Who are you, really?

So, you’re a people pleaser? A social chameleon? Perhaps you’re an introvert or an extrovert.

Maybe you’re an academic or a bartender. A chef, doctor or an entrepreneur.  Maybe your favorite pastime is playing a musical instrument or going on a hike.

Regardless of our labels, professions, relationships, hobbies or even personal values, we constantly adjust how we think, feel and behave to fit how we see ourselves and how we believe others see us, all in the lifelong — and messy — pursuit of finding our “true” self.

Still, an important question remains: who are you, really? And what, exactly, makes something feel like you?

Two psychology papers, published 15 years apart in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and co-authored by psychology professor Dr. Rebecca Schlegel at Texas A&M University’s College of Arts and Sciences, offer a surprising clue.

Our feeling of a true self, Schlegel’s more than decade-long research suggests, may be shaped by how easy and natural an experience feels.

Those experiences, in turn, could reinforce the habits, goals and values we associate within ourselves, connecting us to a greater sense of well-being and meaning in life.

“Our true self may not be something we simply discover within ourselves; it may also be something we construct from what feels natural and easy,” Schlegel said.

‘Who in the world am I?’

We tend to think of our true self as a sort of buried treasure, waiting to be discovered beneath layers of expectations, obligations and social masks.

But what if we’ve got it backward?

And what if the answer to Alice’s famous question in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” — “Who in the world am I?” — isn’t “Ah, that’s the great puzzle!”?

Schlegel’s new research suggests that knowing our true self may begin with something far simpler: fluency.

“Fluency is the subjective experience or feeling of ease when carrying out perceptual, cognitive and behavioral tasks,” Schlegel said.

Put simply, fluency is what happens when something just flows or clicks, such as a conversation that comes naturally, an idea that comes easily or an activity that feels almost effortless.

And that feeling of ease can serve as a cue for deciding whether an experience feels authentic, like something our true self would actually do.

“When an experience is fluent, it can feel familiar, true and pleasant,” Schlegel said. “So, people assume that it is reflective of who they really are inside.”

It’s here, though, that the researchers flip the script, suggesting that our experiences don’t just reflect the identities we already have, they also help shape and express the identities we build.

The roots of this idea stretch back to Schlegel’s 2011 study, when she and her colleagues found that participants reported greater meaning in their lives if they felt that their choices aligned with who they really were. 

Fifteen years and many studies later, Schlegel and her colleagues found that when an experience feels fluent, people are more likely to perceive it as authentic and, in turn, reflective of their true self.

“Our experiences can help express and shape the core of who we think we are,” Schlegel said.

Consider an introvert who goes to a party and strikes up a conversation with a stranger. The conversation flows, and the introvert feels they don’t have to rehearse or worry about how they’re coming across.

The experience might seem inconsistent with their self-image, but it provides new information reflective of their true self.

In this sense, an experience does more than just reflect an identity, it becomes evidence for a deeper true self.

“Fluency plays an important role,” Schlegel said. “Sometimes we act, notice what feels like us, and through those experiences, learn who we believe we are.”

Self-control, breaking the (unhealthy) habit

But what happens when what feels natural isn’t necessarily good for us?

Schlegel’s research extends beyond self-discovery, offering a new way to think about interventions for self-control.

“If fluency helps determine what feels natural and authentic, then the behaviors we repeat may become intertwined with our sense of self, whether it be a positive or negative habit,” Schlegel said.

Self-control is our ability to manage impulses, emotions and behaviors in favor of something we value more in the long term. An impulse, though, doesn’t just have to feel pleasurable or effortless. It can also feel, in a sense, like us.

The researchers point to smoking cigarettes as an example. Over time, holding a cigarette may feel natural, and that feeling of familiarity can serve as a cue for authenticity and a smoker’s perceived true self, potentially making the impulse harder to control and the habit harder to break.

“For a maladaptive behavior, the challenge isn’t just resisting the immediate pleasure. It’s resisting the fact that the behavior may also feel like it has come to be part of oneself,” Schlegel said.

This insight could help inform interventions that strengthen self-control or break unhealthy habits, targeting not just the negative behavior itself but the sense that it’s a part of who we are.

“Interventions may be more successful when they account for fluency-induced authenticity as a potential driving mechanism,” Schlegel said.

It’s still an ongoing effort for future research by Schlegel and her colleagues, though the group has explored and found a possible link between self-integrity and one’s true self.

“Self-integrity, in the context of true self, refers to one’s own actions and how aligned they are with the core values and other aspects of their identity that they deeply care about,” Schlegel said. “So, maybe we know that something feels natural but it may not be consistent with what our core values are, or whether we know it’s good for us.”

Self-integrity and fluency as cues for one’s true self hint at the idea that perhaps the hardest healthy habits to build or unhealthy habits to break aren’t the ones that just feel good; they’re the ones that we’ve come to feel are natural and most like us.  

The search for authenticity

Is the feeling of true self really tied to how natural an experience feels? To find out, Schlegel and her colleagues put the idea to the test in their latest research, across four studies involving more than 1,400 participants.

First, they looked at everyday life, inviting more than 400 participants to describe something they had done recently — work, leisure or anything in between — and rate how easy and natural the experience felt.

Then, in a second study, more than 200 participants were asked to recall an experience that either felt easy and natural (fluent) or that felt difficult and unnatural (disfluent).

“In the first two studies, we wanted to naturally record participant experiences, finding that when an experience stops feeling fluent, our sense of authenticity can shift with it,” Schlegel said.

Next, the researchers wanted to test whether they could manipulate feelings of fluency, rather than just observe and record it. So, 200 participants were instructed to describe key aspects of themselves while keeping a seven-digit number in their minds, a cognitive load designed to make the experience less fluent.

They found that the added mental strain made the task harder, and participants reported a drop in how authentic the experience of describing themselves felt.

“This shows an important distinction of knowing something about ourselves, and that an experience, if made difficult, can affect how we express who we are,” Schlegel said.

The final study took the idea one step further, calling for more than 400 participants to complete a creative problem-solving task.

When the researchers made the creative task difficult, participants reported feeling less authentic while completing the task and showed a marked decrease in how strongly they identified as creative compared with their initial self-assessment.

“This finding was surprising and powerful, and it can help explain that when something feels fluent it can feel authentic to our true self,” Schlegel said. “But when that flow breaks, so can our sense of who we perceive we are.”

Together, the research suggests that the true self may be less something we uncover and more something we gradually learn through experience. We notice what feels natural, experience those moments, and little by little, interpret them as clues about who we are.

The science of being you

The study of our true self is far from just an abstract philosophical exercise; it’s a practical scientific pursuit in the study of human motivation, psychology and sociology.

For Schlegel, it’s a passion rooted in decades of research and expertise.

“Through our work, we take these timeless questions about our attitudes and behaviors, and ground them in tested research and empirical science,” Schlegel said.

At Texas A&M University, that quest is championed by the Existential Psychology Collaboratory, a research hub that investigates the deepest questions of humanity’s existence.

“We aim to understand how people answer the ‘big’ questions in life and how their answers to those questions influence their attitudes and behavior,” Schlegel said.

After all, whether you’re a people pleaser, an introvert, an academic or a hiker, we spend our lives searching for our true self. But perhaps the answer was never just buried inside us. Perhaps it has been taking shape all along, in the experiences that feel unmistakably ours, until every so often we catch a glimpse of an answer to the question: who are you, really?

By Zaid Elayyan, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications