Over the years, the topics of self and identity have received a great deal of attention in the field of psychology. The literature is replete with investigations into self-concept, people's perceptions, ideas, and feelings about themselves, and into identity, people's perceptions of their own sameness and continuity (Oosterwegel and Wicklund, 1995). Although researchers in the field choose to focus on different facets of self and identity, broad theoretical trends can be identified.

Traditionally, theorists have conceptualized self and identity as cognitive structures (Hattie, 1992; Marcia, Waterman, Matteson, Archer, and Orlofsky, 1993). These structures have mostly been regarded as stable mental representations that – once they have become crystallized through the repeated processing of personal information – control our further behavior (e.g. Markus and Wurf, 1987). As a result, the phenomena that are seen as indicative of self and identity are implicitly reduced to a self-concept: a set of beliefs about oneself. This set of beliefs, moreover, is considered to have dynamic implications for the regulation of our actions. The self-concept is thought to serve as an interpretative framework that integrates our personal experiences and as a regulative basis to guide further behavior. However, since the mental representations that constitute the self-concept are seen as stable carriers of personal information, deeply engraved in our memory, the traditional approaches are more suitable for accounting for aspects like stability and continuity than for the dynamics that emerge in self and identity.