Identity and Human Taxonomy
This text is about how our identities make us biased and deluded in our analysis
and perception of others.
Broadly Defining Identity
Identity is a core concept in the human social sphere. It's mostly manifested by
the desire of social beings to not only be accepted by
others, but also viewed and perceived in a specific way. Everyone that is social
(most people including myself) has a desire to fit in and to have a specific role
within a society. Here a society can represent society as a whole but also any
social sphere where a specific group of people interact together (a sports team,
a classroom, an office..). People can have slightly different identities depending
on the role they subconsciously feel like they can fill in a specific social
environment.
As an example, if someone thinks of himself as smart and physically tall,
depending on what might be the most advantageous this person might try to fill
two different roles if he's in different social spheres. If this person is part
of a math club (where height doesn't matter) he might try to fill the role of the
"smartest kid in the room". If that person also plays basketball, he might try to
be perceived as the "tall guy" since it's advantageous to be tall for basketball.
Perception vs Reality
In any social spheres everyone has two identities: how you perceive yourself and
how others generally perceive you. Since most people seem to have a somewhat similar
thought process, there is usually an approximative concensus about how people see
others (i.e most people probably have a somewhat similar impression of Brad Pitt).
What is interesting is that Brad Pitt might perceive himself in a way that is totally
different than how most people perceive him. The question is who's right? Is Brad Pitt
really able to see himself for how he really is? Or is the mainstream idea of who
Brad Pitt is more accurate? Or are they the same? Is there really any truth behind
the concept of identity? This is where things get interesting
and how our ego and our perception of ourselves might completely screw up how we
see others.
How Identities Relate to Human Taxonomy
Our identity is just the output of our personal value system.
This value system is heavily influenced and biased towards things we are
naturally good at. Someone who thinks he's smart will be more inclined to value
people that he think's are also smart (and also have a negative impression of
people who he think's aren't smart).
This creates a complex environment where everyone has different metrics to judge others
based on their personal skill set (or more accurately, their personal perceived skill set).
Add ego to this equation and you have an absolute mess of a cocktail.
Let's divide this "system" in different layers which are simply the order of importance
that we give to every item in our value system. For example, if my value
system has three main component, let's say intelligence, looks and sense of humor,
they aren't all equal(3 layers). I might value intelligence more, then looks second and
lastly sense of humor. This isn't too problematic if I barely have any ego,
but for someone with a big ego this completely messes up the way they perceive others.
Typically someone with a big ego is in direct competition with his peers that
are good at what he's also good at (someone who thinks he's smart and has a
big ego will feel a threat when someone else who's smart is in the same social sphere).
What that person will do in his analysis/judgement of the other person is that
he will iterate on all the items of his own value system until he finds a weakness
that the person he's judging has and suddenly that item will be the most important
of the value system when judging that specific person.
Here's how this looks in practice (Person A is attempting to analyze person B):
Person A has a big ego and has the following value system (in order of importance):
Intelligence, sense of humor, looks.
Person B is known for being pretty smart.
Person A feels a threat and subconsciously starts looking at person's B sense of
humor to find a flaw.
Person B has a good sense of humor.
Person A proceeds in his iteration of his own list of values and checks if
Person B looks good.
Person B doesn't look good.
Person A now starts to focus only on the fact that person B looks bad in order to
satisfy his ego.
Of course this whole process mostly happens subconsciously, but it's pretty clear
that the opinion that Person A has of Person B is heavily influenced and biased
not only because of his value system but also because of his ego. In simpler terms
what ego does is it forces people to have a negative opinion of other people that
have somewhat similar skills to them.
Human taxonomy is a mess. People perceive others in arbitrary ways based
on their personal set of values (their own value system). Ego adds another layer
of complexity that screws everything up completely. Since most people seem to have
a somewhat similar value system there is often a broad concensus about a specific
person, yet this might be far from how this person really is and very far from
how this person perceives himself.
I think this concept might be one of the reason
why I feel distant from most people: our difference in what we value and how we
measure what we value creates a gap that affects most social interactions.