596 vI. SELF‑ AND S OCIAL P ROCESSES
on the other’s part with a concession of her 
own. To illustrate, if her roommate comes to 
view her as an introvert, the target may re -
ciprocate by redoubling her efforts to honor 
the roommate’s extroverted identity.
As their relationship unfolds across time, 
both parties should uphold the continuity 
principle by remaining faithful to their ne -
gotiated identities. Thus, the target should 
continue to play the role of the introvert in 
her dealings with her roommate. Were she 
to host a wild, drunken party one night, 
the roommate could justifiably view this 
behavior as a breach of their interpersonal 
contract and might “retaliate” by refusing 
to accept the target’s claim to an introvert 
identity.
The fourth principle of identity nego -
tiation states that targets should strive to 
maintain compatibility among the various 
identities that they negotiate with a given 
perceiver. In our ongoing example, this 
means that the identity the shy target negoti -
ates with her roommate in their apartment 
should be compatible with the identities that 
she negotiates with her roommate elsewhere. 
Insofar as the target wishes to negotiate a 
more outgoing identity with her roommate 
in other contexts, she may maintain compat -
ibility by seeking appraisals of herself that 
are only slightly more outgoing than the ap -
praisals she seeks from her roommate when 
they are at home.
Intrapsychic  Mechanisms
As noted earlier, the identity negotiation 
processes described earlier are facilitated by 
a parallel set of intrapsychic mechanisms. 
These cognitive and affective mechanisms 
both accompany and sustain people’s iden -
tity negotiations. Consider the scenario 
in which a shy woman tells her roommate 
that she dislikes parties, and her roommate 
nonetheless encourages her to attend the 
evening’s soiree (“Come out with me and I’ll 
introduce you to people”). In this case, the 
target may interpret her roommate’s offer 
to introduce her to people as an acknowl -
edgment of her social awkwardness rather 
than as a refusal to verify her introversion. 
Because interpersonal feedback is often am -
biguous and open to interpretation, most 
people have little difficulty maintaining co -herent and stable identities, even when faced 
with interaction partners who view them 
in identity-  inconsistent ways. If the incon -
sistency is too great to ignore, however, it 
will threaten the target’s need for coherence, 
which will produce unsettling feelings of 
anxiety. Such feelings should prompt iden -
tity negotiation strategies that are designed 
to correct the perceiver’s inaccurate apprais -
als and reduce feelings of defensiveness (e.g., 
Critcher & Dunning, 2015).
Intrapsychic processes facilitate continu -
ity between not only a target’s self-views 
and the appraisals he or she receives from 
others but also the different identities that 
a target negotiates with the same perceiver. 
Consider a target who negotiates a highly 
introverted identity with her roommate in 
their home environment, and a mildly in -
troverted identity with her roommate in the 
context of their larger social group. Despite 
this discrepancy, she may nonetheless main -
tain intrapsychic coherence by linking both 
of these identities to her underlying concerns 
about belongingness. Such cognitive gym -
nastics can even harmonize strikingly dis -
tinct identities. If a target is outgoing and 
exuberant around her mother but shy and 
retiring around her roommate, she may in -
crease the compatibility of these divergent 
identities by imbuing both of them with a 
tone of ironic humor. Furthermore, the tar -
get may cognitively compartmentalize her 
different identities such that each becomes 
salient primarily during interactions with 
the relevant partner.
The Target’s Situated  Identity
As shown in Figure 27.1, the identity nego -
tiation processes and intrapsychic mecha -
nisms described earlier jointly produce tar -
gets’ situated identities. A situated identity  
is a person’s identity within a specific, cir -
cumscribed situation (Alexander & Knight, 
1971). This idea is related to the notion of 
the working self-  concept (Markus & Kunda, 
1986), in that it is the currently active por -
tion of a person’s identity.
Note that targets’ situated identities re -
flect both their own behavioral, cognitive, 
and affective contributions to the identity 
negotiation process and the contributions 
(e.g., feedback, verbal and nonverbal reac -