Welcome to…

• Topic: Social Identity Theory

 By the end of the session you will be to:

1. Understand how and why groups are formed.

2. Understand some stigma associated to groups.

3. Understand the Social Identity Theory

Social Identity Theory: Introduction
Introduction
• The social identity theory is a social psychological theory that sets out to
explain group processes and intergroup relations in social science. Social
identity is a person's sense of who they are based on their group
membership(s). This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The
central hypothesis of social identity theory is that group members of an in-
group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their
self-image. Social Identity Theory is intended to be a social psychological
theory of intergroup relations, group processes, and the social self.
• Social identity theory explains how the self-concept is associated with group
membership and group and intergroup behaviour. It defines group membership
in terms of people’s identification, definition, and evaluation of themselves as
members of a group (social identity) and specifies cognitive, social interactive
and societal processes that interact to produce typical group phenomena.
• Social identity theory is intended to be a social psychological theory of
intergroup relations, group processes, and the social self.
Social Identity Theory : Origins

• It has its origins in early work in Britain by Henri Tajfel in the late
1960S on social factors in perception (e.g., Tajfel 1959, 1969a) and
on cognitive and social belief aspects of racism, prejudice and
discrimination (e.g., Tajfel 1963, 1969b, 1970), but was developed
and fully formulated in collaboration with John Turner and others in
the mid- to late 1970s at the University of cited Bristol (e.g., Tajfel,
1982; Tajfel and Turner 1979; J.C. Turner 1982 in Islam 2014 ).
• During the 1980s significant theoretical and empirical advances were
made as an increasing number of researchers, mainly in Europe but
also in North America and Australia, came under its umbrella. Such
popularity has quite naturally spawned healthy controversy (cf.
Abrams and Hogg 1990), but also has produced a number of books
that document strong and continuing development (e.g., Hogg 1992;
Hogg and Abrams 1988; Oakes, Haslam, and Turner 1994; Tajfel
1984; J.C. Turner 1991; Turner and Giles 1981; Turner et al. 1987).
Exploring social identity theory

• Social identity theory has a number of different conceptual foci. The

two most significant are the social identity theory of intergroup
relations and the social identity theory of the group, the latter called
self-categorization theory.

• The basic idea is that a social category (e.g., nationality, political

affiliation, sports team) into which one falls, and to which one feels
one belongs, provides a definition of who one is in terms of the
defining characteristics of the category-a self-definition that is a part
of the self- concept.
Exploring the concept of social identity
(continuation)
• People have a repertoire of such discrete category memberships that
vary in relative overall importance in the self- concept. Each of these
memberships is represented in the individual member's mind as a
social identity that both describes and prescribes one's attributes as a
member of that group-that is, what one should think and feel, and
how one should behave.
• Thus, when a specific social identity becomes the salient basis for
self-regulation in a particular context, self-perception and conduct
become in-group stereotypical and normative, perceptions of relevant
out-group members become out-group stereotypical, and intergroup
behaviour acquires competitive and discriminatory properties to
varying degrees depending on the nature of relations between the
groups.
Exploring the concept of social identity
(continuation)
• Social identities are not only descriptive and prescriptive; they are
also evaluative. They furnish an evaluation (generally widely shared
or consensual) of a social category, and those of its members, relative
to other relevant social categories.
• Because social identities have these important self-evaluative
consequences, groups and their members are strongly motivated to
adopt behavioural strategies for achieving or maintaining
in-group/out-group comparisons that favour the in- group, and thus of
course the self. To account for social identity phenomena, social
identity theory invokes the operation of two underlying
sociocognitive processes.
Categorisation

• (1) Categorization sharpens intergroup boundaries by producing group-

distinctive stereotypical and normative perceptions and actions, and
assigns people, including self, to the contextually relevant category.
Categorisation is a basic cognitive process that operates on social and
non-social stimuli alike to highlight and bring into focus those aspects of
experience which are subjectively meaningful in a particular context.
• 2) Self- enhancement guides the social categorization process such that
in-group norms and stereotypes largely favour the in-group. It is
assumed that people have a basic need to see themselves in a positive
light in relation to relevant others (i.e., to have an evaluatively positive
self-concept), and that self-enhancement can be achieved in groups by
making comparisons between the in-group and relevant out-groups in
ways that favour the in-group. For example, comparisons can be made
on stereotypical dimensions that favour the in- group rather than on
those which are less flattering to the in-group.
Important feature of the social Identity theory:

