CONCEPT
Possible Selves
Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius's 1986 term — adopted and operationalized by Ibarra — for the cognitive representations of who a person might become: working hypotheses about future identity, grounded enough to influence present behavior.
Possible selves are the future-oriented components of self-concept — the person you might become, the person you fear becoming, the person you hope to be. Introduced by psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius in a 1986 paper that would quietly reshape motivational psychology, the concept describes cognitive structures that are neither fantasy nor prediction but testable hypotheses about future identity. Each possible self exerts a gravitational pull on current behavior: the imagined future entrepreneur shapes the lawyer's Saturday reading; the imagined future novelist shapes the accountant's morning hours. Ibarra adopted the concept and gave it operational teeth, reframing possible selves as the raw material of identity experiments. In the AI age, the distance between imagining a possible self and testing it has collapsed from years to conversations, producing both an unprecedented democratization of identity exploration and a new set of risks around premature commitment and shallow sampling.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Before AI, the distance between