Delegated Personhood: Understanding How Algorithmic Mediation Shapes Perceived Identity Authorship

Digital environments have reconfigured the psychological architecture of identity. Classical theories of selfhood, from Erikson’s (1968) psychosocial model to McAdams’s (1993) life-story framework, position the individual as the primary author of identity; integrating memory, motivation, and reflection into a coherent narrative. Yet identity formation now unfolds within predictive systems that record, rank, and respond to expression. This paper introduces Delegated Personhood, a sociotechnical framework describing how authorship of the self becomes distributed between human cognition and algorithmic optimization processes. Integrating self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2017), cognitive feedback models (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000), and digital sociology (Bucher, 2018; van Dijck, 2020), the model specifies five mechanisms, algorithmic identity fragmentation, mimicry under perceptual surveillance, autonomy attenuation, identity fatigue, and chrono-social drift, through which predictive feedback loops reshape perceived agency. Each mechanism is linked to empirical analogues in motivation, social influence, and temporal cognition. Delegated Personhood defines co-authorship as the point at which algorithmic feedback materially alters self-categorization, producing measurable shifts in coherence, volitional clarity, and temporal continuity. The framework reframes identity as a hybrid system of human intention and computational inference, advancing testable propositions for social-psychological research in algorithmically mediated contexts. Keywords: delegated personhood, identity, algorithmic authorship, self-determination, digital environments, autonomy