• An important feature of social identity theory is that in order to explain group

members' behaviour, it formally articulates these basic socio-cognitive
processes of categorization and self-enhancement with subjective belief
structures. The latter refer to people's beliefs about the nature of relations
between their own group and relevant out- groups. These beliefs (which are
not necessarily accurate reflections of reality because they can be, and often
are, ideological constructs) concern the stability and legitimacy of intergroup
status relations and the possibility of social mobility (psychologically passing
from one group to another) or social change (psychologically changing the
self- evaluative consequences of existing in-group membership).
• In social identity theory, a social identity is a person's knowledge that he or
she belongs to a social category or group (Hogg and Abrams 1988). A social
group is a set of individuals who hold a common social identification or view
themselves as members of the same social category. Through a social
comparison process, persons who are similar to the self are categorized with
the self and are labeled the in-group; persons who differ from the self are
categorized as the out- group.
Social Identity Theory Stages

• Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed that there are three mental
processes involved in evaluating others as “us” or “them” (i.e. “in-
group” and “out-group”. These take place in a particular order.

• Social categorisation
• Social identification and
• Social comparison
Categorisation

• We categorize objects in order to understand them and identify them.

In a very similar way we categorize people (including ourselves) in
order to understand the social environment. We use social categories
like black, white, Australian, Christian, Muslim, student, and bus
driver because they are useful.
• If we can assign people to a category then that tells us things about
those people, and as we saw with the bus driver example, we couldn't
function in a normal manner without using these categories; i.e. in the
context of the bus.
• Similarly, we find out things about ourselves by knowing what
categories we belong to. We define appropriate behavior by reference
to the norms of groups we belong to, but you can only do this if you
can tell who belongs to your group. An individual can belong to many
different groups.
Categorisation and Depersonalisation

• The process of categorising someone has predictable consequences.

Rather than seeing that person as an idiosyncratic individual, you see
him or her through the lens of the prototype; the person becomes
depersonalized. Prototype-based perception of outgroup members is
more commonly called stereotyping; you view them as being similar
to one another and all having outgroup attributes.
• You can also depersonalize in-group members and yourself in exactly
the same way. When you categorize yourself, you view yourself in
terms of the defining attributes of the ingroup (self-stereotyping), and,
because prototypes describe and prescribe group-appropriate ways to
think, feel, and behave, you think, feel, and behave group
prototypically. In this way, self-categorization produces normative
behavior among members of a group.
Social Identification

• In the second stage, social identification, we adopt the identity of the

group we have categorized ourselves as belonging to.
• If for example you have categorized yourself as a student, the chances
are you will adopt the identity of a student and begin to act in the
ways you believe students act (and conform to the norms of the
group).
• There will be an emotional significance to your identification with a
group, and your self-esteem will become bound up with group
membership.
Social Comparison

• The final stage is social comparison. Once we have categorized

ourselves as part of a group and have identified with that group we
then tend to compare that group with other groups. If our self-esteem
is to be maintained our group needs to compare favorably with other
groups.
• This is critical to understanding prejudice, because once two groups
identify themselves as rivals, they are forced to compete in order for
the members to maintain their self-esteem.
• Competition and hostility between groups is thus not only a matter of
competing for resources (like in Sherif’s Robbers Cave) like jobs but
also the result of competing identities.
How groups are formed (How People
Represent Themselves)

• People have a repertoire of different ways to conceive of themselves;

they have many different identities that can be classified as personal
identities or social identities.
• Personal identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of
idiosyncratic personal attributes (e.g., generous, shy), and one’s personal
relationships (e.g., X’s friend, Y’s spouse).
• Social identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of the
attributes of specific groups to which one belongs (e.g., male, nurse,
Hindu). Personal identity is tied to the personal self and associated with
interpersonal or idiosyncratic individual behaviours; social identity is
tied to the collective self and associated with group and intergroup
behaviours.
• Some theorists have argued that in some cultures, social identity rests
more on networks of relations within a group and is thus associated with
the relational self.
How People Represent Groups

