more concrete tools for intervention.

This work was supported by a grant from the European Research Council (ERC‐CoG INTRANSITION‐773023).

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Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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10 Personal Statement Essay Examples That Worked

What’s covered:, what is a personal statement.

• Essay 1: Summer Program
• Essay 2: Being Bangladeshi-American
• Essay 3: Why Medicine
• Essay 4: Love of Writing
• Essay 5: Starting a Fire
• Essay 6: Dedicating a Track
• Essay 7: Body Image and Eating Disorders
• Essay 8: Becoming a Coach
• Essay 9: Eritrea
• Essay 10: Journaling
• Is Your Personal Statement Strong Enough?

Your personal statement is any essay that you must write for your main application, such as the Common App Essay , University of California Essays , or Coalition Application Essay . This type of essay focuses on your unique experiences, ideas, or beliefs that may not be discussed throughout the rest of your application. This essay should be an opportunity for the admissions officers to get to know you better and give them a glimpse into who you really are.

In this post, we will share 10 different personal statements that were all written by real students. We will also provide commentary on what each essay did well and where there is room for improvement, so you can make your personal statement as strong as possible!

Please note: Looking at examples of real essays students have submitted to colleges can be very beneficial to get inspiration for your essays. You should never copy or plagiarize from these examples when writing your own essays. Colleges can tell when an essay isn’t genuine and will not view students favorably if they plagiarized. 

Personal Statement Examples

Essay example #1: exchange program.

The twisting roads, ornate mosaics, and fragrant scent of freshly ground spices had been so foreign at first. Now in my fifth week of the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco, I felt more comfortable in the city. With a bag full of pastries from the market, I navigated to a bus stop, paid the fare, and began the trip back to my host family’s house. It was hard to believe that only a few years earlier my mom was worried about letting me travel around my home city on my own, let alone a place that I had only lived in for a few weeks. While I had been on a journey towards self-sufficiency and independence for a few years now, it was Morocco that pushed me to become the confident, self-reflective person that I am today.

As a child, my parents pressured me to achieve perfect grades, master my swim strokes, and discover interesting hobbies like playing the oboe and learning to pick locks. I felt compelled to live my life according to their wishes. Of course, this pressure was not a wholly negative factor in my life –– you might even call it support. However, the constant presence of my parents’ hopes for me overcame my own sense of desire and led me to become quite dependent on them. I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school. Despite all these achievements, I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success. I had always been expected to succeed on the path they had defined. However, this path was interrupted seven years after my parents’ divorce when my dad moved across the country to Oregon.

I missed my dad’s close presence, but I loved my new sense of freedom. My parents’ separation allowed me the space to explore my own strengths and interests as each of them became individually busier. As early as middle school, I was riding the light rail train by myself, reading maps to get myself home, and applying to special academic programs without urging from my parents. Even as I took more initiatives on my own, my parents both continued to see me as somewhat immature. All of that changed three years ago, when I applied and was accepted to the SNYI-L summer exchange program in Morocco. I would be studying Arabic and learning my way around the city of Marrakesh. Although I think my parents were a little surprised when I told them my news, the addition of a fully-funded scholarship convinced them to let me go.

I lived with a host family in Marrakesh and learned that they, too, had high expectations for me. I didn’t know a word of Arabic, and although my host parents and one brother spoke good English, they knew I was there to learn. If I messed up, they patiently corrected me but refused to let me fall into the easy pattern of speaking English just as I did at home. Just as I had when I was younger, I felt pressured and stressed about meeting their expectations. However, one day, as I strolled through the bustling market square after successfully bargaining with one of the street vendors, I realized my mistake. My host family wasn’t being unfair by making me fumble through Arabic. I had applied for this trip, and I had committed to the intensive language study. My host family’s rules about speaking Arabic at home had not been to fulfill their expectations for me, but to help me fulfill my expectations for myself. Similarly, the pressure my parents had put on me as a child had come out of love and their hopes for me, not out of a desire to crush my individuality.

As my bus drove through the still-bustling market square and past the medieval Ben-Youssef madrasa, I realized that becoming independent was a process, not an event. I thought that my parents’ separation when I was ten had been the one experience that would transform me into a self-motivated and autonomous person. It did, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t still have room to grow. Now, although I am even more self-sufficient than I was three years ago, I try to approach every experience with the expectation that it will change me. It’s still difficult, but I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important.

What the Essay Did Well

This is a nice essay because it delves into particular character trait of the student and how it has been shaped and matured over time. Although it doesn’t focus the essay around a specific anecdote, the essay is still successful because it is centered around this student’s independence. This is a nice approach for a personal statement: highlight a particular trait of yours and explore how it has grown with you.

The ideas in this essay are universal to growing up—living up to parents’ expectations, yearning for freedom, and coming to terms with reality—but it feels unique to the student because of the inclusion of details specific to them. Including their oboe lessons, the experience of riding the light rail by themselves, and the negotiations with a street vendor helps show the reader what these common tropes of growing up looked like for them personally. 

Another strength of the essay is the level of self-reflection included throughout the piece. Since there is no central anecdote tying everything together, an essay about a character trait is only successful when you deeply reflect on how you felt, where you made mistakes, and how that trait impacts your life. The author includes reflection in sentences like “ I felt like I had no sense of self beyond my drive for success, ” and “ I understand that just because growth can be uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not important. ” These sentences help us see how the student was impacted and what their point of view is.

What Could Be Improved

The largest change this essay would benefit from is to show not tell. The platitude you have heard a million times no doubt, but for good reason. This essay heavily relies on telling the reader what occurred, making us less engaged as the entire reading experience feels more passive. If the student had shown us what happens though, it keeps the reader tied to the action and makes them feel like they are there with the student, making it much more enjoyable to read. 

For example, they tell us about the pressure to succeed their parents placed on them: “ I pushed myself to get straight A’s, complied with years of oboe lessons, and dutifully attended hours of swim practice after school.”  They could have shown us what that pressure looked like with a sentence like this: “ My stomach turned somersaults as my rattling knee thumped against the desk before every test, scared to get anything less than a 95. For five years the painful squawk of the oboe only reminded me of my parents’ claps and whistles at my concerts. I mastered the butterfly, backstroke, and freestyle, fighting against the anchor of their expectations threatening to pull me down.”

