learntoquestion ltq discussions

I think part of how we see ourselves is influenced by how we wish to be perceived by others and how we think we are perceived by others. I also think that, in some way, how we see ourselves is influenced by how we see others and vice versa. If we see others in a negative or prejudiced light, we tend to inflate our own self worth and self value, and may have a heightened sense of superiority to others. I also think that if we assign ourselves, say, too little worth, we tend to think so highly of others that we feel diminished by other people. We presume that other people may be better than us, and that can lead to insecurities. I think that personal and social identities are very well intertwined, and that deficiencies in either, like a nutrient or vitamin deficiency, can change our perception, both in the self and in the outside world. Identity can change a lot, both with due time and with the influence of others. Of course, I am not the same person as I was years ago.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of effort my peers poured into this assignment. It was clear that some elements shone through as common motifs that we interpreted as “identity”. Some of those include ethnicity, favorite activities, favorite objects, music and art, and family. I feel like a lot of these traditional elements of identity were well used, and I think that when people think of their identity, they attribute it to the tangible aspects of their life: the people, the places, and the things. I think that I collected that when we think of identity, we think about the concrete aspects of our life. Usually, we don’t attribute abstract attributes and ideologies so much, or so readily. I think maybe, this may be because we bottle up those elements of our identity, and aren’t so quick to share them. There's an element of fear behind that: fear that these inherent attributes like sexual orientation, political leanings, and more, will be interpreted objectively without the context of our lives. That’s probably why when we introduce ourselves, we typically just start off with our name, where we’re from, and simple things. I like how Beverly Daniel Tatum put it in her paper: “Survival sometimes means not responding to oppressive behavior directly. To do so could result in physical harm to oneself, even death.” I agree with her claim that there is this primal inclination within us to not reveal those elements of our identity that make us stand out within the group. I would like to extend her argument by including that those same elements of our identity are often ideological or abstract, as mentioned earlier. She continues to say that there is always a possibility for us to break out of this innate bashfulness, and I think potentially there could be opporutnities in the future for us to embrace the abstracts of our identity openly.

What we do, how we think, but most of all how others see us impacts how we view ourselves. Thus, the way we act towards others is just a reflection of how others act towards ourselves. If a person is mean towards us constantly, wouldn’t that rub off? Our individual identities impact our social choices as our likes and dislikes, personalities, and even those around us affect every single choice we make. In groups that you aren’t as comfortable with you might hesitate to say things, unlike those who are your day ones. One’s personal identity could be connected to their social status through doing things they enjoy in a social manner. One way this could be done is through joining a culture group and doing various activities with them or doing stuff with your family on a more social level. However they are also different in the sense that in the social setting you interact with people of all ages, gender, and race that you don’t necessarily have things in common with. This can happen most notably at a workplace or educational setting. Beverly Daniel Tatum described it best himself stating “The parts of our identity that do capture our attention are those that other people notice, and that reflects back to us. The aspect of identity that is the target of others' attention, and subsequently of our own, often is that which sets us apart as exceptional or "other" in their eyes”. Essentially, what we notice about ourselves are the things other people notice about us which can cause people to become self conscious and most likely attributes to code switching. The act of code switching to make yourself appear different to other groups of people could help minimize that self reflection which makes us feel bad sometimes.

Our identity is first formed at a really young age. Our likes and dislikes, personality traits, most of everything comes from who we spend time with the most with that usually being our family. But, as you grow up and start to become yourself, you change, you enjoy different things, act and walk through life differently than as you did as a kid. Society could limit our ability to change through pressuring us to be things we aren’t. This causes irrational thinking, stress, and limits our creative expression. The social identity theory developed by Henri Tajfel explains that people discern between us and them. This theory states that people who you are most like minded to are categorized as the us, whereas the ones who don’t are the them. The ‘them’ are sometimes shunned, berated, and are talked to differently due to not being part of the ‘us’ group. This impacts people’s willingness to let new and different people into their group.