• Human groups are social categories that people mentally represent as

prototypes, complex (fuzzy) sets of interrelated attributes that capture
similarities within groups and differences between groups.
• Prototypes maximize entitativity (the extent to which a group is a distinct
entity) and optimize metacontrast (the extent to which there is similarity
within and difference between groups).
• If someone says to you, “Norwegian,” what comes immediately to mind is
your prototype of that national group.
• Overwhelmingly, people make binary categorizations in which one of the
categories is the group that they are in, the ingroup.
• Thus, prototypes not only capture similarities within the ingroup but also
accentuate differences between a person’s group and a specific outgroup.
• Ingroup prototypes can therefore change as a function of which outgroup
you are comparing your group to. In this way, prototypes are context
dependent.
Feelings for Group Members

• Social categorization affects how you feel toward other people.

Feelings are governed by how prototypical of the group you think
other people are, rather than by personal preferences, friendships, and
enmities; liking becomes depersonalized social attraction.
• Furthermore, because within one’s group there is usually agreement
over prototypicality, prototypical members are liked by all; they are
popular. Likewise, less prototypical members are unpopular and can
be marginalized as undesirable deviants.
• Another aspect of social attraction is that outgroup members are liked
less than ingroup members; outgroupers are very unprototypical of
the ingroup.
• Social attraction also occurs because one’s ingroup prototypes are
generally more favorable than one’s outgroup prototypes; thus, liking
reflects prototypicality and the valence of the prototype.
Intergroup Behaviour

• The tendency for ingroup prototypes to be more favorable than outgroup

prototypes represents ethnocentrism, the belief that all things ingroup are
superior to all things outgroup. Ethnocentrism exists because of the
correspondence, through social identity, between how the group is evaluated and
how a person is evaluated. Thus, intergroup behavior is a struggle over the
relative status or prestige of one’s ingroup, a struggle for positive ingroup
distinctiveness and social identity.
• Higher status groups fight to protect their evaluative superiority; lower status
groups struggle to shrug off their social stigma and promote their positivity.
• The strategies that groups adopt to manage their identity depend on subjective
belief structures, members’ beliefs about the nature of the relationship between
their group and a specific outgroup. Beliefs focus on status (What is my group’s
social standing relative to the outgroup?), stability (How stable is this status
relationship?), legitimacy (How legitimate is this status relationship?),
permeability (How easy is it for people to change their social identity by passing
into the outgroup?), and cognitive alternatives (Is a different intergroup
relationship conceivable?).
Intergroup Behaviour (continuation)

• A social mobility belief structure hinges on a belief in permeability. It

causes members of lower status groups as isolated individuals to
disidentify from their group to try to join the higher status outgroup;
they try to “pass.”
• A social change belief structure hinges on acceptance that permeability
is low. It causes low status groups to engage in social creativity,
behaviours aimed at redefining the social value of their group and its
attributes, coupled with attempts to avoid (upward) comparison with
higher status groups and instead engage in (lateral or downward)
comparisons with other groups lower in the social pecking order.
• Where a social change belief structure is coupled with recognition that
the social order is illegitimate, group members engage in social
competition, direct competition with the outgroup over status, which
can range from debate through protest, to revolution and war.
Social Influence in Groups

• People in groups adhere to similar standards, have similar attitudes,

and behave in similar ways. They conform to group norms and
behave group prototypically.
• Self-categorization is the cognitive process responsible for an
individual group member behaving prototypically, transforming his or
her self-concept and behavior to be identity-consistent.
• In gauging what the appropriate group norm is, people pay attention
to the behaviour of people who are most informative about the norm,
typically highly prototypical members and leaders, but also, as
contrast anchors, marginal members and deviants, and even outgroup
members (referent informational influence theory).
Social Influence in Groups (continuation)

• Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football
team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and
self-esteem.
• Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social
world.
• Henri Tajfel proposed that stereotyping (i.e. putting people into groups and
categories) is based on a normal cognitive process: the tendency to group
things together. In doing so we tend to exaggerate:

• 1. the differences between groups

• 2. the similarities of things in the same group.
• This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The central hypothesis
of social identity theory is that group members of an in-group will seek to
find negative aspects of an out-group, thus enhancing their self-image.
The stigma associated with differences

• Social identity theory has developed to become one of social

psychology’s most significant and extensively cited analyses of inter-
group and group phenomena, for example,
• prejudice,
• discrimination,
• stereotyping,
• cooperation and competition,
• conformity,
• norms,
• group decision making,
• leadership, and deviance
The stigma associated with differences

• We divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process
of social categorization (i.e. we put people into social groups).
• Prejudiced views between cultures may result in racism; in its
extreme forms, racism may result in genocide, such as occurred in
Germany with the Jews, in Rwanda between the Hutus and Tutsis
and, more recently, in the former Yugoslavia between the Bosnians
and Serbs.
The stigma associated with differences
The stigma associated with differences

• We categorize people in the same way. We see the group to which we

belong (the in-group) as being different from the others (the out-
group), and members of the same group as being more similar than
they are.
• Social categorization is one explanation for prejudice attitudes (i.e.
“them” and “us” mentality) which leads to in-groups and out-groups.
Examples of In-groups and Out-groups: Northern Ireland: Catholics –
Protestants; Rwanda: Hutus and Tutsis; Yugoslavia: the Bosnians and
Serbs; Germany: Jews and the Nazis; Politics: Labor and the
Conservatives;Football: Liverpool and Man Utd; Gender: Males and
Females; Social Class: Middle and Working Classes.
Social Identity Motivations

• The group pursuit of positive distinctiveness is reflected in people’s

desire to have a relatively favorable self-concept, in this case through
positive social identity.
• The self-esteem hypothesis draws out this logic: Social identity
processes are motivated by the individual pursuit of a relatively
favorable self-concept and possibly by the global human pursuit of
self-esteem. Research suggests that group membership generally does
make people feel good about themselves, even if the group is
relatively stigmatized, but feeling good or bad about oneself does not
easily predict whether one will actually identify with a group.
Social Identity Motivations (continuation)

• According to uncertainty reduction theory, there is another basic

motivation for social identity processes. People strive to reduce
feelings of uncertainty about their social world and their place within
it; they like to know who they are and how to behave, and who others
are and how they might behave.
• Social identity ties self-definition and behaviour to prescriptive and
descriptive prototypes. Social identity reduces uncertainty about who
you are and about how you and others will behave, and is particularly
effective if the social identity is clearly defined by membership in a
distinctive high entitativity group.
• Research confirms that uncertainty, especially about or related to self,
does motivate identification particularly with high entitativity groups.
When Does Social Identity Come into Play?

• A social identity comes into play psychologically to govern perceptions,

attitudes, feelings, and behavior when it is psychologically salient. People
draw on readily accessible social identities or categorizations (e.g., gender,
profession), ones that are valued, important, and frequently employed
aspects of the self-concept (chronically accessible in memory), or because
they are self-evident and perceptually obvious in the immediate situation
(situationally accessible).
• People use accessible identities to make sense of their social context,
checking how well the categorization accounts for similarities and
differences among people (structural/comparative fit) and how well the
stereotypical properties of the categorization account for people’s
behavior (normative fit).
• People try different categorizations, and the categorization with optimal fit
becomes psychologically salient. Although largely an automatic process,
salience is influenced by motivations to employ categorizations that favor
the ingroup and do not raise self-uncertainty.
Conclusion

• Just to reiterate, in social identity theory the group membership is

not something foreign or artificial which is attached onto the
person, it is a real, true and vital part of the person.
• Again, it is crucial to remember in-groups are groups you identify
with, and out-groups are ones that we don't identify with, and
may discriminate against.
Have a break before your next lecture….
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References (continuation)

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