If the student had gone through their essay and applied this exercise of bringing more detail and colorful language to sentences that tell the reader what happened, the essay would be really great. 

Table of Contents

Essay Example #2: Being Bangladeshi-American

Life before was good: verdant forests, sumptuous curries, and a devoted family.

Then, my family abandoned our comfortable life in Bangladesh for a chance at the American dream in Los Angeles. Within our first year, my father was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. He lost his battle three weeks before my sixth birthday. Facing a new country without the steady presence of my father, we were vulnerable — prisoners of hardship in the land of the free. We resettled in the Bronx, in my uncle’s renovated basement. It was meant to be our refuge, but I felt more displaced than ever. Gone were the high-rise condos of West L.A.; instead, government projects towered over the neighborhood. Pedestrians no longer smiled and greeted me; the atmosphere was hostile, even toxic. Schoolkids were quick to pick on those they saw as weak or foreign, hurling harsh words I’d never heard before.

Meanwhile, my family began integrating into the local Bangladeshi community. I struggled to understand those who shared my heritage. Bangladeshi mothers stayed home while fathers drove cabs and sold fruit by the roadside — painful societal positions. Riding on crosstown buses or walking home from school, I began to internalize these disparities. During my fleeting encounters with affluent Upper East Siders, I saw kids my age with nannies, parents who wore suits to work, and luxurious apartments with spectacular views. Most took cabs to their destinations: cabs that Bangladeshis drove. I watched the mundane moments of their lives with longing, aching to plant myself in their shoes. Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

As I grappled with my relationship with the Bangladeshi community, I turned my attention to helping my Bronx community by pursuing an internship with Assemblyman Luis Sepulveda. I handled desk work and took calls, spending the bulk of my time actively listening to the hardships constituents faced — everything from a veteran stripped of his benefits to a grandmother unable to support her bedridden grandchild.

I’d never exposed myself to stories like these, and now I was the first to hear them. As an intern, I could only assist in what felt like the small ways — pointing out local job offerings, printing information on free ESL classes, reaching out to non-profits. But to a community facing an onslaught of intense struggles, I realized that something as small as these actions could have vast impacts. Seeing the immediate consequences of my actions inspired me. Throughout that summer, I internalized my community’s daily challenges in a new light. I began to stop seeing the prevalent underemployment and cramped living quarters less as sources of shame. Instead, I saw them as realities that had to be acknowledged, but could ultimately be remedied. I also realized the benefits of the Bangladeshi culture I had been so ashamed of. My Bangla language skills were an asset to the office, and my understanding of Bangladeshi etiquette allowed for smooth communication between office staff and its constituents. As I helped my neighbors navigate city services, I saw my heritage with pride — a perspective I never expected to have.

I can now appreciate the value of my unique culture and background, and of living with less. This perspective offers room for progress, community integration, and a future worth fighting for. My time with Assemblyman Sepulveda’s office taught me that I can be a change agent in enabling this progression. Far from being ashamed of my community, I want to someday return to local politics in the Bronx to continue helping others access the American Dream. I hope to help my community appreciate the opportunity to make progress together. By embracing reality, I learned to live it. Along the way, I discovered one thing: life is good, but we can make it better.

This student’s passion for social justice and civic duty shines through in this essay because of how honest it is. Sharing their personal experience with immigrating, moving around, being an outsider, and finding a community allows us to see the hardships this student has faced and builds empathy towards their situation. However, what really makes it strong is that they go beyond describing the difficulties they faced and explain the mental impact it had on them as a child: Shame prickled down my spine. I distanced myself from my heritage, rejecting the traditional panjabis worn on Eid and refusing the torkari we ate for dinner every day. 

The rejection of their culture presented at the beginning of the essay creates a nice juxtaposition with the student’s view in the latter half of the essay and helps demonstrate how they have matured. They use their experience interning as a way to delve into a change in their thought process about their culture and show how their passion for social justice began. Using this experience as a mechanism to explore their thoughts and feelings is an excellent example of how items that are included elsewhere on your application should be incorporated into your essay.

This essay prioritizes emotions and personal views over specific anecdotes. Although there are details and certain moments incorporated throughout to emphasize the author’s points, the main focus remains on the student and how they grapple with their culture and identity.  

One area for improvement is the conclusion. Although the forward-looking approach is a nice way to end an essay focused on social justice, it would be nice to include more details and imagery in the conclusion. How does the student want to help their community? What government position do they see themselves holding one day? 

A more impactful ending might look like the student walking into their office at the New York City Housing Authority in 15 years and looking at the plans to build a new development in the Bronx just blocks away from where the grew up that would provide quality housing to people in their Bangladeshi community. They would smile while thinking about how far they have come from that young kid who used to be ashamed of their culture. 

Essay Example #3: Why Medicine

I took my first trip to China to visit my cousin Anna in July of 2014. Distance had kept us apart, but when we were together, we fell into all of our old inside jokes and caught up on each other’s lives. Her sparkling personality and optimistic attitude always brought a smile to my face. This time, however, my heart broke when I saw the effects of her brain cancer; she had suffered from a stroke that paralyzed her left side. She was still herself in many ways, but I could see that the damage to her brain made things difficult for her. I stayed by her every day, providing the support she needed, whether assisting her with eating and drinking, reading to her, or just watching “Friends.” During my flight back home, sorrow and helplessness overwhelmed me. Would I ever see Anna again? Could I have done more to make Anna comfortable? I wished I could stay in China longer to care for her. As I deplaned, I wondered if I could transform my grief to help other children and teenagers in the US who suffered as Anna did.

The day after I got home, as jet lag dragged me awake a few minutes after midnight, I remembered hearing about the Family Reach Foundation (FRF) and its work with children going through treatments at the local hospital and their families. I began volunteering in the FRF’s Children’s Activity Room, where I play with children battling cancer. Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up. When they take on the roles of firefighters or fairies, we all get caught up in the game; for that time, they forget the sanitized, stark, impersonal walls of the pediatric oncology ward. Building close relationships with them and seeing them giggle and laugh is so rewarding — I love watching them grow and get better throughout their course of treatment.