While walking around the exhibition I first noticed my friend's boxes. I’d assumed I knew most things about them considering I’ve been friends with them going on 6 years. What most surprised me is that on the inside there were commonalities between me and them. For example I never knew my friend Max liked golf prior to this and while reading his paper he seems to enjoy it a lot for leisure rather than the competitive play, similar to me. Continuing to walk around the hall I noticed some really unique vessels that included a football helmet, tea box, tote bag, and many others. These things allowed me to peep into a person's life prior to ever knowing their name or who they are. I think that this was a cool experience with the ability to do that and was definitely a fun way to meet other people who had similar interests to mine.

Work Cited

From Tatum, B. D. (2000). The complexity of identity: “Who am I?.” In Adams, M.,

Blumenfeld, W. J., Hackman, H. W., Zuniga, X., Peters, M. L. (Eds.),

Readings for diversity and social justice: An anthology on racism, sexism,

anti-semitism, heterosexism, classism and ableism (pp. 9-14). New York:

Routledge.

Something that shapes how we see others is the behavior, actions and words people say. People can see or change their opinions on others based on the things they do when people talk to each other. Our identities and beliefs can make people do certain things we want or like when talking with others which can impact how somebody is seen by someone else. Author Beverely Daniel Tatum further adds to this by writing, “Who I am (or say I am) is a product of these and many other factors. Erik Erikson, the psychoanalytic theorist who coined the term identity crisis, introduced the notion that the social, cultural, and historical context is the ground in which individual identity is embedded”. Personal and social identities are similar because they are both of someone's own identity. They are different because social identities are the identity that people share with strangers meeting for the first time and personal identity is the identity people share with their close friends and family. An example of social and personal identity is the shoe box vessel I made with my social identity on the outside of the box and my personal on the inside.

By looking at the identity vessels of my peers, it showed me how diverse and unique we all are, not only by the content of what was in each box, but by the creative means that people used. One box that stood out to me was a shoe box made to look like the student’s bedroom, complete with a bed, mirror and more. Another vessel that I took to notice was one that used to hold CDs or DVDs in it, and in each of the slots was a disc labeled with an aspect of their identity. I would have never thought of these creative ideas and seeing them really revealed to me how diverse we are, even in our thinking.

By reading “The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I?” it pointed out a really interesting topic that I now realize applied to the vessels from Friday. On the second page of this piece, it comments “... [if] a person is a member of the dominant or advantaged social group, the category is usually not mentioned” (Tatum 2). For example, people falling under the category of male, heterosexual, white, or a combination of these things usually don’t portray them when expressing their identity. I noticed this on Friday, even in my own vessel, where I didn’t mention that I was straight. However, others with identities beyond the “stereotypical” of a straight, white male did mention the unique identities of their sexuality, gender, or race.

This concept also connects to dissonance and how others view us. This concept also connects to dissonance and how others view us. If someone’s inner identity doesn’t align with this baseline social standard of a straight white man, it creates dissonance according to the article. So without us even knowing, while making the project, we experienced dissonance when creating the outside of the box: our outer identities/how others see us is influenced by both what you want others to see and what you notice others see about you. Creating harmony in these things occurs when expressing our identity.

Finally, I noticed on the outside of many boxes, most people put their social groups/identities and left their more personal identities on the inside. Some examples I noticed on people outside were social media accounts, sports groups, music groups, and religious affiliations.

1. What shapes how we see ourselves, how others see us and how we see others? How do our individual identities impact our personal and social choices? How are personal and social identities connected and how are they different?

Family, culture, traditions, and media all play a role in how we build our identity and beliefs. For example the way we are raised is very crucial in how we act when we grow up. But also where we grow up is as equally as important. It is easy for our identity and beliefs to change because of the experiences we go through and the people we surround ourselves with.

