By Sophie Ardley and Anna Sutton
Have you ever been in a social setting where you didn’t feel comfortable showing people your true self? For example, note the difference between going to a party with your old university friends and going to an end of year work do with all your colleagues, including your manager. With your uni mates, you may be the jokester, the life of the party, and love showing off your cringey dance moves. You know this is your true self, as you are completely relaxed and you are not worried about how others are perceiving you. However, would you feel comfortable acting this way at your work party?
If you’re like many of us, you may be more likely to adapt yourself to act more appropriately, so you don’t make a fool of yourself in front of your manager. Therefore, in this instance, you might feel you're not being authentic to who you really are. While this is entirely reasonable, did you know that an abundance of research has found that acting authentically to our true selves can help improve our well-being and engagement to our daily tasks?
Sometimes it can be a challenge to know how to be true to ourselves in situations like the one just described, while also acting appropriately. So, what can help us shape our authentic sense of self? Our autobiographical memories are critical to this process. These memories of our personal experiences have been found to be important for our self-identity, social connections, and directing behaviour for the future.
In this recent paper, we aimed to find out how autobiographical memories are related to our sense of authenticity. We found that memories of times when we were being authentic or inauthentic were more likely than other memories to serve the self-identity function and less likely to serve the social function. Remembering times we acted authentically or inauthentically can help us develop our identity … and perhaps learn how to still be true to ourselves, even at our end of year work parties!
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