Real Self vs. Digital Self: Identity, Presentation, and Behavior Online

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Real Self vs. Digital Self: Identity, Presentation, and Behavior Online

Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 12: Social Psychology in the Digital AgeSection 12.3 · lesson 81 of 8510 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

How platforms activate different versions of the self, and what that costs.

  • Apply Goffman's dramaturgy to platform behavior
  • Relate actual, ideal, and ought selves to digital affordances
  • Separate benign from toxic disinhibition
  • Evaluate the evidence on authenticity and well-being

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Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,252 words). Read along, or search it.

Social Psychology in the Digital Age

Real Self vs. Digital Self

Is there a real self behind the profile? That question sounds philosophical, and social psychology answers it empirically. This section brings four classical frameworks to bear on online identity. Goffman's dramaturgy, which predates computing by decades. Higgins's self-discrepancy theory, which explains which bad feeling you get. Jones and Pittman's taxonomy of impression-management strategies. And the deindividuation tradition, updated by the SIDE model. The through-line is that digital environments extend these dynamics. They do not replace them. And the practical payoff is a finding about authenticity, measured longitudinally.

Goffman, 1959

Identity as a Staged Accomplishment

Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life in nineteen fifty-nine. It treats identity as a dramaturgical accomplishment. Actors manage impressions through staged behavior, aimed at an imagined audience. He distinguished two regions. Front-stage is where the performance occurs. Back-stage regions are where preparation and repair happen. And where deviation from the performance is permitted. Now consider why a book from nineteen fifty-nine survives the internet so well. Platforms operationalize self-presentation in near-literal stagecraft. The metaphor stopped being a metaphor.

What Changed

Three Features That Break the Old Regions

Three features distinguish digital performance from the offline kind. The first is context collapse, named by Marwick and boyd. Formerly segregated audiences get fused into a single visible field. Colleagues, family, classmates, and strangers, all at once. Which makes Goffman's region maintenance extremely difficult. The second is persistence and searchability. Performances become durable in a way face-to-face performances never were. And that complicates something we rarely notice. Ordinary identity revision depends on other people forgetting the earlier draft. Remove the forgetting and revision loses its quiet mechanism. The third feature is algorithmic pressure on what gets rewarded. Which subtly rewrites the criteria of competent self-presentation.

Higgins, 1987

Three Selves, Two Kinds of Distress

Higgins published self-discrepancy theory in nineteen eighty-seven. It identifies three self-representations. The actual self is the traits you currently have. The ideal self is the traits you wish you had. The ought self is the traits you feel obliged to have. And the gaps between them predict different emotions. A gap between actual and ideal produces dejection-related emotions. A gap between actual and ought produces agitation-related emotions. That distinction earns its keep immediately. Two people can be equally dissatisfied with themselves and feel different things. Dejection and agitation are not intensities of one state here. They trace back to two different discrepancies.

Platform Effects

Different Channels Summon Different Selves

Different platforms push on different parts of that architecture. Bargh, McKenna and Fitzsimons showed one side of it in two thousand two. Anonymous online channels can facilitate expression of the true self. The true self means characteristics you believe you possess. But which you cannot easily express in face-to-face life. Public, photograph-rich platforms invite projection of the ideal self. Users curate exceptional moments and edit visual representations. Which widens the actual-to-ideal gap rather than closing it. So the environment is genuinely paradoxical. Different platform types systematically activate different self-representations. The same person is pushed toward disclosure in one place and dejection in another.

Jones And Pittman, 1982

Five Strategies of Impression Management

Jones and Pittman published a taxonomy of impression management in nineteen eighty-two. It identifies five strategies, and each one claims something different. Self-promotion claims competence. Ingratiation claims likability. Exemplification claims moral worth. Supplication claims need. And intimidation claims power. Now notice what every one of those presupposes. A target audience, and a desired attribution. Which is exactly why context collapse is so destabilizing. With the audiences fused, no single strategy fits any of them. Platforms differentially afford and reward these strategies, producing distinct profiles.

Leary And Kowalski, 1990

Wanting To, and Knowing How

Leary and Kowalski added a distinction in nineteen ninety. Their two-component model separates two things usually run together. Impression motivation is the desire to manage how you are perceived. Impression construction is the set of strategies you actually deploy. That separation is what makes platform effects legible. Because digital platforms mainly change the first one. They amplify motivation, through visible feedback and audience scale. The strategies themselves were always available to people. Nobody invented self-promotion in two thousand ten. What is new is how much you want to use it. And how often the environment reminds you that you could.

