Cognitive Processes and Identity Formation: The Mediating Role of Identity Processing Style

Identity formation is conceptualized in terms of a social‐cognitive model that postulates stylistic differences in how people negotiate or manage to evade the challenge of constructing, maintaining, and/or reconstructing their sense of identity. Some people adopt an informed, refl ective orientation to identity conflicts and questions; others take a more automatic, normative approach; whereas others procrastinate and delay identity decisions until situational demands and consequences dictate how they react. The role that general rational and automatic cognitive processes and identity processing styles play in identity formation is considered. Research that has evaluated the theoretical hypothesis according to which the linkage between rational and automatic reasoning processes and measures of identity formation is mediated by identity processing style is reviewed. The fi ndings indicated that rational and automatic cognitive processes generally did account for signifi cant variance on measures of identity formation including strength of commitment, types of selfattributes within which one’s identity was grounded, and identity status. However, the fi ndings further revealed that identity processing styles at least in part mediated most of the relationships between cognitive processes and identity formation. In all of the analyses, identity processing styles explained a greater amount of the unique variation in measures of identity formation than the cognitive variables.