Hearing from the parents about their children’s condition and seeing the children recover inspired me to consider medical research. To get started, I enrolled in a summer collegelevel course in Abnormal Psychology. There I worked with Catelyn, a rising college senior, on a data analysis project regarding Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Together, we examined the neurological etiology of DID by studying four fMRI and PET cases. I fell in love with gathering data and analyzing the results and was amazed by our final product: several stunning brain images showcasing the areas of hyper and hypoactivity in brains affected by DID. Desire quickly followed my amazement — I want to continue this project and study more brains. Their complexity, delicacy, and importance to every aspect of life fascinate me. Successfully completing this research project gave me a sense of hope; I know I am capable of participating in a large scale research project and potentially making a difference in someone else’s life through my research.

Anna’s diagnosis inspired me to begin volunteering at FRF; from there, I discovered my desire to help people further by contributing to medical research. As my research interest blossomed, I realized that it’s no coincidence that I want to study brains—after all, Anna suffered from brain cancer. Reflecting on these experiences this past year and a half, I see that everything I’ve done is connected. Sadly, a few months after I returned from China, Anna passed away. I am still sad, but as I run a toy truck across the floor and watch one of the little patients’ eyes light up, I imagine that she would be proud of my commitment to pursue medicine and study the brain.

This essay has a very strong emotional core that tugs at the heart strings and makes the reader feel invested. Writing about sickness can be difficult and doesn’t always belong in a personal statement, but in this case it works well because the focus is on how this student cared for her cousin and dealt with the grief and emotions surrounding her condition. Writing about the compassion she showed and the doubts and concerns that filled her mind keeps the focus on the author and her personality. 

This continues when she again discusses the activities she did with the kids at FRF and the personal reflection this experience allowed her to have. For example, she writes: Volunteering has both made me appreciate my own health and also cherish the new relationships I build with the children and families. We play sports, make figures out of playdoh, and dress up.

Concluding the essay with the sad story of her cousin’s passing brings the essay full circle and returns to the emotional heart of the piece to once again build a connection with the reader. However, it finishes on a hopeful note and demonstrates how this student has been able to turn a tragic experience into a source of lifelong inspiration. 

One thing this essay should be cognizant of is that personal statements should not read as summaries of your extracurricular resume. Although this essay doesn’t fully fall into that trap, it does describe two key extracurriculars the student participated in. However, the inclusion of such a strong emotional core running throughout the essay helps keep the focus on the student and her thoughts and feelings during these activities.

To avoid making this mistake, make sure you have a common thread running through your essay and the extracurriculars provide support to the story you are trying to tell, rather than crafting a story around your activities. And, as this essay does, make sure there is lots of personal reflection and feelings weaved throughout to focus attention to you rather than your extracurriculars. 

Essay Example #4: Love of Writing

“I want to be a writer.” This had been my answer to every youthful discussion with the adults in my life about what I would do when I grew up. As early as elementary school, I remember reading my writing pieces aloud to an audience at “Author of the Month” ceremonies. Bearing this goal in mind, and hoping to gain some valuable experience, I signed up for a journalism class during my freshman year. Despite my love for writing, I initially found myself uninterested in the subject and I struggled to enjoy the class. When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines. Journalism required a laconic style and orderly structure, and I found my teacher’s assignments formulaic and dull. That class shook my confidence as a writer. I was uncertain if I should continue in it for the rest of my high school career.

Despite my misgivings, I decided that I couldn’t make a final decision on whether to quit journalism until I had some experience working for a paper outside of the classroom. The following year, I applied to be a staff reporter on our school newspaper. I hoped this would help me become more self-driven and creative, rather than merely writing articles that my teacher assigned. To my surprise, my time on staff was worlds away from what I experienced in the journalism class. Although I was unaccustomed to working in a fast-paced environment and initially found it burdensome to research and complete high-quality stories in a relatively short amount of time, I also found it exciting. I enjoyed learning more about topics and events on campus that I did not know much about; some of my stories that I covered in my first semester concerned a chess tournament, a food drive, and a Spanish immersion party. I relished in the freedom I had to explore and learn, and to write more independently than I could in a classroom.

Although I enjoyed many aspects of working for the paper immediately, reporting also pushed me outside of my comfort zone. I am a shy person, and speaking with people I did not know intimidated me. During my first interview, I met with the basketball coach to prepare for a story about the team’s winning streak. As I approached his office, I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block, and I could hardly get out my opening questions. Fortunately, the coach was very kind and helped me through the conversation. Encouraged, I prepared for my next interview with more confidence. After a few weeks of practice, I even started to look forward to interviewing people on campus. That first journalism class may have bored me, but even if journalism in practice was challenging, it was anything but tedious.

Over the course of that year, I grew to love writing for our school newspaper. Reporting made me aware of my surroundings, and made me want to know more about current events on campus and in the town where I grew up. By interacting with people all over campus, I came to understand the breadth of individuals and communities that make up my high school. I felt far more connected to diverse parts of my school through my work as a journalist, and I realized that journalism gave me a window into seeing beyond my own experiences. The style of news writing may be different from what I used to think “writing” meant, but I learned that I can still derive exciting plots from events that may have gone unnoticed if not for my stories. I no longer struggle to approach others, and truly enjoy getting to know people and recognizing their accomplishments through my writing. Becoming a writer may be a difficult path, but it is as rewarding as I hoped when I was young.

This essay is clearly structured in a manner that makes it flow very nicely and contributes to its success. It starts with a quote to draw in the reader and show this student’s life-long passion for writing. Then it addresses the challenges of facing new, unfamiliar territory and how this student overcame it. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on this eye-opening experience and a nod to their younger self from the introduction. Having a well-thought out and sequential structure with clear transitions makes it extremely easy for the reader to follow along and take away the main idea.

Another positive aspect of the essay is the use of strong and expressive language. Sentences like “ When I thought of writing, I imagined lyrical prose, profound poetry, and thrilling plot lines ” stand out because of the intentional use of words like “lyrical”, “profound”, and “thrilling” to convey the student’s love of writing. The author also uses an active voice to capture the readers’ attention and keep us engaged. They rely on their language and diction to reveal details to the reader, for instance saying “ I felt everything from my toes to my tongue freeze into a solid block ” to describe feeling nervous.

This essay is already very strong, so there isn’t much that needs to be changed. One thing that could take the essay from great to outstanding would be to throw in more quotes, internal dialogue, and sensory descriptors.