Suler, 2004

Online Disinhibition Has Two Faces

Suler described the online disinhibition effect in two thousand four. It is the loosening of behavioral restraint observed in digital interaction. And the critical point is that it is not uniformly negative. Disinhibition has a benign face. Confessional self-disclosure. Unusual openness. Willingness to ask for help. It also has a toxic face. Cruelty, hostility, harassment. Behavior the person would not produce in a room. Now the finding that makes this hard. The two faces are distinguished less by the underlying mechanism. And more by the target and the consequence. Which means you cannot design the toxic face away by removing the mechanism. The same loosening produces both.

Six Mechanisms

What Actually Does the Loosening

Suler identifies six enabling mechanisms behind the loosening. Dissociative anonymity: they do not know who you are. Invisibility: they cannot see you, even if they know your name. Asynchronicity: you do not have to face the reaction in real time. Solipsistic introjection: the other person becomes a voice inside your own head. Dissociative imagination: the exchange feels like a game rather than life. And minimization of authority: status cues are weak or absent online. Those six together account for an enormous behavioral range. From confessional self-disclosure at one end. To cruelty at the other. And notice that only the first of the six is anonymity. Which is why removing anonymity does less than people expect.

The Older Literature

Deindividuation, and What SIDE Corrects

Disinhibition links directly to classical deindividuation research. Zimbardo laid that groundwork in nineteen sixty-nine. Conditions that reduce self-awareness and accountability matter here. Anonymity, diffusion of responsibility, and immersion in a group. All three produce behavioral drift toward situational norms. For better or for worse, depending on what the norms are. The SIDE model refines this considerably. Reicher, Spears and Postmes published it in nineteen ninety-five. Anonymity does not abolish normative behavior at all. It shifts allegiance from personal identity to salient social identity. And that identity may be prosocial or destructive, depending on the group. So anonymity causes toxicity is the wrong claim. Anonymity changes which norm is in force. The group supplies the content.

Authenticity

The Cost of a Sustained Gap

Does any of this actually cost anything? Yes, and it is measurable. Reinecke and Trepte ran the key longitudinal study in twenty fourteen. Authentic self-presentation on social network sites predicted subjective well-being. Six months later, which rules out the simplest reverse-causation stories. And the effect was mediated by two things. Positive affect, and perceived social support. The cost of chronic inauthenticity runs through three pathways. The first is cognitive load from impression monitoring. That monitoring is expensive, and it runs continuously. The second is fear of exposure. A maintained gap is a standing vulnerability. The third is subtler, and it is the worst of the three. Others respond to the curated self rather than the actual one. Which erodes the diagnostic value of everything they tell you.

Consolidate

Five Modes, and Their Documented Correlates

Five presentation modes are worth distinguishing, with their documented correlates. Authenticity means online expression converging with the offline self-concept. It is associated with higher well-being and greater relational depth. Selective disclosure means strategic editing that does not contradict the self. Its outcomes are neutral to positive, and context dependent. Idealized projection means systematically exaggerating desirable traits. It buys short-term reward and pays long-term dejection. Identity exploration means provisionally adopting alternative selves in safe contexts. That one is developmentally adaptive in adolescence. And chronic inauthenticity is a sustained mismatch with a motive to conceal. It predicts more anxiety, more depressive symptoms, and lower self-esteem. Read the fourth row carefully before worrying about teenagers. The concern is not exploration. It is premature closure on a platform self.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Real Self vs. Digital Self: Identity, Presentation, and Behavior Online

How does Goffman's presentation of self apply to social media?
Erving Goffman's 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life describes people as performers managing impressions on a front stage, with a back stage for preparation. Social media makes this nearly literal, since profiles and posts are curated performances. It also adds problems, such as context collapse, a term used by Alice Marwick and danah boyd for when friends, family, coworkers, and strangers all see the same post.
How does social media affect the gap between the actual and ideal self?
Image-heavy platforms can widen the gap between the actual self and the ideal self by encouraging curated, edited posts. According to E. Tory Higgins's 1987 self-discrepancy theory, a gap between actual and ideal selves produces dejection-related emotions such as sadness and disappointment. In contrast, Bargh, McKenna, and Fitzsimons found in 2002 that anonymous online settings can help people express a true self they find hard to show face to face.
What is the online disinhibition effect?
The online disinhibition effect, described by John Suler in 2004, is the tendency for people to say and do things online they would not do face to face. It has a benign side, such as unusual openness or asking for help, and a toxic side, such as cruelty and harassment. Suler listed six causes, including anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, and minimized authority, so removing anonymity alone does not eliminate it.
Does anonymity make people behave worse online?
Not necessarily. The social identity model of deindividuation effects, or SIDE model, published by Stephen Reicher, Russell Spears, and Tom Postmes in 1995, holds that anonymity shifts people from their personal identity toward a salient group identity. Behavior then follows that group's norms, which may be supportive or hostile. Anonymity changes which norms are in force, while the group determines whether the result is kind or cruel.

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