Indeed! If you haven’t come upon it yet, you might enjoy some of the literature in affective learning, where that identification is the highest category of one taxonomy; an overview: http://nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/Bloom/affective_domain.html…
My version of this is "put on the pants". My wife got my yoga pants for my birthday, and suddenly I saw myself as the kind of person who owns yoga pants. This made it way easier to go to my first class.