Identities accompany us everywhere we go: the classroom, the workplace, the voting booth, and the Internet. At its core, my work is motivated by the observation that our identities—our mental self-representations—influence what we feel, perceive, and do in all these environments. At the same time, our environments sustain and influence our identities. I illuminate these ideas in two interconnected lines of research. My first line of research investigates how identities shape and are shaped by digital environments. I take a multi-method approach, combining traditional methods (surveys, experiments) with novel methods (smartphone sensing, ecological momentary assessment) to study identity in both controlled and naturalistic settings. I also draw on multiple disciplines (e.g., social-personality psychology, organizational behavior, political science, and media studies) to understand identity against the backdrop of key features of modern society: demographic diversity, political fragmentation and fragility, and the diffusion of digital technology into all facets of life.

Research

Identities shape and are shaped by digital environments

We are in the midst of a digital revolution whose psychological and societal implications researchers do not yet fully understand. To contribute to this understanding, I examine how identity leaves active and passive traces in digital environments, as well as how digital environments leave traces in us.

Some digital traces are the product of identities actively attempting to shape their digital environments. For example, when asked to moderate comments posted on an ostensibly real online blog, participants across three experiments censored posts that opposed their political views (e.g., pro-choice/pro-life beliefs), even when those comments were inoffensive (Ashokkumar, Talaifar et al., 2020). People even went as far as banning authors of opposing posts from the blog. Importantly, such selective censoring was strongest among people whose political views were rooted in strongly held identities. Moreover, the belief that a person’s political views reflect the “essence” of who they are mediated the propensity to censor opposing comments. Censoring has implications for the person censoring (by allowing their views to go unchallenged), for observers (who remain unaware of heterogeneity in their community), and for the person being censored (who may not share their views again).

The previous paper illustrates one way in which people actively protect their identities using tools available in digital environments. Still, identities can also leave traces in digital environments passively, without active intervention from the individual. For example, smartphones passively collect data from a wide array of onboard sensors (e.g., GPS, Bluetooth, microphone) and logs (e.g., texts, calls, unlocks) (Sust, Talaifar, & Stachl, 2023). Sensor and log data can be complemented with ecological momentary assessments delivered to individuals’ smartphones to obtain a more comprehensive record of behavior in the stream of everyday life.

I leverage digital traces passively collected by smartphones to reveal the everyday behavioral patterns of people with different political identities. For instance, I examined whether 61 ostensibly non-political behavioral tendencies measured by smartphones were nevertheless organized along political fault lines, revealing “lifestyle polarization” (Talaifar, Jordan, Gosling, & Harari, 2025). I found that liberals and conservatives engaged in different movement, work, and leisure behaviors at most times of the day and week. However, in a follow-up study, I also found that people overestimated the degree to which liberals’ and conservatives’ everyday behaviors differed.

Thus, political identity has penetrated some of the most basic aspects of everyday life, but not to the degree people think. This research suggests that society may feel divided not only because of deep ideological disagreements between cross-partisans but also because such disagreements are accompanied by distinct lifestyles—both real and misperceived—that prevent cross-partisans from developing shared ties and mutual understanding.

In another project, I investigate the digital traces of individuals high on right-wing authoritarianism. We used 280 million records passively collected by smartphones, together with theory-informed variable derivation and interpretable machine learning methods, to develop a behavioral portrait of authoritarianism in the 21st century (*Koch, *Talaifar et al., under review). This portrait revealed that individuals with authoritarian tendencies behaved remarkably differently in everyday life relative to those lower on authoritarianism. Individuals with authoritarian tendencies had less exposure to unknown people, places, and cultures; a preoccupation with status and hierarchy; and greater aggression and emotionality. Social media use, and particularly Facebook use, was the strongest behavioral predictor of authoritarian tendencies. This is the first study to use digital traces to investigate the behavioral patterns of individuals with authoritarian tendencies.

Our results provide a window onto the authoritarian psyche and can be used to develop behavioral measures of authoritarianism and behavioral interventions that combat authoritarianism.

Drawing on and extending the above-described research, my collaborators and I have proposed a conceptual framework clarifying how identity influences digital environments via selection (i.e., choosing or avoiding digital environments), manipulation (i.e., intentionally altering or changing digital environments), and evocation (i.e., unintentionally eliciting responses from digital environments) (Soh, Talaifar, & Harari, 2024). However, my research goes beyond examining the influence of identity on digital environments; I also examine how digital environments, in turn, influence self and identity processes.

Early scholars of the digital revolution emphasized the freeing influence of digital environments on the self. In a theoretical paper, I argue that digital environments have evolved from being freeing influences to constraining influences (Talaifar & Lowery, 2023). I propose that this constraint is evident in several forms. The uninhibited exploration afforded by the anonymity of early digital environments has given way to an erosion of privacy that “chills” people’s riskier impulses. An Internet that promised to free people from their marginalized identities by reducing

the salience of physical cues is reinforcing existing status hierarchies through biased algorithms. The recording of every digitally mediated behavior is robbing people of the freedom to forget and be forgotten. And predictive algorithms that feed people content based on their past behaviors serve as reinforcement machines that may impede people’s ability to change. I describe how, in the face of such constraints, people engage in strategies to reassert their agency, with limited success.

We are currently documenting the constraining influence of the digital environment on the self in ongoing research investigating self-censorship online (Ashokkumar & Talaifar, in prep). Across three experiments simulating an online forum, we find that Republicans self-censored their political opinions if those opinions were incongruent with the opinions of the forum’s other Republican members. Critically, when these participants self-censored an opinion, the opinion’s perceived importance and centrality to their identity subsequently weakened. Thus, self-censoring political opinions in digital environments eliminates dissent both from the discussion environment but also from its source—the dissenting individual.