On the other hand, when actions feel identity-inconsistent, the same difficulties suggest the behavior is pointless and “not for people like me.” The IBM model was developed by University of Southern California Professor Daphna Oyserman, and has been used as a foundation for a variety of aspiration-achievement gap interventions in schools,[4][5][6] health,[7][8] planning, and savings.
[14] Devil's Night in Detroit, the eve before Halloween when youths traditionally tear up the town, got Oyserman, thinking about the role of identities in how we make decisions.
“I wondered what the youths who were setting fires were imagining about their futures,” Oyserman wrote in the author’s note of her book Pathways to Success Through Identity-Based Motivation.
“Perhaps they had a particular way of imagining possibilities for their future selves that highlighted the risks of participating in Devil’s Night.” This experience led Oyserman to pursue decades of research that manifested into the current theory of identity-based motivation.
In addition to results in the education domain, IBM has also been shown to improve motivation and goal pursuit outcomes in health [17][18] – nudging people to engage in healthier behaviors, planning – reducing people’s tendency to procrastinate, and savings – increasing the amount people plan to save for long term goals such as their child’s college education or their retirement [19][20] Identity-based motivation has been used as a foundation for school interventions (and tests of those interventions) in public schools in Detroit, Chicago, and other locations in the U.S. as well as internationally in Singapore and England.
One way this manifests in the education domain ,for example, is that students are more likely to take steps toward a future self goal (e.g. college) when this identity comes to mind and feels connected with their current self.