Like Beverly mentions in their book, we are what we surround ourselves with. So our own identity is shaped by the things we enjoy, the careers we are interested in, and the values and standards we live by. I personally love music and everything that has to do with it. I live and breathe music, so I see myself as a musician. It’s the same for anything else in life. You surround yourself with things and people you want to be surrounded with or things and people who you think are interesting.

The way others see us is unique, because they don’t know what we like and they don’t know who we are. When humans see a new person the first thing we look at is the face, because not only do we want to know what they look like, but we also want to see how they naturally feel. So if we see a person for the first time and they look angry, we automatically think that person is a naturally angry person. It’s the same if we see someone with a happy expression on their face - (a smile), that is why when a new person smiles at us we tend to smile back because our nervous system senses comfortability in this naturally happy person so our brain tells us that this is a nice person who we can approach and most likely befriend. We then look at their body language and posture, that is because we STILL want to know how they naturally feel. If someone is moving fluently and they have a sense of freedom with the way they walk, we would want to approach this person more than someone who is walking with a sense of speed because our brain tells us that the person walking with speed has somewhere to be and most likely would not want to be approached. (This is why positive and negative reinforcement is important because you wouldn’t want to confuse someone by the way you carry yourself). The last thing we look for in a person is the clothing they wear. What people wear usually gives insight on what they like. So if someone wore a shirt with spongebob on it, we would assume that person likes spongebob.

One thing I said earlier was that the way we build our personal identity is based on who and what we surround ourselves with. Something intrigued me when I was walking around the room during the time we were given to look at each other's vessels on Friday. I noticed that almost every person there did sports. But I also noticed that they didn’t just start doing it when they got Boston Latin School. They had been doing it their whole life, unlike me. For example, in Tripp’s vessel he talked about how his father introduced him to hockey when he was younger and how he started to play hockey more and more and began to love it. And as he grew up he started to follow Massachusetts sports teams like the Bruins, Celtics, etc. So people started to refer to him as the sports kid, because sports became a huge part of him. This goes to show that since he became an athlete he decided to become a huge sports fan. So his individual identity impacted how he chose to live his life.

Even though our personal identity is commonly different from our Social identity, social identities shape personal identities by giving context and meaning.

There were a lot of observations I made about how people think others view them versus how they view themselves. People talked about their appearance on the outside to show that people often make first assumptions based on appearance. People also use very basic adjectives that don’t offer a lot of room for interpretation. They described themselves as “loud”, or “determined”. They put the “tribes” they’re in, such as the sports teams they root for, their ethnicity, religion, or neighborhood, among others. On the inside people often included their friends, showing that our self image is often shaped by the people we surround ourselves with. They also included their interests and achievements, but few straightforward objects and words like on the outside. This is reflective of the very two dimensional knowledge we have on others.

The project itself was also interesting not just in what people shared, but how it showed what people were willing to share. People definitely shared a lot about themselves, but they only shared what they thought was acceptable. There wasn’t much mention of the negative perceptions others or even they themselves had. There is a common fear of being vulnerable to others, especially those you don’t know. That fear of being vulnerable can at times hinder personal growth. If you constantly feel like you have eyes on you, it is harder to make personal breakthroughs. This feeling has become increasingly prominent with social media and the emphasis of an online presence. The common belief that vulnerability is embarrassing has (in most cases) only been amplified by modern technology. Furthermore, the lack of nuance in discussions online and the echo chambers created make people even more afraid to step outside of their comfort zone and challenge other people’s thinking, much less their own. Suddenly they are claiming to agree with things they know deep down they don’t. This increasing disconnection between personal and social identities has also led to increased dissonance and more and more extreme justification of this dissonance allowing the issue to spiral further. This is all to say I do believe society has made it increasingly harder to change and grow.

