This work examines the Michelangelo phenomenon, an interpersonal model of the means by which people move closer to (vs. further from) their ideal selves. The authors propose that partner similarity--similarity to the ideal self, in particular--plays an important role in this process. Across 4 studies employing diverse designs and measurement techniques, they observed consistent evidence that wh...

Sociology of gender has developed beyond a personality-centered idea of "sex-roles" to an approach that stresses interaction and social structure. At the same time, there has been a concurrent development in the psychological sex-differences and medical literatures toward including the biological bases of sex-typed behavior and gender identities. In this paper, while we conceptualize gender as ...

A self or person does not appear to be identifiable with his or her organic body, nor with any part of it, such as the brain; and yet selves seem to be agents, capable of bringing about physical events (such as bodily movements) as causal consequences of certain of their conscious mental states. How is this possible in a universe in which, it appears, every physical event has a sufficient cause...

We present an interactive storytelling system that aims to help us “recreate” our conscious selves by calling on traditional Japanese concepts and media. “Recreating our selves” means the process of reconciling our conscious ‘daily self’ and our ‘hidden self’. This requires deep stimulations which are difficult to achieve through conventional logic based interactions. Users create, enter and dy...

If identities are socially produced, what happens when individuals grow up participating in divergent or conflicting social contexts? This paper reports upon research with second generation Turkish adolescents in London. Using the concept of the dialogical self, the research examines the dialogical structure of these young Turks’ selves. The analysis is Bakhtinian and seeks to identify the diff...

In no possible world does a time traveler succeed in killing her earlier self before she ever enters a time machine. So if many, many time travelers went back in time trying to kill their unprotected former selves, the time travelers would fail in many strange, “coincidental” ways, slipping on banana peels, killing the wrong victim, and so on. Such cases produce doubts about time travel. How co...