Psychologists define the 'dark core of personality'. All dark personality traits can be traced back to the general tendency of placing one's own goals and interests over those of others even to the extent of taking pleasure in hurting other's

Would identity remain at the core of a person or would it shift based on the needs?

It would continue to shift based on needs. We already have social tests and social norms, profile people psychologically, and punish aberrations very harshly. You can lose all legal rights and social freedoms for relatively harmless actions, mostly because they don't conform to what we consider normal. All "criminals", "misfits", and the "insane" are outcast from society very readily based on profiling, leaving rather few options for people to happily engage with society once they've been labeled. Ideas like "there but for the grace of God go I" are long gone, if they were ever here to begin with.

So young people and people caught in the middle are already forced to self-monitor, or face being labeled as aberrant. That's not something new, or necessarily bad, but it's growing and we don't really know where it goes. The improvement of science as a tool of categorization will cause bigger divides between "us" and "them" as we continue to make the distinctions between social categories more and more clear. With bigger divides, picking a "team" becomes more crucial to being accepted, and humans are capable of any amount of self-deception if that's what it takes to achieve social acceptance. It's not a coincidence that culture is regional... people do what it takes to win in their environment, shaping their minds if necessary.

We really need to be more careful with this science. I'm already seeing people say "can we use brain imaging to identify evil people and preemptively correct them"? Which is basically just Racism 2.0, Fun With Vaguely Predictive Categories!

/r/science Thread Parent Link - eurekalert.org