From my peers’ vessels, I learned a lot about how different people are and how our minds word. Some people created interactive vessels that focused less on what was in or on the project and more on the way it felt, whereas others focused a lot on the visual aspect in order to create an environment within the box that speaks to who they are. For example, where one student had included music that a peer could listen to through headphones, somebody else had built a mini-version of their bedroom, filled with decorations or valuable items (such as a stuffed animal). Both of these vessels were well-thought out, and created the feeling of a looking glass- allowing others a glance into their identities. I feel like the vastly different ways that people had gone about completing the project spoke about everyone’s identities in itself, and the ways that creativity is defined differently depending on the individual. Many of these vessels surprised me because I personally would have never been able to come up with some of the ideas. One vessel that especially stood out to me was the CD book (Viviana’s), because of how unique and different it was; it felt as though the vessel really matched her identity and aligned with her personality well.

In modern day society, people often transform or bend their identities in order to fit in, or keep up to date with certain societal standards as to how one should be or how one should act. In Julio Noboa Pollanco’s poem “Identity”, he writes, “I'd rather be unseen, and if then shunned by everyone, than to be a pleasant-smelling flower, growing in clusters in the fertile valley.” The poet emphasizes the importance of standing true to oneself, even if it means standing alone. This is often difficult due to fear of being “shunned” as mentioned in the poem, or insecurity with one's identity, leading to a common outcome of abandoning different parts of your identity and what makes you who you are. Societal pressure encourages us to change a great amount in order to align with a series of expectations, causing us to go through many changes with how we view ourselves and how we let others view us based on what’s the norm at a specific point in time.

Our identities externally are shaped by common traits and values since it is easier to connect over commonalities. This does mean that fundamental parts of our identities are left out to a certain degree, which makes it very interesting to see the inside of people’s vessels. This aligns with social identity theory since it involves trying to fit into social groups and following common patterns within them. It doesn’t necessarily mean people lose parts of their identity, they just aren’t always on display. For example, several people included their religious backgrounds as part of their vessels. Religion is a topic not often discussed at BLS, which is a very diverse space where it often isn’t convenient to display this part of one’s identity. I noticed that people included books inside their vessels, many of them revolutionary for their time or important to humanity in general. I didn’t really think people were reading books and connecting deeply with their ideas to the degree that I saw. Ideas of domination and subordination may also be at play in what people decide to display outwardly. If people are part of a generally subordinate group, they may either cling to that as a key part of what makes them distinct, or mask it at least at times.

The social media article was interesting since many people know each other superficially through their social media personalities. Some people in particular surprised me with the inside of their vessels and the history and personality they each have. Obviously most of what we see online is essentially fake, but everyone is so invested that it becomes real.

Online it’s easy to choose exactly how you want to appear, but I hadn’t considered how the past could easily resurface as mentioned in the article. It gets me thinking about how our identities will evolve over the next ten years or so, and how that will align with current social media personas.

Walking through the Seevak room, I felt like I got to see a positive side of every single person and not just the common ideas of who they are. People like to categorize others into homogeneous cliques, but obviously that’s not how identity works. It was impactful to see photos and artifacts from people’s childhoods and get to know some of their values. It shows that even though people act based on surrounding groups and social interactions, individuals have unique backgrounds, thoughts, and stories.

What shapes how we see ourselves, how others see us and how we see others? How do our individual identities impact our personal and social choices? How are personal and social identities connected and how are they different?

