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The Identity Trap
We all have a sense of our own identity. Some of it is rooted in the immutable traits we’re born with, such as gender and racial attributes, but most of it we acquire along the way. We pursue training in a particular field, take a job with an organization, decide to live in one place or another and come to care about certain causes.
It’s important for us to signal our identity, which we do constantly in both conscious and unconscious ways. We often preface statements with identifiers to signal status and let people understand the role we expect to play (“As a so-and-so, I think this or that”). We also take note of how others signal identity to us and act accordingly.
Anthropologists believe that identity and status played important roles in cultural evolution, communicating to others how best to collaborate with us. Yet identity can also become a trap when our need to signal status becomes more important than what we are trying to achieve. That’s how good intentions result in bad outcomes and we become our own worst enemy.
Building A Basis For Collective Action
Humans are, in so many ways, weak and vulnerable creatures. We’re neither particularly fast nor strong. We can’t fly or burrow underground to escape predators. We don’t have a particularly strong sense of smell, sight or hearing to sense danger nor do we…