It would be nice to see the nerves they felt interviewing the coach by including dialogue like “ Um…I want to interview you about…uh…”.  They could have shown their original distaste for journalism by narrating the thoughts running through their head. The fast-paced environment of their newspaper could have come to life with descriptions about the clacking of keyboards and the whirl of people running around laying out articles.

Essay Example #5: Starting a Fire

Was I no longer the beloved daughter of nature, whisperer of trees? Knee-high rubber boots, camouflage, bug spray—I wore the garb and perfume of a proud wild woman, yet there I was, hunched over the pathetic pile of stubborn sticks, utterly stumped, on the verge of tears. As a child, I had considered myself a kind of rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees, who could glide through tick-infested meadows and emerge Lyme-free. I knew the cracks of the earth like the scars on my own rough palms. Yet here I was, ten years later, incapable of performing the most fundamental outdoor task: I could not, for the life of me, start a fire. 

Furiously I rubbed the twigs together—rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers. No smoke. The twigs were too young, too sticky-green; I tossed them away with a shower of curses, and began tearing through the underbrush in search of a more flammable collection. My efforts were fruitless. Livid, I bit a rejected twig, determined to prove that the forest had spurned me, offering only young, wet bones that would never burn. But the wood cracked like carrots between my teeth—old, brittle, and bitter. Roaring and nursing my aching palms, I retreated to the tent, where I sulked and awaited the jeers of my family. 

Rattling their empty worm cans and reeking of fat fish, my brother and cousins swaggered into the campsite. Immediately, they noticed the minor stick massacre by the fire pit and called to me, their deep voices already sharp with contempt. 

“Where’s the fire, Princess Clara?” they taunted. “Having some trouble?” They prodded me with the ends of the chewed branches and, with a few effortless scrapes of wood on rock, sparked a red and roaring flame. My face burned long after I left the fire pit. The camp stank of salmon and shame. 

In the tent, I pondered my failure. Was I so dainty? Was I that incapable? I thought of my hands, how calloused and capable they had been, how tender and smooth they had become. It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive. And I’d gotten glasses, having grown horrifically nearsighted; long nights of dim lighting and thick books had done this. I couldn’t remember the last time I had lain down on a hill, barefaced, and seen the stars without having to squint. Crawling along the edge of the tent, a spider confirmed my transformation—he disgusted me, and I felt an overwhelming urge to squash him. 

Yet, I realized I hadn’t really changed—I had only shifted perspective. I still eagerly explored new worlds, but through poems and prose rather than pastures and puddles. I’d grown to prefer the boom of a bass over that of a bullfrog, learned to coax a different kind of fire from wood, having developed a burn for writing rhymes and scrawling hypotheses. 

That night, I stayed up late with my journal and wrote about the spider I had decided not to kill. I had tolerated him just barely, only shrieking when he jumped—it helped to watch him decorate the corners of the tent with his delicate webs, knowing that he couldn’t start fires, either. When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.

This student is an excellent writer, which allows a simple story to be outstandingly compelling. The author articulates her points beautifully and creatively through her immense use of details and figurative language. Lines like “a rustic princess, a cradler of spiders and centipedes, who was serenaded by mourning doves and chickadees,” and “rubbed and rubbed until shreds of skin flaked from my fingers,” create vivid images that draw the reader in. 

The flowery and descriptive prose also contributes to the nice juxtaposition between the old Clara and the new Clara. The latter half of the essay contrasts elements of nature with music and writing to demonstrate how natural these interests are for her now. This sentence perfectly encapsulates the contrast she is trying to build: “It had been years since I’d kneaded mud between my fingers; instead of scaling a white pine, I’d practiced scales on my piano, my hands softening into those of a musician—fleshy and sensitive.”

In addition to being well-written, this essay is thematically cohesive. It begins with the simple introduction “Fire!” and ends with the following image: “When the night grew cold and the embers died, my words still smoked—my hands burned from all that scrawling—and even when I fell asleep, the ideas kept sparking—I was on fire, always on fire.” This full-circle approach leaves readers satisfied and impressed.

There is very little this essay should change, however one thing to be cautious about is having an essay that is overly-descriptive. We know from the essay that this student likes to read and write, and depending on other elements of her application, it might make total sense to have such a flowery and ornate writing style. However, your personal statement needs to reflect your voice as well as your personality. If you would never use language like this in conversation or your writing, don’t put it in your personal statement. Make sure there is a balance between eloquence and your personal voice.

Essay Example #6: Dedicating a Track

“Getting beat is one thing – it’s part of competing – but I want no part in losing.” Coach Rob Stark’s motto never fails to remind me of his encouragement on early-morning bus rides to track meets around the state. I’ve always appreciated the phrase, but an experience last June helped me understand its more profound, universal meaning.

Stark, as we affectionately call him, has coached track at my high school for 25 years. His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running. When I learned a neighboring high school had dedicated their track to a longtime coach, I felt that Stark deserved similar honors.

Our school district’s board of education indicated they would only dedicate our track to Stark if I could demonstrate that he was extraordinary. I took charge and mobilized my teammates to distribute petitions, reach out to alumni, and compile statistics on the many team and individual champions Stark had coached over the years. We received astounding support, collecting almost 3,000 signatures and pages of endorsements from across the community. With help from my teammates, I presented this evidence to the board.

They didn’t bite. 

Most members argued that dedicating the track was a low priority. Knowing that we had to act quickly to convince them of its importance, I called a team meeting where we drafted a rebuttal for the next board meeting. To my surprise, they chose me to deliver it. I was far from the best public speaker in the group, and I felt nervous about going before the unsympathetic board again. However, at that second meeting, I discovered that I enjoy articulating and arguing for something that I’m passionate about.

Public speaking resembles a cross country race. Walking to the starting line, you have to trust your training and quell your last minute doubts. When the gun fires, you can’t think too hard about anything; your performance has to be instinctual, natural, even relaxed. At the next board meeting, the podium was my starting line. As I walked up to it, familiar butterflies fluttered in my stomach. Instead of the track stretching out in front of me, I faced the vast audience of teachers, board members, and my teammates. I felt my adrenaline build, and reassured myself: I’ve put in the work, my argument is powerful and sound. As the board president told me to introduce myself, I heard, “runners set” in the back of my mind. She finished speaking, and Bang! The brief silence was the gunshot for me to begin. 