There are many things that shape who we are, from our heritage to our education, our identities are built upon each day that we are living. When exploring the identity vessel projects, one student's identity vessel really spoke to me. The student had used a shoebox, which might have seemed like a common vessel but actually meant something to them specifically. They said that dance was a big part of their identity and the overflowing shoes represented that. I think this is a great indicator that the things that we spend our time on play a big part in shaping our identity. Most people might describe themselves as a soccer player or a violinist, different things they spend their time on that have become who they are. Furthermore, our activities are often how we make friendships and connect with our communities, creating our “social identities.” Our personal and social identities are connected because they are two parts of a whole, creating our identities and how the world will see us. As mentioned in “The Complexity of Identity: “Who Am I?’” By Beverly Daniel Tatum, our identities are shaped by outside factors and often the environment we grow up in. Similar to how sports and activities build our identity, the people present during such activities also help to shape who we are. The opinions and beliefs of those around us can heavily influence our own opinions and therefore how we view ourselves. In contrast, our individual identities can also change how we act in social situations and therefore our social identities. Our pre-existing beliefs can help us to decide how we want our social identities to be, while for some people our social identities are almost identical to our personal ones. So overall, our social and personal identities often are different from person to person and dependent on if you surround yourself with people who have similar or opposing views.

When I walked around the room I noticed that a lot of people showed the inside of their vessels to include their families or younger versions of themselves. This connects to how people have an “us” vs. “them” mentality but when you really look at what everyone values, the things that they love the most are their families; this deconstructs the “us” vs. “them” mentality and makes us view ourselves as one similar group of people. One of the reasons the mentality can be so quickly forgotten in this scenario is because identity changes. Everyday life impacts people to think differently about the smallest things, so no one is the same person that they were even a year ago. Individual identity decides social choices (the people we spend time with), since when we see people that we relate to, we are more likely to want to interact with them more. The “us” vs. “them” mentality can be disregarded if people remember or are shown the similarities between each other; not only is one person now imagining more positive things about the other person, they are more willing to interact with the previous “them” in positive ways, because if they didn’t they would not be interacting with a part of their own identity. Through interactions with the previous “them” their identity will shift to somewhere where they may no longer see the “us” vs. “them.” That being said, not everyone’s preconceived notions can change so quickly especially when “the Internet is more permanent and more pervasive” than ever before, as Nausicaa Renner says in her article “How Social Media Shapes Our Identity.” People’s own identities change very quickly, but the ways that others perceive them may not. With social media it is hard to move away from our past selves since everything is immortalized in media, so something you said ten years ago can still come back to haunt you. This is seen most commonly with celebrities, but can also happen to the everyday person. When presented with the identity vessels in class people may be more keen to relate to their fellow students, but if they are reminded of something that one of their peers posted two years ago, they might not be so willing to give up their ideas of the other person. Everyone needs to try new things in order to learn how to grow and since social media constantly reminds people of their past it can be hard to grow away from it. That being said, activities like the identity vessel project help introduce new versions of ourselves to each other and bridge the gap between the idea of “us” and “them”.

The self-concept we have of ourselves is directly linked to the ideas we have of other people, the ideas others have on us and how much of our lives are built around our connection with other people. As I was walking around, I noticed how commonly people mentioned the people they hold close, whether that be friends or family they obviously hold a lot of impact on my classmates and I. This idea affected both the internal and external factors of the vessels, internal parts had mentions of our family and external parts commonly represented how our relationships between certain people can influence others perspectives on us.

When family members were mentioned on someone's project they were commonly in reference to someone's personal identity. For example, they might get certain traits, hobbies, or aspirations from their parents. They could also get their sense of self from what other people have told them, similar to what was discussed in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “The Complexity of Identity: Who Am I?” where she describes how self-concept “depends in large part on who the world around me says I am.” Most teenagers also get the very foundations of who they are from their family, most commonly their religion. Furthermore, if one person whose opinion we value and trust to be right, we can think less of others who don’t hold the same values.

Along with how family affects our personal identity, they affect our social identity as well. We can get most of our social identity from our family, like race, nationality, ethnic group, religion, etc. These factors specifically influence our culture, which greatly influences our idea of self. Our culture can both indirectly and directly influence our values, which can dictate both how we view ourselves and other people. Social Identity also has a tendency to impact how we view whole groups of people with a “us v. them” perspective, where those with opposing social groups are seen as less than compared to us. Our identities are very much multifaceted, but most examples come in a big part to what opinions others have of us, or general life values that they share.