When false representations ring true (and when they don't).(Essay)

IN APRIL 2007, MARILEE JONES RESIGNED AS MIT'S DEAN OF ADMISSIONS after word reached the administration that she had fabricated part of her resume 28 years earlier (Lewin, 2007: A1). When she first applied for a job at MIT in 1979, Jones had claimed to have earned degrees from three colleges in upstate New York. Yet, there was no record of her having earned a degree from any of the institutions she named. The revelation came as a shock to the MIT community and to those who were familiar with her work as dean of admissions. During the 10 years since she had assumed the position, Jones had tried to discourage parents and students from embellishing their resumes in an effort to appear more attractive to colleges. In her 2006 book, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, Jones urges students to live with integrity and avoid the temptation to cheat. Her message resonated with parents, students, and college admissions administrators and contributed to her popularity in the MIT community.

Jones's resignation coincided with a course that one of this article's authors cotaught in 2007 at a selective liberal arts college. The course, entitled "Meaningful Work in a Meaningful Life," encouraged students to reflect on their approach to work, including critical issues they will likely encounter and difficult decisions they might have to make. The course aimed to provide students with a "toolkit" of concepts that would be useful as they embarked on a life of meaningful work. At the time, we asked the students participating in this course what they thought of Jones's deception. Most of the students asserted that Jones's fabricated resume did not warrant her resignation. They reasoned that she had done exemplary work while serving as the dean of admissions, and she should not have been punished for an act that has become commonplace. When pressed to explain their perspective, our students argued that everyone misrepresents themselves to a certain extent on their resumes. We had not anticipated this response, and we were disturbed to hear the students' casual defense of Jones's actions. Their attitude did not reflect awareness or concern that the falsification of one's credentials is grounds for immediate dismissal at any place of employment, nor were they struck by Jones's clear, if poignant, hypocrisy.

The disjunction between our own interpretation of the Jones story and that of our students heightened our interest in young people's attitudes toward self-fabrication. We began by asking ourselves whether all self-fabrications are necessarily wrong. According to Goffman's (1959) dramaturgic analysis of social life, self-fabrications are normative, not exceptional. We are all putting on a performance to some extent. However, Goffman distinguished between true and false performances, arguing that a true performance is one that is authorized whereas a false performance is not. Since the self is a "collaborative manufacture" between performer and audience, authorization must be a collective act. Individuals cannot be the sole arbiters of their self-performances. It becomes necessary, then, for interacting individuals to find consensus regarding the parameters of authorization. In this paper we seek to identify these parameters through an examination of the causes and consequences of young people's various self-fabrications. In so doing we explore the individual and societal factors that both compel and sanction these fabrications. We argue that there are circumstances under which self-fabrications may have beneficial effects and are, thus, authorized representations of the self. In contrast, a false, or unauthorized self-representation is one that results in harm to the self, to others, and to society.

THE HUMAN NATURE OF SELF-FABRICATIONS

Goffman (1959) explained that in any given social situation we do not have access to all of the facts, in part because we cannot know another person's innermost thoughts and feelings. We must therefore rely on representations of reality rather than on the reality itself. As manmade substitutes of reality, representations are open to manipulation. Taking a dramaturgic perspective, Goffman argued that we stage our self-performances in order to manage the impressions that others form of us. He described the self as a product, not a cause, of the scene that a performer creates. The self is the character that the performer plays. It arises as the performance is recognized by the audience. Thus, the self does not exist within the individual. It is, rather, a "collaborative manufacture" between performer and audience. Goffman extended his theater metaphor further by distinguishing between the "front region" and the "back region" of a self-performance. The performance takes place in the front region and the audience interprets its meaning. The performer works in the back region to construct the scene, drawing on the tools at his or her disposal to produce the desired impression.

The dramatic aspect of one's self-presentation may be accentuated during adolescence. Erikson (1968) described this stage of the life cycle as a period of identity development. Individuals experience a psychological "crisis" as they begin to reexamine their childhood identifications and contemplate their role in the broader society. During this period, individuals develop the ability to think abstractly, a skill that enables them to entertain and hold onto multiple versions of themselves and to begin developing a self-theory. Hatter (1999) notes that this cognitive capacity emerges at a time in individuals' lives when they face an increasing number of potential roles as their social contexts multiply and expand. The transition from middle school to high school tends to bring with it greater autonomy from parents, the experience of multiple teachers and classmates throughout the day, and new and diverse extracurricular options. According to Harter, individuals assume different roles in different situations in order to adapt to the situation at hand.

To resolve the adolescent identity crisis, Erikson (1968) argued that many individuals require a psychosocial moratorium, or a "time out," during which they are free to explore alternate roles and values and evaluate how other people receive them. In this space, consequences may be suspended as adolescents rework and integrate their childhood identifications into an identity that is situated in and recognized by the broader society. Identity experimentation is not simply an expected attribute of the adolescent period; it is a necessary and healthy part of individuals' psychosocial development. Building on Erikson's work, Marcia (1988) elaborated on the centrality of exploration in the identity formation process. He warns that without such exploration, adolescents may experience one of two forms of identity confusion. Either they commit to a rigid and narrowly defined identity without exploring other options; or, they refrain from exploration and commitment altogether and maintain a diffuse identity that may be crippling.