It’s noteworthy that Graham’s examples are about incorporating politics or religion into your identity: these are not just any identities, they are tribal identities. The whole function of tribal beliefs is literally to coordinate side-taking. If you have an identity like “mathematician” or “kind”, then you may still react negatively to threats to that self-image, but those threats are generally of a different nature.
If you have an identity as a kind person, and someone presents you with evidence that you’re not actually very kind, then that threatens a mental construct that had been a source of positive feelings to you; but it’s a conflict that you can resolve, one way or the other, in your own head. Maybe you integrate the evidence to get a more nuanced conception of whether you are kind (“generally yes, except in situation X”), maybe you explain it away as a mistake (“I was trying to be kind but failed because I didn’t do Z, I will do Z in the future”), or maybe you even reject that self-concept entirely.
But a tribal threat is primarily an external one, not an internal one. It’s when you believe or are something, and this makes you an enemy in the eyes of others. If you are Jewish and the Nazis know about that, it doesn’t matter how much you rethink your Jewish identity in your own head: the Nazis will still be out to get you. Or, for a milder example, if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the people from the other party might still decide to ostracize you and discriminate against you. The extent to which you experience yourself as being threatened by tribal threats, depends on how much you alieve yourself to actually be threatened by the tribe you don’t belong to.
For your math example, depending on the person they might find the “kids mostly shouldn’t learn math” claim threatening in one of several ways. If someone really wanted to be a math teacher, say, then the claim might feel like a tribal threat, in that the claim would threaten the person’s future livelihood if it got widely accepted. On the other hand, if they feel like they are a good person because they are going to teach math to kids and teaching math to kids is good, then that brings us to a third way by which a self-concept might be threatened: if someone argues that its value should be negative rather than positive.
That doesn’t challenge a person’s self-concept as “an aspiring math teacher” in the sense of threatening to prove that they are actually not an aspiring math teacher. Rather it challenges their self-concept that they are an aspiring math teacher and being an aspiring math teacher is good, by implying that it’s a bad thing to be an aspiring math teacher. If they accepted the argument, they might end up believing that they are an aspiring math teacher and that’s bad.
So that gives us three different categories of identity threats, which are worth distinguishing:
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A tribal threat to your general sense of safety and well-being.
It’s noteworthy that Graham’s examples are about incorporating politics or religion into your identity: these are not just any identities, they are tribal identities. The whole function of tribal beliefs is literally to coordinate side-taking. If you have an identity like “mathematician” or “kind”, then you may still react negatively to threats to that self-image, but those threats are generally of a different nature.
If you have an identity as a kind person, and someone presents you with evidence that you’re not actually very kind, then that threatens a mental construct that had been a source of positive feelings to you; but it’s a conflict that you can resolve, one way or the other, in your own head. Maybe you integrate the evidence to get a more nuanced conception of whether you are kind (“generally yes, except in situation X”), maybe you explain it away as a mistake (“I was trying to be kind but failed because I didn’t do Z, I will do Z in the future”), or maybe you even reject that self-concept entirely.
But a tribal threat is primarily an external one, not an internal one. It’s when you believe or are something, and this makes you an enemy in the eyes of others. If you are Jewish and the Nazis know about that, it doesn’t matter how much you rethink your Jewish identity in your own head: the Nazis will still be out to get you. Or, for a milder example, if you’re a Democrat or a Republican, the people from the other party might still decide to ostracize you and discriminate against you. The extent to which you experience yourself as being threatened by tribal threats, depends on how much you alieve yourself to actually be threatened by the tribe you don’t belong to.
For your math example, depending on the person they might find the “kids mostly shouldn’t learn math” claim threatening in one of several ways. If someone really wanted to be a math teacher, say, then the claim might feel like a tribal threat, in that the claim would threaten the person’s future livelihood if it got widely accepted. On the other hand, if they feel like they are a good person because they are going to teach math to kids and teaching math to kids is good, then that brings us to a third way by which a self-concept might be threatened: if someone argues that its value should be negative rather than positive.
That doesn’t challenge a person’s self-concept as “an aspiring math teacher” in the sense of threatening to prove that they are actually not an aspiring math teacher. Rather it challenges their self-concept that they are an aspiring math teacher and being an aspiring math teacher is good, by implying that it’s a bad thing to be an aspiring math teacher. If they accepted the argument, they might end up believing that they are an aspiring math teacher and that’s bad.
So that gives us three different categories of identity threats, which are worth distinguishing:
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A threat to your belief that you are X, and being X is good.
A tribal threat to your general sense of safety and well-being.
This sounds right to me.