The next few minutes blurred together, but when the dust settled, I knew from the board members’ expressions and the audience’s thunderous approval that I had run quite a race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough; the board voted down our proposal. I was disappointed, but proud of myself, my team, and our collaboration off the track. We stood up for a cause we believed in, and I overcame my worries about being a leader. Although I discovered that changing the status quo through an elected body can be a painstakingly difficult process and requires perseverance, I learned that I enjoy the challenges this effort offers. Last month, one of the school board members joked that I had become a “regular” – I now often show up to meetings to advocate for a variety of causes, including better environmental practices in cafeterias and safer equipment for athletes.

Just as Stark taught me, I worked passionately to achieve my goal. I may have been beaten when I appealed to the board, but I certainly didn’t lose, and that would have made Stark proud.

This essay effectively conveys this student’s compassion for others, initiative, and determination—all great qualities to exemplify in a personal statement!

Although they rely on telling us a lot of what happened up until the board meeting, the use of running a race (their passion) as a metaphor for public speaking provides a lot of insight into the fear that this student overcame to work towards something bigger than themself. Comparing a podium to the starting line, the audience to the track, and silence to the gunshot is a nice way of demonstrating this student’s passion for cross country running without making that the focus of the story.

The essay does a nice job of coming full circle at the end by explaining what the quote from the beginning meant to them after this experience. Without explicitly saying “ I now know that what Stark actually meant is…” they rely on the strength of their argument above to make it obvious to the reader what it means to get beat but not lose. 

One of the biggest areas of improvement in the intro, however, is how the essay tells us Stark’s impact rather than showing us: His care, dedication, and emphasis on developing good character has left an enduring impact on me and hundreds of other students. Not only did he help me discover my talent and love for running, but he also taught me the importance of commitment and discipline and to approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

The writer could’ve helped us feel a stronger emotional connection to Stark if they had included examples of Stark’s qualities, rather than explicitly stating them. For example, they could’ve written something like: Stark was the kind of person who would give you gas money if you told him your parents couldn’t afford to pick you up from practice. And he actually did that—several times. At track meets, alumni regularly would come talk to him and tell him how he’d changed their lives. Before Stark, I was ambivalent about running and was on the JV team, but his encouragement motivated me to run longer and harder and eventually make varsity. Because of him, I approach every endeavor with the passion and intensity that I bring to running.

Essay Example #7: Body Image and Eating Disorders

I press the “discover” button on my Instagram app, hoping to find enticing pictures to satisfy my boredom. Scrolling through, I see funny videos and mouth-watering pictures of food. However, one image stops me immediately. A fit teenage girl with a “perfect body” relaxes in a bikini on a beach. Beneath it, I see a slew of flattering comments. I shake with disapproval over the image’s unrealistic quality. However, part of me still wants to have a body like hers so that others will make similar comments to me.

I would like to resolve a silent issue that harms many teenagers and adults: negative self image and low self-esteem in a world where social media shapes how people view each other. When people see the façades others wear to create an “ideal” image, they can develop poor thought patterns rooted in negative self-talk. The constant comparisons to “perfect” others make people feel small. In this new digital age, it is hard to distinguish authentic from artificial representations.

When I was 11, I developed anorexia nervosa. Though I was already thin, I wanted to be skinny like the models that I saw on the magazine covers on the grocery store stands. Little did I know that those models probably also suffered from disorders, and that photoshop erased their flaws. I preferred being underweight to being healthy. No matter how little I ate or how thin I was, I always thought that I was too fat. I became obsessed with the number on the scale and would try to eat the least that I could without my parents urging me to take more. Fortunately, I stopped engaging in anorexic behaviors before middle school. However, my underlying mental habits did not change. The images that had provoked my disorder in the first place were still a constant presence in my life.

By age 15, I was in recovery from anorexia, but suffered from depression. While I used to only compare myself to models, the growth of social media meant I also compared myself to my friends and acquaintances. I felt left out when I saw my friends’ excitement about lake trips they had taken without me. As I scrolled past endless photos of my flawless, thin classmates with hundreds of likes and affirming comments, I felt my jealousy spiral. I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.” When that didn’t work, I started to feel too anxious to post anything at all.  

Body image insecurities and social media comparisons affect thousands of people – men, women, children, and adults – every day. I am lucky – after a few months of my destructive social media habits, I came across a video that pointed out the illusory nature of social media; many Instagram posts only show off good things while people hide their flaws. I began going to therapy, and recovered from my depression. To address the problem of self-image and social media, we can all focus on what matters on the inside and not what is on the surface. As an effort to become healthy internally, I started a club at my school to promote clean eating and radiating beauty from within. It has helped me grow in my confidence, and today I’m not afraid to show others my struggles by sharing my experience with eating disorders. Someday, I hope to make this club a national organization to help teenagers and adults across the country. I support the idea of body positivity and embracing difference, not “perfection.” After all, how can we be ourselves if we all look the same?

This essay covers the difficult topics of eating disorders and mental health. If you’re thinking about covering similar topics in your essay, we recommend reading our post Should You Talk About Mental Health in College Essays?

The short answer is that, yes, you can talk about mental health, but it can be risky. If you do go that route, it’s important to focus on what you learned from the experience.

The strength of this essay is the student’s vulnerability, in excerpts such as this: I wanted to be admired and loved by other people too. However, I felt that I could never be enough. I began to hate the way that I looked, and felt nothing in my life was good enough. I wanted to be called “perfect” and “body goals,” so I tried to only post at certain times of day to maximize my “likes.”

The student goes on to share how they recovered from their depression through an eye-opening video and therapy sessions, and they’re now helping others find their self-worth as well. It’s great that this essay looks towards the future and shares the writer’s goals of making their club a national organization; we can see their ambition and compassion.

The main weakness of this essay is that it doesn’t focus enough on their recovery process, which is arguably the most important part. They could’ve told us more about the video they watched or the process of starting their club and the interactions they’ve had with other members. Especially when sharing such a vulnerable topic, there should be vulnerability in the recovery process too. That way, the reader can fully appreciate all that this student has overcome.

Essay Example #8: Becoming a Coach

”Advanced females ages 13 to 14 please proceed to staging with your coaches at this time.” Skittering around the room, eyes wide and pleading, I frantically explained my situation to nearby coaches. The seconds ticked away in my head; every polite refusal increased my desperation.

