Our “self” is a shifting structure of social relationships and interactions

As I make my way through Selfless: The Social Creation of "You" by Brian Lowery, a social psychologist and Stanford professor, a book I wrote about recently, I'm impressed with the insights Lowery shares about who we really are — in contrast to who we wrongly believe we are.

He doesn't mince words, as shown in this excerpt.

You know who you are deep down, in your heart of hearts. You know that you mean well, that you only do the wrong thing when you must or when the situation requires it. If you hit someone it was to defend yourself, or to protect someone, or to teach someone a lesson, or because everyone would've taken the liberty if they could. In any case, your view of yourself, or your thoughts and actions, as moral (or not) feels defining.

What if this is all bullshit? What if the self isn't something inside you, in your heart or anywhere else? What if the self is created in social interactions, in shared stories? If actions and beliefs define you, it's only because they have social meaning. If you give money to a person in need or a cause to help the downtrodden, are you a good person or a sucker? It's not the action per se that defines you, it's how the action is understood by others, and therefore by you.

Now, for most people, this is an unfamiliar and unwelcome way of viewing the self. It undermines our cherished view of ourselves as someone who possesses certain characteristics that reflect who we truly are, independent of how others see us.

But this thought experiment argues persuasively against that commonly held perception of our self. 

When you're driving a car and come to a four-way stop, you assume others will obey the rules of the road as well, and you will all appropriately take turns advancing or turning through the intersection. Each time this happens, it strengthens an unstated faith in the way things work, which increases the chance that you will continue to drive in a way that others find sane and predictable.

Now imagine that tomorrow you stop at a corner you know well but others ignore the rules of the road, they drive too fast, run stop signs, turn across multiple lanes of traffic. The same thing happens the next day, and the next. Now, rather than counting on everyone to follow rules you understand, you have drive as if anyone might do anything. It probably won't take long for you to ignore rules you have followed for years.

You can't assume others will stop at a red light, so you might have to slow down and maybe even stop at a green light just to make sure someone doesn't crash into you. For driving to continue without utter chaos, new rules would have to emerge, and you would learn, very quickly, to adopt them.

So how we behave, think, and feel is much more of a social phenomenon than is commonly realized. Here's how Lowery defines the self.

We all know our self intimately, but only vaguely understand it. Sometimes when surprised by our behavior, or where we find ourselves in life, we might ask, Who am I? How did I get here? How did this become my life? But in each of these questions, there is an unstated assumption that we at least know what — who — that "I" is.

Selves are mysterious. We cannot escape our self — no matter what you do or where you go, you are with your self. Given all the time we spend with our selves, you would think we would understand them better. But if you're anything like me, you often surprise yourself, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It's tricky to see the self clearly when we expect the self to be an internal, stable essence.

Think of the self like a nation. The government changes, citizens come and go, but the nation remains more or less the same. The continuity of interactions among people, the belief in a continuous history and national culture creates the experience of a stable entity. The idea of nation is often linked to a physical boundary, a nation's borders, but borders don't define nations.

A nation is composed of the relationships among people who believe themselves to be members of the nation. A nation is defined by selves. A self is more like a nation composed of interactions among people than it is like a country defined by a physical boundary. Nations and selves are defined by shared understandings within a network of relationships. Self, in other words, is a shifting structure of social relationships and interactions. 

Structure. This is an important word in Lowery's view of the self. Just as we create structures to help us navigate in the world, we also create the structure of our self, but this is less obvious to us.

Structure fills an existential need. Structure is a map of the world around us, with a place for us within it. For some, this might come from "God's plan"; for others, the idea of meritocracy, that everyone's outcomes are the product of individual effort and talent, plays a similar function. We can only be who we are if there is a sensible world around us. But not all structure is consciously considered.

Perhaps the most important structures are ones we take for granted, you and I. The idea that you exist as a self is the foundation from which we engage with the world. Imagine you didn't feel your self to be a man or woman, to have an ethnicity or a professional identity, that you had no political affiliation. Imagine you saw little or no difference between friends and strangers, and that friends treated you no differently than strangers. Imagine you had no outlook informed by connections with others.

Without a sense of self, and a belief that others selves exist in much the same way, the world would be almost impossible to navigate.

Science, religion, and philosophy are also structures that help us understand our place in the world. Scientists create ideas about the way the world works — theories — and use them to generate hypotheses that can be tested against what we observe. Philosophers rely on rational inquiry to explore fundamental truths about our experience and reality itself. Religious adherents attempt to make sense of the world through faith in supernatural forces. 

…With just a little bit of distance we can see the role of people in the creation and operation of science, religion, and philosophy. But not so much the self. The self can seem numinous, emanating from some place beyond human creation. But that is far from true.

Structures — including your self — are created and maintained through collective action. A person who lives in a purely personal world is considered insane. Meanwhile, the more people who join you in a collectively created world the saner you seem, regardless of the content of that world. As I write this, there are people who believe that some leaders of the Democratic Party in the United States are a part of a satanic cult that drinks the blood of children.

Surprisingly large numbers of people can believe outlandish ideas if they believe them together. The inverse is also true. Not believing the accepted reality of your social group — whatever that entails — marks you as naive, corrupt, or mentally ill.