Social Identity Switching: How effective is it and how much control do we have over social identity switches?

This PhD project will develop and refine socio-technical approaches to detecting and understanding collective identities. The focus of the work will be on reducing performance costs from cognitive identity switches
This PhD project seeks to understand the cognitive and social processes involved in identity switching. Throughout the day, individuals need to cognitively switch between different social identities (e.g. from software engineer to project manager to parent). These switches are triggered by changes in social context such as the task one is working on, an email message, phone call or even the content of a webpage. A switch from one social identity to another carries potential consequences for decision-making and performance. The fast-paced world of digital technologies (e.g. text messages, social media) provide triggers of identity switches in almost any situation. At the same time, digital technologies augment seemingly small mistakes such as when a confidential email is sent to the wrong recipient or a mistake is made in a financial transaction.
In this project, we will leverage the power of computational linguistics to assess social identities dynamically. Recent research has shown that it is possible to detect which social identity was salient during writing from only a few language markers with good accuracy. Using more sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) techniques will enable us to examine identity switching in more detail than is currently possible. Building on cognitive research on bilingualism, this project will examine cognitive costs (i.e., reaction time, error rates) of identity switches and implications for decision-making and task performance. This project has practical implications for designing digital technology that is robust to costs from identity switches.
Her research falls in the area of cognitive science in human-computer interaction as her research seeks to understand whether our cognitive system incurs costs when switching between different social identities. This research will have implications for software engineering, for instance when designing secure banking software and mobile phone applications but also in terms of healthcare (e.g., switching between a doctor and parent identity when attending to underage patients). She will present her progress to researchers and companies in software engineering as part of our regular EPSRC SAUSE platform grant meetings.