Despair weighed me down. I sank to my knees as a stream of competitors, coaches, and officials flowed around me. My dojang had no coach, and the tournament rules prohibited me from competing without one.

Although I wanted to remain strong, doubts began to cloud my mind. I could not help wondering: what was the point of perfecting my skills if I would never even compete? The other members of my team, who had found coaches minutes earlier, attempted to comfort me, but I barely heard their words. They couldn’t understand my despair at being left on the outside, and I never wanted them to understand.

Since my first lesson 12 years ago, the members of my dojang have become family. I have watched them grow up, finding my own happiness in theirs. Together, we have honed our kicks, blocks, and strikes. We have pushed one another to aim higher and become better martial artists. Although my dojang had searched for a reliable coach for years, we had not found one. When we attended competitions in the past, my teammates and I had always gotten lucky and found a sympathetic coach. Now, I knew this practice was unsustainable. It would devastate me to see the other members of my dojang in my situation, unable to compete and losing hope as a result. My dojang needed a coach, and I decided it was up to me to find one.

I first approached the adults in the dojang – both instructors and members’ parents. However, these attempts only reacquainted me with polite refusals. Everyone I asked told me they couldn’t devote multiple weekends per year to competitions. I soon realized that I would have become the coach myself.

At first, the inner workings of tournaments were a mystery to me. To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side. I learned everything from motivational strategies to technical, behind-the-scenes components of Taekwondo competitions. Though I emerged with new knowledge and confidence in my capabilities, others did not share this faith.

Parents threw me disbelieving looks when they learned that their children’s coach was only a child herself. My self-confidence was my armor, deflecting their surly glances. Every armor is penetrable, however, and as the relentless barrage of doubts pounded my resilience, it began to wear down. I grew unsure of my own abilities.

Despite the attack, I refused to give up. When I saw the shining eyes of the youngest students preparing for their first competition, I knew I couldn’t let them down. To quit would be to set them up to be barred from competing like I was. The knowledge that I could solve my dojang’s longtime problem motivated me to overcome my apprehension.

Now that my dojang flourishes at competitions, the attacks on me have weakened, but not ended. I may never win the approval of every parent; at times, I am still tormented by doubts, but I find solace in the fact that members of my dojang now only worry about competing to the best of their abilities.

Now, as I arrive at a tournament with my students, I close my eyes and remember the past. I visualize the frantic search for a coach and the chaos amongst my teammates as we competed with one another to find coaches before the staging calls for our respective divisions. I open my eyes to the exact opposite scene. Lacking a coach hurt my ability to compete, but I am proud to know that no member of my dojang will have to face that problem again.

This essay begins with an in-the-moment narrative that really illustrates the chaos of looking for a coach last-minute. We feel the writer’s emotions, particularly her dejectedness, at not being able to compete. Starting an essay in media res  is a great way to capture the attention of your readers and build anticipation for what comes next.

Through this essay, we can see how gutsy and determined the student is in deciding to become a coach themselves. She shows us these characteristics through their actions, rather than explicitly telling us: To prepare myself for success as a coach, I spent the next year as an official and took coaching classes on the side.  Also, by discussing the opposition she faced and how it affected her, the student is open and vulnerable about the reality of the situation.

The essay comes full circle as the author recalls the frantic situations in seeking out a coach, but this is no longer a concern for them and their team. Overall, this essay is extremely effective in painting this student as mature, bold, and compassionate.

The biggest thing this essay needs to work on is showing not telling. Throughout the essay, the student tells us that she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence,” she “grew unsure of her own abilities,” and she “refused to give up”. What we really want to know is what this looks like.

Instead of saying she “emerged with new knowledge and confidence” she should have shared how she taught a new move to a fellow team-member without hesitation. Rather than telling us she “grew unsure of her own abilities” she should have shown what that looked like by including her internal dialogue and rhetorical questions that ran through her mind. She could have demonstrated what “refusing to give up” looks like by explaining how she kept learning coaching techniques on her own, turned to a mentor for advice, or devised a plan to win over the trust of parents. 

Essay Example #9: Eritrea

No one knows where Eritrea is.

On the first day of school, for the past nine years, I would pensively stand in front of a class, a teacher, a stranger  waiting for the inevitable question: Where are you from?

I smile politely, my dimples accentuating my ambiguous features. “Eritrea,” I answer promptly and proudly. But I  am always prepared. Before their expression can deepen into confusion, ready to ask “where is that,” I elaborate,  perhaps with a fleeting hint of exasperation, “East Africa, near Ethiopia.”

Sometimes, I single out the key-shaped hermit nation on a map, stunning teachers who have “never had a student  from there!” Grinning, I resist the urge to remark, “You didn’t even know it existed until two minutes ago!”

Eritrea is to the East of Ethiopia, its arid coastline clutches the lucrative Red Sea. Battle scars litter the ancient  streets – the colonial Italian architecture lathered with bullet holes, the mosques mangled with mortar shells.  Originally part of the world’s first Christian kingdom, Eritrea passed through the hands of colonial Italy, Britain, and  Ethiopia for over a century, until a bloody thirty year war of Independence liberated us.

But these are facts that anyone can know with a quick Google search. These are facts that I have memorised and compounded, first from my Grandmother and now from pristine books  borrowed from the library.

No historical narrative, however, can adequately capture what Eritrea is.  No one knows the aroma of bushels of potatoes, tomatoes, and garlic – still covered in dirt – that leads you to the open-air market. No one knows the poignant scent of spices, arranged in orange piles reminiscent of compacted  dunes.  No one knows how to haggle stubborn herders for sheep and roosters for Christmas celebrations as deliberately as my mother. No one can replicate the perfect balance of spices in dorho and tsebhi as well as my grandmother,  her gnarly hands stirring the pot with ancient precision (chastising my clumsy knife work with the potatoes).  It’s impossible to learn when the injera is ready – the exact moment you have to lift the lid of the mogogo. Do it too  early (or too late) and the flatbread becomes mangled and gross. It is a sixth sense passed through matriarchal  lineages.

