UA Psychologist Asks "Are You The Same Person You Used To Be?"

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Ever wished for a brand new you? A University of Arkansas psychologist says that for a third of all people, becoming a new person is more than a wish - it’s a reality.

Through a series of four studies, James Lampinen, assistant professor of psychology, has found that about one in every three people believe they are not the same person they were eight years ago.

"It’s not just that they believe they’ve gone through a lot of changes or that they have grown and evolved through their experiences," Lampinen explained. "These people see their current identities as distinct and separate from who they were less than a decade ago. They express difficulty in relating to their former selves."

Lampinen calls this experience diachronic disunity (DD) - the idea that one’s self is not a continuous entity but is capable of a complete change over time. He recently presented his research at "Memory and the Self," a special symposium hosted by the University of Arkansas department of psychology. The event gathered renowned scholars of cognitive, social and developmental psychology to discuss notions of who we are and theories about how we remember.

Lampinen says he first become aware of the phenomenon of DD while talking to an old friend, who asserted that she was not the same people she used to be. Intrigued by this perspective, Lampinen set out to discover how many people shared this view and whether those individuals differed from people who perceive their identities as continuous.

To answer these questions, Lampinen and graduate student Timothy Odegard devised a series of four studies. The first of these studies aimed to identify the number of people who experience diachronic disunity. The second attempted to link DD to various psychological characteristics.

The researchers’ third study assessed four components that people rely on to construct their identities - physical attributes, psychological characteristics, social contexts and material possessions - and asked how drastically these components could be altered before people lost their sense of self. Finally, the fourth study examined whether people who go through DD remember events and experiences differently than other people.

The results of these four studies gave Lampinen and Odegard a glimpse into the phenomenon of diachronic disunity and enabled them to construct a profile of people who experience it.

For instance the first experiment revealed that DD most often occurs in association with significant changes in a person’s life. Furthermore, people are more likely to report DD after a long period of time. Comparing themselves to the person they were two years ago, few subjects reported a different identity. But after an interval of eight years, approximately one third of Lampinen’s subjects felt they were no longer the same person.

In addition, the studies revealed that individuals who experience DD share certain characteristics. They tend to dissociate themselves from feelings of trauma or guilt more readily than other people and report a lower overall satisfaction with their lives. Furthermore, subjects who experienced DD showed a reduced tolerance for ambiguity.

"Ambiguity is troublesome. If, several years ago, you did certain things that don’t comply with your current code of morals or sense of competence, you may feel uncomfortable remembering those things," Lampinen said. "People who experience DD are more sensitive to that kind of cognitive conflict, and it may lead them to reduce the ambiguity by distancing themselves psychologically from the person who committed those actions."

Other differences became obvious when Lampinen and Odegard reviewed their third study. In that study, the researchers provided subjects with hypothetical scenarios such as: "Imagine you lost all of your memories." They then posed the question, "Would you still be you?"

In general, people relied most heavily on psychological characteristics and - to a certain extent - physical attributes to define the self. Therefore, changes to these components were more likely to impact the way people viewed their identities.

However, subjects who had experienced DD also responded to changes in their social context and material possessions as though these were significant determinants of identity. But this onlyheld true when the components were altered in a negative way, which may indicate that the subjects use diachronic disunity as a coping mechanism, said Lampinen.

Finally, the researchers also found a difference in the way that DD subjects experienced memories.

Memory represents a critical tool for shaping identity. Many psychologists theorize that people who view the self as continuous through time use memory to create a "life narrative" - linking their experiences into a story that illustrates who they are and how they came to be that way.

In the fourth study, Lampinen and Odegard asked subjects to each describe a recent memory and a memory from six years ago. The subjects all described their recent memories with equal clarity and felt confident that they remembered correctly. However, the subjects who had experienced DD differed greatly from other participants when describing their older memories.

The DD subjects reported that their older memories were less vivid and less coherent, and they doubted the accuracy of the memory. Furthermore, these subjects were less likely to consider the older memories self-defining.

"When the subjects who had gone through DD related their memories from six years ago, they felt disconnected from those memories," Lampinen said. "It was as though they recalled the incident as an observer rather than as a participant."

This lack of involvement in distant memories may indicate that people who experience diachronic disunity don’t create a continuous life narrative as other people do. Rather, they may view their experiences in a more fragmentary sense - as a series of vignettes rather than as a story.

Another possibility, suggests Lampinen, is that people who exhibit DD approach their lives as a sequence of transformational events - emerging from each life experience as a new and different person.

"Diachronic disunity isn’t a pathology. After all, a third of all people describe their experience in that way," Lampinen added. "And they do recognize some continuity over time. They recognize that a picture of them from ten years ago is a picture of them and that they still know things they learned in grade school. More than anything, these individuals have a different perspective on the past and on memory, a different connection to who they used to be."

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