Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-rj9fg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-20T10:36:02.031Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

“We are one people”: Group myths also draw cues from self-concept formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2025

Eli Elster
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, UC Davis, Davis, CA, USA [email protected]
Luke Glowacki*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA [email protected]
*
*Corresponding author.

Abstract

Sijilmassi et al. suggest that group myths explaining the shared history of a people succeed and propagate by leveraging cognitive cues from fitness interdependence. We offer an alternative and mutually compatible account rooting the success of group myths in cues from a different cognitive domain: The development of self-concepts.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Bluck, S., & Alea, N. (2008). Remembering being me: The self-continuity function of autobiographical memory in younger and older adults. In Sani, F. (Ed.), Self-continuity: Individual and collective perspectives (pp. 5570). Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
Campbell, J. D. (1990). Self-esteem and clarity of the self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 538549.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Campbell, J. D., Assanand, S., & Di Paula, A. (2003). The structure of the self-concept and its relation to psychological adjustment. Journal of Personality, 71, 115140.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Campbell, J. D., & Lavallee, L. E. (1993). Who am I? The role of self-concept confusion in understanding the behavior of people with low self-esteem. In Baumeister, R. E. (Ed.), Self-esteem: The puzzle of low self-regard (pp. 320). Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habermas, T., & Köber, C. (2014). Autobiographical reasoning is constitutive for narrative identity: The role of the life story for personal continuity. In Mclean, K. C. & Syed, M. (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of identity development (pp. 149165). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, T., & Köber, C. (2015). Autobiographical reasoning in life narratives buffers the effect of biographical disruptions on the sense of self-continuity. Memory, 23, 664674.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hastie, R. (2022). Schematic principles in human memory. In Higgins, E. T., Herman, C. P., & Zanna, M. P. (Eds.), Social cognition (1st ed., pp. 3988). Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogendoorn, H. (2022). Perception in real-time: Predicting the present, reconstructing the past. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(2), 128141.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jhangiani, R., & Tarry, H. (2022, January 26). Principles of social psychology – 1st international H5P edition. Pressbooks. https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/Google Scholar
Jiang, T., Chen, Z., & Sedikides, C. (2020). Self-concept clarity lays the foundation for self-continuity: The restorative function of autobiographical memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 119(4), 945959.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Loftus, E., & Palmer, J. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction. An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585589.CrossRefGoogle Scholar