There are no sources that catalogue the scent of incense that wafts through the sunlit porch on St. Michael’s; no  films that can capture the luminescence of hundreds of flaming bonfires that fluoresce the sidewalks on Kudus  Yohannes, as excited children chant Ge’ez proverbs whose origin has been lost to time.  You cannot learn the familiarity of walking beneath the towering Gothic figure of the Enda Mariam Cathedral, the  crowds undulating to the ringing of the archaic bells.  I have memorized the sound of the rains hounding the metal roof during kiremti , the heat of the sun pounding  against the Toyota’s window as we sped down towards Ghinda , the opulent brilliance of the stars twinkling in a  sky untainted by light pollution, the scent of warm rolls of bani wafting through the streets at precisely 6 o’clock each day…

I fill my flimsy sketchbook with pictures from my memory. My hand remembers the shapes of the hibiscus drifting  in the wind, the outline of my grandmother (affectionately nicknamed a’abaye ) leaning over the garden, the bizarre architecture of the Fiat Tagliero .  I dice the vegetables with movements handed down from generations. My nose remembers the scent of frying garlic, the sourness of the warm tayta , the sharpness of the mit’mt’a …

This knowledge is intrinsic.  “I am Eritrean,” I repeat. “I am proud.”  Within me is an encyclopedia of history, culture, and idealism.

Eritrea is the coffee made from scratch, the spices drying in the sun, the priests and nuns. Eritrea is wise, filled with ambition, and unseen potential.  Eritrea isn’t a place, it’s an identity.

This is an exceptional essay that provides a window into this student’s culture that really makes their love for their country and heritage leap off the page. The sheer level of details and sensory descriptors this student is able to fit in this space makes the essay stand out. From the smells, to the traditions, sounds, and sights, the author encapsulates all the glory of Eritrea for the reader. 

The vivid images this student is able to create for the reader, whether it is having the tedious conversation with every teacher or cooking in their grandmother’s kitchen, transports us into the story and makes us feel like we are there in the moment with the student. This is a prime example of an essay that shows , not tells.

Besides the amazing imagery, the use of shorter paragraphs also contributes to how engaging this essay is. Employing this tactic helps break up the text to make it more readable and it isolates ideas so they stick out more than if they were enveloped in a large paragraph.

Overall, this is a really strong essay that brings to life this student’s heritage through its use of vivid imagery. This essay exemplifies what it means to show not tell in your writing, and it is a great example of how you can write an intimate personal statement without making yourself the primary focus of your essay. 

There is very little this essay should improve upon, but one thing the student might consider would be to inject more personal reflection into their response. Although we can clearly take away their deep love and passion for their homeland and culture, the essay would be a bit more personal if they included the emotions and feelings they associate with the various aspects of Eritrea. For example, the way their heart swells with pride when their grandmother praises their ability to cook a flatbread or the feeling of serenity when they hear the bells ring out from the cathedral. Including personal details as well as sensory ones would create a wonderful balance of imagery and reflection.

Essay Example #10: Journaling

Flipping past dozens of colorful entries in my journal, I arrive at the final blank sheet. I press my pen lightly to the page, barely scratching its surface to create a series of loops stringing together into sentences. Emotions spill out, and with their release, I feel lightness in my chest. The stream of thoughts slows as I reach the bottom of the page, and I gently close the cover of the worn book: another journal finished.

I add the journal to the stack of eleven books on my nightstand. Struck by the bittersweet sensation of closing a chapter of my life, I grab the notebook at the bottom of the pile to reminisce.

“I want to make a flying mushen to fly in space and your in it” – October 2008

Pulling back the cover of my first Tinkerbell-themed diary, the prompt “My Hopes and Dreams” captures my attention. Though “machine” is misspelled in my scribbled response, I see the beginnings of my past obsession with outer space. At the age of five, I tore through novels about the solar system, experimented with rockets built from plastic straws, and rented Space Shuttle films from Blockbuster to satisfy my curiosities. While I chased down answers to questions as limitless as the universe, I fell in love with learning. Eight journals later, the same relentless curiosity brought me to an airplane descending on San Francisco Bay.

“I wish I had infinite sunsets” – July 2019

I reach for the charcoal notepad near the top of the pile and open to the first page: my flight to the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes. While I was excited to explore bioengineering, anxiety twisted in my stomach as I imagined my destination, unsure of whether I could overcome my shyness and connect with others.

With each new conversation, the sweat on my palms became less noticeable, and I met students from 23 different countries. Many of the moments where I challenged myself socially revolved around the third story deck of the Jerry house. A strange medley of English, Arabic, and Mandarin filled the summer air as my friends and I gathered there every evening, and dialogues at sunset soon became moments of bliss. In our conversations about cultural differences, the possibility of an afterlife, and the plausibility of far-fetched conspiracy theories, I learned to voice my opinion. As I was introduced to different viewpoints, these moments challenged my understanding of the world around me. In my final entries from California, I find excitement to learn from others and increased confidence, a tool that would later allow me to impact my community.

“The beauty in a tower of cans” – June 2020

Returning my gaze to the stack of journals, I stretch to take the floral-patterned book sitting on top. I flip through, eventually finding the beginnings of the organization I created during the outbreak of COVID-19. Since then, Door-to-Door Deliveries has woven its way through my entries and into reality, allowing me to aid high-risk populations through free grocery delivery.

With the confidence I gained the summer before, I took action when seeing others in need rather than letting my shyness hold me back. I reached out to local churches and senior centers to spread word of our services and interacted with customers through our website and social media pages. To further expand our impact, we held two food drives, and I mustered the courage to ask for donations door-to-door. In a tower of canned donations, I saw the value of reaching out to help others and realized my own potential to impact the world around me.

I delicately close the journal in my hands, smiling softly as the memories reappear, one after another. Reaching under my bed, I pull out a fresh notebook and open to its first sheet. I lightly press my pen to the page, “And so begins the next chapter…”

The structuring of this essay makes it easy and enjoyable to read. The student effectively organizes their various life experiences around their tower of journals, which centers the reader and makes the different stories easy to follow. Additionally, the student engages quotes from their journals—and unique formatting of the quotes—to signal that they are moving in time and show us which memory we should follow them to.

Thematically, the student uses the idea of shyness to connect the different memories they draw out of their journals. As the student describes their experiences overcoming shyness at the Stanford Pre-Collegiate Summer Institutes and Door-to-Door Deliveries, this essay can be read as an Overcoming Obstacles essay.

