What Builds Our Self-Images if We Do Not?
Five outside forces build our internal models when we do not take personal responsibility for their development: social conformity, cognitive dissonance, personal ego, reinforcement, and instruction.
By looking at how the internal models of ourselves are changed by outside forces (rather than ourselves), the triviality of these characters becomes more apparent.
Social Conformity
The slow grind towards conformity to a peer group can shape your internal model. This causes you to develop the self-image of someone conforming to your peer group, but different in some trivial, inoffensive way that allows you to fill a role in that group (e.g., you assume the role of the funny one, the sassy one, the leader, the rebel).
Cognitive Dissonance
We all have a desire to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is the state of having two conflicting beliefs, attitudes, or thoughts. No one wants to believe their actions contradict their self-image, so when your actions are forced down paths that contradict your internal mental model, you subtly rebuild your internal model to explain these actions.
For example, when you decide to switch jobs, you contextualize yourself as not enjoying your current job because it would create cognitive dissonance for you to leave a job you enjoyed. This is what makes your last few weeks at a job uniquely miserable and explains why it is difficult to work in such situations (in school environments, this is known as “senioritis”).
Cognitive dissonance can be uniquely self-destructive when someone has a temporary health-related vice (obesity, low exercise, smoking, etc.), which they then incorporate into their internal character as being part of who they are, making it almost impossible to recover.
In a similar vein, cognitive dissonance can be uniquely challenging when we contextualize failing as part of who we are. Sometimes we fail at something big or a few times in a row and we begin to internalize that we are just the type of person who fails when they try things of that category. This is incredibly damaging as now, trying and winning at something will create cognitive dissonance and you will subconsciously sabotage your ability to win.
Personal Ego
The drive to see oneself in a positive light shapes many people’s self-images. Our brains will go to enormous lengths to create a narrative that allows our internal self-images to be the heroes of our own stories. This method of developing a self-image can be uniquely insidious when it inevitably causes us to demonize positive traits we don’t see ourselves as having.
A young boy in school who doesn’t have many friends may be driven by his ego to contextualize himself as a “lone wolf outsider” who doesn’t need to hang out with “those normies.” He will begin to conceptualize normative behavior as intrinsically negative. His conceptualization may last long into his adult life and cause him to have difficulty building rapport when interviewing for jobs, dating, or building a support network of friends when moving to a new area.
If a man who has struggled financially lets his ego conceptualize himself as a “salt of the earth” type, he will begin to dismiss all wealthy people as immoral (potentially preventing him from even attempting to better his own situation).
Reinforcement
When we act in a certain way, we reinforce that aspect of our self-image. In many ways this is the same force as cognitive dissonance, but it is worth talking about separately, as it can dramatically snowball into very deleterious self-images through a process called avoidance.
Suppose one day you decide to not go to a party because the last time you went to a party you had a bad time. Now, you have “I am not the type of person who wants to be around a lot of people” lightly written into your self-image. Should you repeatedly make the same decision to not go to group events, you will reinforce that aspect of your self-image, thereby decreasing your likelihood of wanting to go to group events in the future.
Eventually, you will begin to make up stories about why you don’t want to go to group events to justify the initial emotional impulse you feel not to (e.g., “I am not good at social situations” or “something horrible happened to me at a party and I will have flashbacks if I ever go to one”). If this initially innocuous behavior is left unchecked for decades, it can snowball into an aspect of your self-image that could seriously affect your ability to function within society.
Instruction
While it requires an enormous amount of effort for us to design our own self-images, it requires virtually no effort to have someone else tell us who we are and how we should interact with the world.
Brands and people alike leverage our vulnerability on this front to drive us to spend money on their products or do things that serve their personal interests. Advertisements tell us what we should find to be fun, how we should want to see ourselves, and what we should want in life. Authority figures, friends, family, colleagues, and even strangers tell us who we should and should not be.
Ironically, most of the external instruction we internalize as being part of our characters is not forced upon us but rather sought out. It is human nature to compulsively seek out anything that allows us to neatly categorize ourselves. This can be seen in everything from horoscopes to the Myers Briggs personality test, blood type personality tests (common in Asia), Tumblr tables that label your micro-sexuality, and online quizzes that tell us which TV show character we are.
It is difficult to emphasize just how strong the desire to label oneself is. Even if we manage to resist strict classification systems, every human feels the subtle pull of wanting to identify with the fictional characters we see as having some similarity to us (e.g., “I’m the ‘Samantha’ of my friend group”[[39]](#_ftn39)), which can ultimately cause us to adopt other aspects of their archetype into our self-image.