Social identity switching: an investigation of non-demographic identities with computational-linguistic and self-report measures

Recent research has shown that people can switch between demographic social identities seamlessly. The current studies advance social identity switching research by (1) moving beyond demographic identities to identities that are not perceptually distinguishable; (2) developing a new identity switching paradigm based on an implicit computational linguistic style measure of salience; and (3) including explicit self-report measures of switch effectiveness, task difficulty, and performance. In two within-subjects studies (N = 211 and N = 220), a short writing task was used to prompt a switch from participants’ parent identity to their feminist identity or a repetition of the feminist identity. Our findings from the implicit measure revealed no identity activation “cost” in the switch relative to the repetition condition, consistent with the previous findings for demographic identities. In contrast, the self-reported salience of the feminist identity was significantly lower in the identity switch condition than in the repetition condition. Study 2 also found little-to-no difference in self-rated performance or difficulty of the task between conditions, indicating no switch costs on perceived performance. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between the implicit measure and the explicit salience measure as well as implications of the new paradigm and our findings.