Identity Bargaining and Self-Conception

An essential feature of social interaction is negotiation as to the identities actors may assume. A roleplaying experiment was designed in which this identity bargaining could be observed and its outcomes predicted. Male subjects interacted with female stooges who demanded that they assume a certain identity in order to accomplish a desirable goal (e.g., get a date). In half the cases the subject was altercast in an identity incompatible with his ideal self-conception; in the other half the altercast was irrelevant to his ideal self. Half the subjects interacted in private, while half believed themselves to have a peer audience. As predicted, subjects engaged in greater ceding of identity when the stooges' altercast was not aimed at a central feature of their self-conception. While measures of subjects' interpersonal strategies were not consistently differentiated when the episode had an audience, in relative privacy, however, subjects whose central feature of self was attacked proved to be relatively more defensive and derogatory toward the stooge, to project greater "secondariness," to altercast the stooge into a supportseeking identity, and to project greater autonomy. The common assumption that social interaction is goal-directed suggests central questions about the relationship between actors' goals and their means for pursuing them. The individual goes about his daily activities, attempting to affect others' behavior in ways best to achieve his purposes, while at the same time, these others pursue goals which ordinarily dovetail imperfectly with those being sought by the actor. Exchange theorists (e.g., Blau, 1964; Homans, 1961; Thibaut and Kelley, 1961) have argued that interaction goals should be viewed as preference rank orderings for the potential outcomes of behavior. Intervening between this rank ordering and the ultimate outcomes achieved in an encounter is a dynamic process of negotiation. It is through such negotiations that actors develop the shared meanings which allow them to interact (Goffman's, 1959 working consensus). Central to the working consensus is an implicit agreement over the situational identities actors may assume in the encounter. Each person projects a definition of the situation containing information about who he is in the encounter (selfpresentation, Goffman, 1959), and who alter may, or ought to, be (altercasting, Weinstein and Deutschberger, 1963). Since the purposes of any two actors seldom mesh perfectly, the definition of the situation they come to share is the product of a continuous negotiation. The negotiations centering on self-presentation and altercasting may be called identity bargaining, where actors place constraints on each other's situational identities, and finally anchor in the working con* This research was supported in various measures by N.S.F. grant GS-1093, N.S.F. dissertation grant GS-2520, and a grant from the Graduate Council of the State University of New York. Parts of it were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, 1973, and the Southern Sociological Society, 1973. I would like to express appreciation to Eugene Weinstein, Ardis Bynum, Janice Hoag, Andrea Kaplan, Leslie Miller, Frank Miyamoto, Robert Stein, Thomas Steinburn, and Mayer Zald for their assistance in various phases of the research. I would also like to acknowledge gratefully the Department of Sociology of the State University of New York at Stony Brook for the use of its facilities. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.105 on Fri, 07 Oct 2016 04:28:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Identity Bargaining / 477 sensus an understanding of who everyone will be during the encounter. Identity bargaining is often more than simply a set of strategic maneuvers instrumental to some interactional goal; it may often yield intrinsic rewards as well. One of the commonest forms of self-presentation is the pursuit of what McCall and Simmons (1966:75) call role-support, the confirmation from others for one's claims about one's identity. "One of man's most distinctive motives is the compelling and perpetual drive to acquire support for his idealized conception of himself." Besides securing role-support by shaping the responses of others, the person constantly tries to be himself, i.e., to behave consistently with his projected definition of self. There are two different ways costs and rewards may be attached to the actor's identity. The strategic identity he assumes in an encounter may be a vehicle for accomplishing his valued purposes, or his presented identity may capture important features of his self-conception. In a given interaction, however, these two elements may create conflict for the actor. From his perspective it would be desirable to assume an identity in pursuit of his situational goals which was congruent with an idealized version of himself. He would like to avoid the dilemma that Gergen (1965) has called selfconsistency vs. strategic self-presentation. The purpose of the present research was to create an identity bargaining encounter in the laboratory, by formally posing the selfconsistency vs. self-presentation dilemma to experimental subjects. This meant creating a desirable goal for the subject to achieve with another person, who made it a precondition of success that the subject assume an identity incompatible with his self-conception. Once placed in this dilemma, under what circumstances would the actor resolve the conflict in favor of self-consistency (and failure) or in favor of strategic self-presentation (and success)? It was necessary to create an experimental condition where the subject was constrained to bargain over an important and central feature of his self-conception, and a control condition where the object of negotiation was an unimportant or irrelevant feature of his self-conception. It was hypothesized that the subject would be less likely to assume an identity necessary to achieve his interpersonal task when it was incompatible with a central feature of his self-conception as opposed to an incidental feature. METHOD