Elements of persona · 2:39am Nov 25th, 2021
Recently, my mind has been on questions of persona. What constitutes a persona? How do you decompose one into its pieces? How do you put the pieces back together? How does a persona grow over the course of a life? How do people apply their intuition for personas to things that aren't people? How powerful can that intuition be? The list goes on. I think it’s worth trying to get answers to these questions even if they take a long, long time. I don’t have the answers, but I thought I’d share my line of thought.
Celestia tucking her Sun in at the end of the day. Good night, Sun. Source.
The people in your life, the things you personify, the narratives you construct or absorb, the (potentially many) masks you wear for others, the characters in your favorite stories. Your ability to work fluently with all of these things depends on your understanding of, your ability to reason about, personas. I don’t actually know where to draw the boundaries between, say, a persona and a character, or a persona and a personality, though my intuition tells me that there are some boundaries. For example:
- Characters have physical descriptions. Physical descriptions don’t seem relevant for personas.
- Characters have friends, and they can own things like a house. It doesn’t quite make sense to say that a persona has friends and owns things.
- Personas and characters can have emotions, but it’s weird to say that a personality has emotions.
When I’m fixated on a problem like this, my intuition tends to throw a lot of half-baked thoughts like that in my direction. Here are some more.
- Any conscious thought can be associated with a persona.
- Everything about a persona can be raised to conscious awareness.
- Anything said deliberately, spoken, written, or otherwise, can be attributed to a persona.
- The different personas in a group of friends must fit together for that group to be stable.
- Culture deals with the slice of personas that propagate between people.
A few days ago, one such thought stuck out to me.
- Cults try to shape the personas of their followers.
Now that’s interesting.
Extending intuitions
Cults try to shape the personas of their followers. That’s interesting for two reasons. First, it suggests that personas can be understood from an engineering perspective, not just from a philosophical perspective. That would make the study of personas much more concrete. Thinking more on it, there are a lot of cases where people try to engineer personas (parents for their children, schools for their students, new hire orientations for their employees, writers for their characters). However, cults seem more willing to push it to extremes, and their outcomes tend to have more obvious causes.
Second, there’s a lot of motivation to understand cult practices so their negative consequences can be dealt with appropriately. It seems that as a result, developmental psychologists have models for how cults do what they do. I found these models in the linked paper:
- Robbery Jay Lifton’s Eight Criteria for Thought Reform
- Edgar Schein’s Model for Coercive Persuasion
- Margaret Singer’s Six Conditions for Thought Reform
- Steven Hassan’s Influence Continuum and the BITE Model of Mind Control
- Scheflin’s Social Influence Model
None of these models deals directly with personas, but all of them deal with the practice of controlling personas. If it happens to be the case that cults try to control all aspects of their members’ personas, then I can discover all aspects of persona by identifying all of the persona-things that cults try to manipulate. The strategy then is pretty straightforward.
- Identify all of the persona-things that cults try to manipulate, at least according to the models that developmental psychologists have come up with.
- Find some way to group all of those persona-things, and find the relationships between discovered groups.
- Use the discovered groups and their relationships as a generic decomposition of personas.
I did exactly that.
Elements of persona
Information, thoughts, emotions, roles, actions, and goals. It’s basically the same decomposition as the BITE (Behavior, Information, Thoughts, Emotions) model from the paper I linked above, but with “behavior” split into “roles, actions, and goals”. The reason for the split is that Steven’s BITE model mixes aspects of persona with methods for operationalizing persona control, and I’m not so interested in the latter.
In terms of fictional characters:
- Information captures the things a character sees, hears, reads, or otherwise mentally ingests from the outside world.
- Thoughts capture how one thing leads to another in the character’s mental world, and how a character mentally structures information.
- Roles capture how a character believes they fit into various bigger pictures.
- Actions capture the breadth of a character’s capabilities.
- Emotions capture how a character evaluates their situation, how a character evaluates their adherence to their roles, and when a character interrupts their own actions.
- Goals capture how a character justifies their roles, actions, and emotions.
This is a first draft, and I’m not convinced that it’s correct or comprehensive. However, even this half-baked attempt seems useful in all the ways I’d hoped.
What does it mean to be intelligent?
- To have a lot of useful information.
- To have a lot of useful thoughts.
- To be able to recognize a lot of useful roles.
- To be able to recognize a lot of useful actions.
- To be able to recognize a lot of complex emotions.
- To be able to recognize a lot of useful goals.
Why is X person/character acting this way?
