An old legend has it that Marilyn Monroe was invisible as she strolled through Manhattan. No breathy laugh that draws attention no platinum curls that catch the light. Only a woman wearing a coat. Do you want to see me become her? she asked her partner and something changed. eyes lips chin and posture. People let out gasps. She wasn’t born into Monroe. She had perfected the performance to the point that it was impossible to distinguish between the person and the act. This brings up a dilemma that has silently consumed philosophers psychologists and marketers for decades is authenticity even something we can evaluate if being real can be turned on and off like a lamp?
Northwestern University’s team made the decision to give it a shot. Researchers Joshua Wilt Sarah Thomas and Dan McAdams who work in the complex field of narrative identity recruited 190 undergraduates for two studies and asked them to do a seemingly straightforward task. Write about a time when you felt most authentic. Next describe a time when you didn’t. The scenes that resurfaced were precise and disorganized much like actual recollections.
One student talked of laughing with classmates about embarrassing habits admitting that she drools while sleeping feeling ashamed and then feeling oddly more at ease than she had been the entire semester. Another remembered performing a version of himself at a college party which garnered him a phone full of new connections but left him feeling as he put it just as alone as when I walked in. One gets the impression from reading these stories that authenticity isn’t something that people think about abstractly. In their stomachs they sense it.
The researchers’ next move was truly audacious. They developed a coding system from the ground up sorting through 108 distinct descriptors that surfaced from participant narratives such as acting in a genuine way with others feeling phony going with the crowd and ownership of choices. The agreement between the two independent coders who assessed whether each description existed in each scene was very good with intraclass correlations for real scenes reaching.95. The entire process had the feel of attempting to categorize something that is difficult to classify like as creating a periodic table for human deception. Relational authenticity expressing one’s actual self satisfaction taking responsibility for one’s actions and fending off outside influences are the five clusters that developed for authenticity. For inauthenticity four clusters were identified self denigration suppression compliance and phoniness. These categories may seem obvious after the fact but coming up with them using empirical facts instead of theory is a distinct kind of accomplishment.
| Topic | Measuring Authenticity: Psychology, Narrative Identity & Consumer Perception |
|---|---|
| Key Researchers | Joshua Wilt, Sarah Thomas, Dan P. McAdams (Northwestern University) |
| Field | Personality Psychology / Narrative Identity |
| Primary Studies | Two studies involving 190 undergraduates total (Study 1: 87 participants, Study 2: 103 participants) |
| Key Frameworks | Authenticity Inventory 3 (Kernis et al., 2006), Authenticity Scale (Wood et al., 2008) |
| Dimensions of Authenticity Identified | Relational Authenticity, Expression of True Self, Contentment, Ownership of Actions, Resisting External Pressures |
| Dimensions of Inauthenticity Identified | Phoniness, Conformity, Suppression, Self-Denigration |
| Institution | Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois |
| Published In | Heliyon (Elsevier) |
The second study went one step further and correlated similar narrative elements with well known self report surveys which ask respondents to score phrases such as I am in touch with my motives and desires or I usually do what other people tell me to do. The findings revealed something intriguing but also a little unsettling. Individuals who scored highly on self reported authenticity did in fact prefer to describe their authentic moments in ways that matched; for example those who valued relational honesty wrote about open trusting encounters. However the overlap was not overpowering but rather mild.
It was evident that both the questionnaire approach and the narrative approach were accessing different but related levels of the same issue. Asking someone if they feel warm is similar to using a thermometer to measure the temperature. Both are instructive. Neither is finished. Furthermore neither has complete faith in the other.
All of this would presumably come as no surprise to Stanford professor Glenn Carroll who has spent decades researching authenticity as a social construct rather than a psychological characteristic. In the 1990s he conducted research on microbreweries and discovered something that is still relevant today consumers were prepared to pay extra for true craft beer even if it was objectively of worse quality than mass produced alternatives like Anheuser Busch or Coors.
The large brewers possessed decades of collected experience impeccable quality control and unrivaled technical expertise. However many equated imperfection and smallness with authenticity. According to Carroll’s more recent research eateries that specifically state on their menus that they are authentic actually lose patrons. It turns out that being authentic is something that other people have to say about you. You’ve undermined it the instant you assert it. There’s a paradox there that probably holds true for both humans and Greek eateries.
In the marketing industry authenticity has emerged as one of the most sought after and poorly understood brand attributes of the past 10 years demonstrating the conflict between measurement and meaning. Approximately 90% of millennials according to surveys take brand authenticity into account when making purchases. In response businesses have engineered the impression of transparency staged frank moments and performed vulnerability.
In an advertisement Patagonia warned consumers not to purchase their jacket due to the high production costs. That year sales increased by thirty percent. Instead of apologizing the bag business Away mailed consumers a beautifully designed vacation book turning a shipping mistake into a moment of loyalty. These are shrewd perhaps even sincere actions. However they bring up an issue that the Northwestern researchers were debating from a different angle is it possible to systematize something that is inherently resistant to systems?
The research’s honest response is somewhat. The narrative themes demonstrated both convergent and discriminant validity versus established measures and the coding technique Wilt and his colleagues created demonstrated strong reliability coders agreed on what they were seeing. Technically speaking that means the system functions but it is not comprehensive.
Ownership of actions and self denigration loaded onto an authenticity factor whereas phoniness loaded negatively into both authenticity and honesty factors according to the factor extension analysis a statistical technique for examining how story motifs relate to more general personality dimensions. Individuals who scored highly on Machiavellianism a personality trait linked to cold interpersonal affect and manipulation emphasized fakery in their descriptions of their inauthentic moments. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that those who were most adept at deceit were also the most vocal about identifying it in themselves.
The researchers are commendably honest about the constraints that exist here. The samples were tiny taken from a single university in the Midwest and nearly all of the participants were young adults from an educated industrialized Western background. In societies that value group cohesion over individual expression authenticity may appear very differently.
The patterns may be greater or different among older persons who are likely to have more stable self concepts. Additionally the entire operation is based on subjective self reflection; there is no behavioral trail no brain scan and no point at which the evidence clearly indicates that the individual was being authentic. Since authenticity is essentially about how people experience their own lives the researchers accept that subjectivity is ingrained in the technique and contend that it should be. Even yet it’s worth taking a time to sit with the discomfort of that circularity.
But something that transcends the numbers is what sticks. No connection coefficient can match the weight of the stories people shared such as drooling in front of a boyfriend or performing at a party to win over strangers. Decades ago British psychologist Donald Winnicott contended that people create a False Self in order to conform to social standards and that psychological distress resides in the discrepancy between this performance and one’s inner reality.
That is not refuted by the Northwestern data. It adds texture if anything. Conformity repression and a creeping self disgust were described by the students who felt the most inauthentic. The people who felt the most genuine talked about comfort trust and the peculiar relief of being noticed. It is actually questionable if those sensations can be adequately quantified. However the attempt to try with all its flaws and partial successes seems like just the kind of sincere a little embarrassing endeavor that authenticity requires.
i) https://www.pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6676168/
ii) https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/authenticitys-paradox-if-you-flaunt-it-you-lose-it
iii) https://www.nytlicensing.com/latest/marketing/why-do-brands-need-authenticity-marketing/
iv) https://www.scale-marketing.com/blog/authenticity/