You probably your memory as being essential to who you are, but new findings suggest that others consider your moral traits to be the core component of your identity. Data collected from family members of patients suffering from neurodegenerative disease showed that it was changes in moral behavior, not memory loss, that caused loved ones to say that the patient wasn’t “the same person” anymore.
An old saying springs to mind:
“We judge ourselves by our intentions but judge others by their actions”.
It’s called the fundamental attribution error, and it’s one of the most heavily researched phenomenon in psychology.
Lead researcher Nina Strohminger of the Yale University School of Management, said:
“Contrary to what you might think — and what generations of philosophers and psychologists have assumed — memory loss itself doesn’t make someone seem like a different person. Nor do most other factors, such as personality change, loss of higher-level cognition, depression, or the ability to function in daily activities. This is interesting because it shows that someone can change quite a bit and still seem like basically the same person. On the other hand, if moral faculties are compromised, a person can be rendered unrecognizable.”
Real-world Cognitive Change
Strohminger and co-author Shaun Nichols of the University of Arizona had conducted previous research showing that people tend to associate moral traits with identity over other mental or physical traits. They wanted to see if this association would hold up in the context of real-world cognitive change.
The study involved 248 participants with family members suffering from one of three types of neurodegenerative disease: frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Both frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are associated with cognitive changes, and frontotemporal dementia is specifically associated with changes to frontal lobe function that can affect moral behavior. ALS, on the other hand, is primarily associated with loss of voluntary motor control.
The participants, mostly spouses or partners of the patients, reported the extent to which their loved one showed various symptoms typical of their disease, rating each symptom as none, mild, moderate, or severe.
They also indicated the extent to which their family member had changed on 30 different traits, and how much their relationship with the patient had deteriorated since the onset of the disease.
Finally, participants reported how much they perceived the patient’s identity as having changed as a result of the disease, answering questions like “Do you feel like you still know who the patient is?” and “Regardless of the severity of the illness, how much do you sense that the patient is still the same person underneath?”
Identity Disruption
The results revealed that both Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia were associated with a greater sense of identity disruption than ALS, with frontotemporal dementia leading to the greatest deterioration in identity. Importantly, the association could not be explained by differences in overall functional decline.
Statistical models showed that perceived identity change was strongly linked with change in moral traits. Almost no other symptom, including depression, amnesia, and changes in personality traits, had an observable impact on perceived identity change.
The researchers also found that the degree of perceived identity change was associated with how much the participants thought their relationship with the patient had deteriorated, and this association was driven by the degree of change in the patient’s moral traits:
“Continuing to see a loved one as the same person they’ve always been is crucial to the health of the social bond,” explains Strohminger.
Aphasia was also linked with perceived identity, albeit not as strongly as morality:
“When you think about it, it makes perfect sense: language is the most precise tool we have for conveying the content our minds to others,” says Strohminger. “If someone loses this ability, it may be easy to see that person as having vanished as well.”
Together, these findings suggest that moral capacities form the core of how we perceive individual identity.
Reference:
- N. Strohminger, S. Nichols. Neurodegeneration and Identity. Psychological Science, 2015; DOI: 10.1177/0956797615592381
Last Updated on November 7, 2023