Intervening in the Audience Effects of Identity Shift

• In Event: An Intervention for Identity Shift: Unpacking the Challenges and Discrepancies of a CMC Theory and its Future

Abstract

Penny Trieu (University of Michigan, USA) researches identity and self-presentation on social media. In this panel, she is particularly interested clarifying and extending two notable dimensions in the identity shift research literature. The first dimension concerns untangling the two possible mechanisms behind identity shift: performance pressure and publicness. Studies on identity shift, including those conducted in CMC environments, have often informed participants in advance whether their self-presentation will be public or private (Gonzales & Hancock, 2008; Walther et al., 2011). Participants might exert more cognitive work in a public setting due to increased external pressure. This subsequently induces participants to think harder and preempt a presented trait in their mind prior to their public self-presentation. One may conclude that it is performance pressure rather than the publicness of the self-presentation which drives the consequent identity shift. Second, Trieu is interested in testing the influence of a known audience on identity shift. Individuals shift their identity supposedly to reduce dissonance or to maintain self-consistency. With an audience who actually knows them and with whom they expect future interactions, the desire to maintain self-consistency—and ultimately the drive to shift identity accordingly—may be greater. In a conducted experiment guided by Dr. Nicole Ellison, Trieu seeks to address these two specific dimensions of research on identity shift in CMC environments. As a panelist, she wants to explicate how these mechanisms come into play, map existing empirical studies to these theorized mechanisms, and proposes future studies to test competing identity shift theories.

Author

• Penny Trieu, U of Michigan