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There is certainly evidence that actors experience a blending of their real self with their assumed characters. For instance, Benedict Cumberbatch said, "My mum says I'm much more impatient with her when I'm filming Sherlock."

Mark Seton, a researcher at the University of Sydney, has even coined the term "post-dramatic stress disorder" to describe the lasting effects experienced by actors who lose themselves in a role. "Actors may often prolong habits of the characters they have embodied," he writes.

A recent finding doesn't involve acting, and it indicates that merely spending some time thinking about another person seemed to rub off on the volunteers' sense of self, led by Meghan Meyer at Princeton University. Across several studies, these researchers asked volunteers to first rate their own personalities, memories or physical attributes, and then to perform the same task from the perspective of another person. For instance, they might score the emotionality of various personal memories, and then rate how a friend or relative would have experienced those same events.

After taking the perspective of another, the volunteers scored themselves once again: the consistent finding was that their self-knowledge was now changed-their self-scores had shifted to become more similar to those they'd given for someone else. For instance, if they had initially said the trait term "confident" was only moderately related to themselves and then rated the term as being strongly related to a friend's personality, when they came to rescore themselves, they now tended to see themselves as more confident. Remarkably, this morphing of the self with another was still apparent even if a 24-hour gap was left between taking someone else's perspective and re-rating oneself.

"By simply thinking about another person, we may adapt our self to take the shape of that person," said Meyer and her colleagues. That our sense of self should have this quality might be a little discouraging, especially for anyone who has struggled to establish a firm sense of identity. Yet there is an optimistic message here, too. The challenge of improving ourselves-or at least seeing ourselves in a more positive light-might be a little easier than we thought. By roleplaying or acting out the kind of person we would like to become, or merely by thinking about and spending time with people who embody the kind of attributes we would like to see in ourselves, we can find that our sense of self changes in desirable ways.

"As each of us chooses who to befriend, who to model, and who to ignore," write Meyer and her colleagues, "we must make these decisions aware of how they shape not only the fabric of our social networks, but even our sense of who we are."