Clarifying and Testing Identity Shift Theory: A Return to Biased Scanning?

Identity shift is a key phenomenon in contemporary scholarship on media psychology. Carr et al. (2021) proposed identity shift theory (IST) to explain this phenomenon. This paper clarifies and tests IST. Our clarified IST posits private self-awareness, public self-awareness, and identification with claim as moderators of identity shift, with private and public self-awareness influenced by identifiability and perceived publicness, respectively. Across two studies (n1 = 203; n2 = 780), we provide a near-comprehensive test of the clarified IST, conducting the first empirical test of several key mechanisms in the context of identity shift. Identifiability did not influence private self-awareness and perceived publicness did not influence public self-awareness. Identification with claim, but not private or public self-awareness, consistently moderated identity shift. We conclude by arguing that these findings suggest a possible reorientation of identity shift scholarship away from identifiability and publicness—central to early identity shift theorizing and IST—and toward biased scanning—central to early identity shift theorizing but dropped from IST.