Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate the age-old questions of what makes us whowe are and what features of identity, if changed, would makeus a different person. Previous approaches to identity havesuggested that there is a type of feature that is most definingof identity (e.g., autobiographical memories or moralqualities). We propose a new approach to identity thatsuggests that, like concepts in general, more causally centralfeatures are perceived as more defining of the self-concept. Inthree experiments, using both measured and manipulatedcausal centrality, we find that changes to features of identitythat are perceived as more causally central are moredisruptive to both the identity of the self and others.