At the end of this essay, readers are fully convinced that this student is dedicated (they have committed to journaling every day), thoughtful (journaling is a thoughtful process and, in the essay, the student reflects thoughtfully on the past), and motivated (they flew across the country for a summer program and started a business). These are definitely qualities admissions officers are looking for in applicants!

Although this essay is already exceptionally strong as it’s written, the first journal entry feels out of place compared to the other two entries that discuss the author’s shyness and determination. It works well for the essay to have an entry from when the student was younger to add some humor (with misspelled words) and nostalgia, but if the student had either connected the quote they chose to the idea of overcoming a fear present in the other two anecdotes or if they had picked a different quote all together related to their shyness, it would have made the entire essay feel more cohesive.

Where to Get Your Personal Statement Edited

Do you want feedback on your personal statement? After rereading your essays countless times, it can be difficult to evaluate your writing objectively. That’s why we created our free Peer Essay Review tool , where you can get a free review of your essay from another student. You can also improve your own writing skills by reviewing other students’ essays. 

If you want a college admissions expert to review your essay, advisors on CollegeVine have helped students refine their writing and submit successful applications to top schools. Find the right advisor for you to improve your chances of getting into your dream school!

Next Step: Supplemental Essays

Essay Guides for Each School

How to Write a Stellar Extracurricular Activity College Essay

4 Tips for Writing a Diversity College Essay

How to Write the “Why This College” Essay

Related CollegeVine Blog Posts

Fashion and individual identity Research Paper

Introduction, symbolism of clothing, the connection between fashion and personal identity, gender imbalance, reference list.

Fashion came about due to the desire by some people to be unique. In their quest to be unique, they wore clothes and used things that appealed other people, who then went ahead to get their own. However, fashion grew to become a frivolously motivated and constantly changing trend.

Contemporary fashion has dealt with much of the frivolousness, and it is thus taken as a reflection of one’s self-image (McDaniel, 2009). An archaic frivolous attitude towards fashion, which is unfortunately embraced by many, will therefore have adverse effects on the individual identity of the person. This paper explores the extent to which the fashion industry has dented individual identity.

Clothes normally have a variety of symbolic meanings. This is part of what the fashion industry uses to attract people to their designs. The symbolism is normally meant to make the clothes communicate to other people about the person wearing the cloth (Langman, 2002). This kind of symbolism has been an undeniable catalyst of the ever-rising negative effects of fashion on the identity of people.

The aforementioned symbolism may touch a myriad of spheres in life. For instance, the clothes may be meant to say something about the sexual orientation of the person wearing them. Other things clothes may symbolize include music, age etcetera (Duran, 2008).

This has made people who want to sport a given image try different fashions, which could lead to an identity crisis if the desired image is not part of the persons character. For instance, due to the quest to have a sexy appeal, a person may wear clothes that are too revealing for their character. This could lead to an identity crisis in cases where the person gets to like the nature of such clothes.

The choice of the kind of clothes to wear is normally dictated by the personality of the individual. This fact makes the clothes a reflection of the person, which is why the choice of fashion is taken to represent personal identity. Accessories that normally accompany clothing may equally reflect a person’s identity.

Since clothes tell so much about the people who wear them, the owner of the clothes also values them in a specific way depending on his personality. It is this kind of relationship between clothing and personality that makes fashion a critical media of information (Rasband, 2006).

The discussed connection between fashion and personal identity is the main reason why a myriad of people who embrace fashion are in an identity crisis. The description of contemporary fashion states clearly that it is characterized by trends.

It thus follows that people who are fond of following fashion trends will be caught in an identity crisis since they would want to try a variety of attires and accessories that portray different identities (Beaudry, 2010).

An affluent young person may buy different fashion designs to appear fashionable just because he/she has the money. This could have an adverse effect in his/her personal identity. For instance, it is common to see hip-hop artists wear hip-hop attire, and then switch to wearing suits.

Even though the suit-wearing may be meant for specific functions, the way other people view the artist may change. The artist identity may also be intrinsically affected, especially if he/she considers the new attire to be more appealing than the usual attire. Other people’s identities are equally jeopardized upon embracing the dynamic fashion trends in the contemporary society.

Men and women equally use clothing as part of their personal image. However, fashion has, since time immemorial, been oriented towards women. Thus women are always experimenting with different fashions to get their desired look and results. This has led to a boom in the fashion for women, which has translated into more identity issues among women (Malcolm, 2008).

For instance, the culture-reflecting attire that used to be worn by women in the past has been replaced by more fashionable clothes. Ancient attire that emphasized femininity has also been replaced by attire that makes women less lady-like. This makes them cope with the dynamism of social life.

Thus women are now able to assume masculine responsibilities and positions. For instance, in the contemporary society, it is not unusual to find female CEOs, managers and engineers. It can thus be argued that, although the fashion industry has adversely affected the identity of people, some of the effects are positive while others are negative.

As evidenced in the discussion above, individual identity and fashion are, more or less, inseparable. Fashion has a myriad of attributes and innumerable symbolic features that make a convenient tool for individual as well as cultural identification. Since identity is all about self-realization, fashion serves to harmonize a person’s inner feelings, and also reveal his/her uniqueness.

It is also notable that fashion is normally acceptable in the society as long as its effects do not hurt people. This acceptability is the reason why fashion has led many to have identity crises, and embrace a fashion addiction that only serves to retard their social and personal growth.

Beaudry, M. (2010). Dress and Personal Identity. Web.

Duran, I. (2008). Marketing to Personal Identity. Web.

Langman, L. (2002). Transgression as identity . Web.

Malcolm, B. (2008). Fashion and identity. Web.

McDaniel, E. (2009). Communication Between Cultures . London. McMillan Publishers.

Rasband, J. (2006). Image advantage. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2024, January 29). Fashion and individual identity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fashion-and-individual-identity/

"Fashion and individual identity." IvyPanda , 29 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/fashion-and-individual-identity/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Fashion and individual identity'. 29 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Fashion and individual identity." January 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fashion-and-individual-identity/.

1. IvyPanda . "Fashion and individual identity." January 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fashion-and-individual-identity/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Fashion and individual identity." January 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/fashion-and-individual-identity/.

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