Authenticity, Social Motivation, and Psychological Adjustment

INTRODUCTION To be or not to be, that is the question. To thine own self be true. –Shakespeare Playwrights, musicians, philosophers, and psychologists have long concerned themselves with notions of authenticity. Shakespeare, for example, wrote often of themes related to being “true” to oneself and presenting a “false” self to others. Philosophers such as Lacan, Nietzsche, and Rorty take aim at the construct of authenticity by denying the existence of a coherent, unified self. The Grateful Dead, purveyors of “psychedelic” enlightenment, exhort their diehard fans to “wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.” The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests that they participated in were said to promote “higher states of consciousness” that elevated participants' understanding of their roles in the material and “cosmic” universes. What all these conceptions of authenticity have in common is that authenticity is rooted in subjective internal experiences that have implications for one's self-knowledge, understanding, and their relationship to behavior. In this chapter, we present a new multicomponent conceptualization of psychological authenticity and discuss its implications for a wide range of psychological and interpersonal functioning. We begin with a brief historical overview of the authenticity construct. Of necessity, this review is highly selective, focusing entirely on the psychological literature. Following this overview, we present our conceptualization of authenticity. We then report findings from our research that bears on this conceptualization.