Young People Let Digital Apps Dictate Their Identities, Say 2 Scholars

By Marc Parry. In the 1950s and 60s, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote about how people are shaped by a series of crises that must be confronted during different phases of their lives. For adolescents, the crisis involves developing a sense of who they are and what sort of life they aspire to. Back then, "it was seen as a positive development that people could explore different senses of identity before making a long-term commitment to a certain way of being," says Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist who studied under Erikson as an undergraduate there in the mid-60s. More...