- What did they see, hear, or read?
- What do they think are the implications of the above?
- What roles do they see themselves playing?
- What do they think they’re doing?
- How do they feel about what they’re doing and the things happening around them?
- What are they hoping for?
When can I apply my intuition for personas to things that aren’t people? I can do it when I can say/ask things like:
- Did it see ____?
- Why does it think ____?
- It’s supposed to ____.
- It’s able to ____.
- It thinks it’s supposed to ____.
- It’s doing that because ____.
Since these are all persona-oriented, and since there’s a lot more to people than just their persona(s), these decompositions are certainly not complete. Even restricted to persona-oriented things, I’m not sure if any of the decompositions above are fully correct or comprehensive, but they’re certainly useful for getting some depth out of questions and some structure out of their corresponding answers. As for the questions I posed at the beginning of this post (how does a persona grow over the course of a life, how powerful can intuition for personas be, etc.), I’m still working on those.
If you see any shortcomings, please mention them because I really want this model to not suck.
Anyway. Thanks for reading!
How do you define a persona?
(Avoid obvious jokes and references, here!)
Do you mean what a person invents or presents, of themselves, for others? What they will feel, think, and then perceive?
Personas are twofold in the above definition. Separate from personality, which requires no conscious effort, personas are meant to represent an essence.
We do not believe in what is not consciously reaffirmed.
(Not in all cases; not with all people.)
You must be involved in a process, and reaffirmed by parts of it, to believe you have become it. A mechanic knows they're a mechanic due to fixing cars—and the life lived, and the knowledge gained, to get there.
Identity is what is consistently said and done, by us and to us.
A persona is invented for the person—and others—to believe that person is of a particular essence. A comedian believes they are so, due to the life of clubs and stand-up shows, telling jokes and hearing laughs, becoming immersed in comments about their status.
Through action, and reaction, our persona is reaffirmed. What is projected: is solidified. This doesn't apply to personalities, which are a reflection of one's being/consciousness.
Isaac Asimov had a drawing of himself, before a typewriter and sweating, his fingers, blurred, and pages splattering over the space, becoming dozens of books. That symbolism of being prolific embodied his persona. He craved to be seen as that image, to himself and others, so he projected that essence, and followed it with the needed persona and lifestyle.
Others believed this. And so it became him, an aspect of him, an angle of view on him.
This doesn't relate fully to your blog—which is built from research and facts. I figured, though, I would sprinkle my bais in the comment section.
Great and concise work as always! You suck the reader into a dense cloud of technical and spit them out, the other side, quickly informed and planted with seeds.
Be well!
~ Yr. Indebted Pal, B
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B, you're awesome. I think I can state what I'm getting at a bit more precisely after reading your comment.
You're exactly right that by persona, I'm trying to capture a person's essence. It's the thing that makes a person recognizably that person even after stripping away the things that feel "objective", like their body and their name. It's the thing that a person can take with them into a video game or into a chat room where we can't see, hear, smell, touch, or taste them— purely a mental projection. It's the thing that can make us believe that a construct is a person. It's the bifurcation of that which makes us value privacy even when we're doing nothing wrong. It's the thing that people need to change when they find themselves inadequate in a deep sense.
Honestly, this post is like 10% based on research. I was originally looking for a way to unify models of people with programming paradigms. The contents of this blog post solved the main hurdle of getting the initial kernel I could expand on to eventually get a convincing result. I thought it was hilarious that the key insight came not from computer science, not from cognitive science, not from machine learning, but from manipulative cults, and that I found the relevant research because of one profoundly stupid passing thought that these cults basically try to program their members.
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By the way, I feel like your comment has provided me with at least 10x whatever value you might have gotten from me. This problem is really important to me, and you've helped me connect it with a bunch of concepts that are much more concrete and intuitive.
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Cults make sense since it's their highest function; any place that focuses on a process allows for another source of information and means.
Though what I defined is different from your objective.
It's hard to put into words what builds a persona. It depends to be repeated behaviours. The kinds of jokes, stories, and responses someone has. They keep in a general state. They trek repeated places. However, they continue to bring about new/fresh things from those places. We can guess the kind of jokes or responses someone will have. But the exact response within that area is unique to them.
It's not the best answer... but it's the one I currently got!
~ Yr. Pal, B
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It's different from my original* objective. As I thought more about how my understanding of personas connects to my understanding of other things, my objective morphed quite a bit. I think I solved my original objective, so now it's mostly curiosity and a sense of exploration pushing me in this direction.