Social Identity Theory

Social Identity Theory (SIT)

• People often perceive themselves and others as group members more than as unique individuals.
• Social identity underlies intergroup behavior.
• Explores the conditions where social identities primarily determine social perceptions and behaviors.
• Specifies strategies for coping with devalued social identities.

Origins of SIT

• Inspired by Henri Tajfel's experiences with discrimination and intergroup conflict.
• Sought to understand how people treat each other as enemies irrationally.
• Minimal group studies showed arbitrary group assignments cause ingroup favoritism.
• Categorizing individuals into groups leads to "us" vs. "them" thinking and behavior.

Basic Principles of SIT

• Examines how people adopt and behave based on social identities.
• Investigates when people think in terms of "we" instead of "I".
• Considers the impact on feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.
• Focuses on psychological processes differentiating social identities from personal identities.
• Explores strategies for deriving a positive social identity.
• Addresses social structure characteristics influencing strategy use.

Psychological Processes in SIT

• Social Categorization:
  • Classifies individuals into groups.
  • Common and functional psychological process.
  • Responds to complex social situations.
  • Emphasizes similarities within categories.
  • Accentuates differences between categories.
• Social Comparison:
  • Interprets and values group features by comparing them to other groups' characteristics.
  • Determines a group's social status or perceived prestige.
• Social Identification:
  • Realization of self-inclusion in some social categories and exclusion from others.
  • Incorporates the emotional significance of group membership.
  • Motivates emphasizing ingroup identity.
  • Protects or enhances the value of ingroups and their members.

Identity Management Strategies

• Used by low-status social group members.
• Aims to address their situation and improve social identity value.
• Individual Mobility: Attempts to escape devalued group membership and join a higher-status group.
• Social Creativity: Redefines intergroup comparison by highlighting positive ingroup characteristics.
  • Achieved by focusing on different comparison dimensions.
  • Includes other groups in the comparison.
  • Changes the meaning of low-status group membership.
• Social Competition: Involves conflict to change the status quo.
  • Collective action oriented towards objective or material outcomes.

Socio-Structural Characteristics

• Conditions predicting different strategies for social identity maintenance or improvement.
• Permeability of Group Boundaries: Subjective belief that individuals can act independently within a social system.
  • High permeability encourages individual mobility.
• Stability of Group Status: Perception of group differences as fluid or enduring.
• Legitimacy of Current Status Relations: Moral convictions influencing the motivation to change.
  • Illegitimacy motivates rectifying the current state.

Core Predictions of SIT

• Individuals strive to make favorable comparisons between their ingroup and relevant outgroups.
• Aims to achieve or maintain a positive social identity.
• Social categorization can cause intergroup discrimination and conflict.
• The search for positive social identity takes different forms.
  • Individual mobility, social creativity, social competition depending on justifications
  • Perceived cognitive alternatives to current status relations.

Theoretical Developments

• Self-Categorization Theory (SCT):
  • Elaborates on cognitive processes underlying group-level self-conceptions.
  • Focuses on social categorizations at different inclusiveness and abstraction levels.
  • Key principles include self-categories at different levels of abstraction.
  • Metacontrast between interclass and intraclass differences.
  • Salience of self-categories leading to accentuation of perceived similarities and differences.
  • Introduces depersonalization: psychological process where people perceive themselves as interchangeable exemplars of a social category.

Conceptualizations and Measures

• Research distinguishes between social identity value and social identity strength.
• Social identity value is the content of characteristics associated with a group.
• Social identity strength is the extent to which an individual perceives self-inclusion in the group.
• Social identity includes cognitive awareness and emotional significance of group membership.

Self-Categorization Theory (SCT)

• Explains how and when people define themselves as individuals or as group members.
• Examines the implications of these self-perceptions on understanding the mind and behavior.
• Recognizes that individuals are both individuals and group members.
• Explains when a group is ‘a group’ through understanding the cognitive definition of the self.
• Focuses on how perceivers define themselves and others as individual and group entities.
• Aims to understand, explain, and predict how people think, feel, and act as a psychological group.
• Related to Social Identity Theory (SIT), as SCT's founder co-founded SIT.
• Both theories address interplay between psychological functioning and socially/culturally shared properties of human life.
• SCT distinguishes itself by focusing on psychological processes underlying movement along the interpersonal–intergroup continuum.

Development of SCT

• Can be summarized in three steps
  • Distinguishing between personal and social identity, with social identity as the basis of group behavior.
  • Elaborating the personal-social identity distinction to include levels of self-categorization and formalizing the theory.
  • Systematic research on the self-concept and stereotyping, leading to a detailed understanding of the self and its implications for cognition.
• Begins with minimal group studies, demonstrating that social categorization into groups is sufficient for discrimination.
• Addresses why subjects identify with minimal groups and act in ways that reflect the importance of these group identities.
• Social Categorization-Social Identity-Social Comparison-Positive Distinctiveness:
  • Sequence that provides a framework for understanding intergroup behavior.
  • Social categorizations define people's place in society and provide social identities.
  • Social comparison evaluates these identities.
  • The motive for positive distinctiveness leads to ingroup favoring responses.

Core Aspects of SCT

• Levels of Self-Categorization:
  • Interpersonal level: Self defined as a unique individual relative to others.
  • Intergroup level: Self defined as a group member in contrast to an outgroup.
  • Superordinate level: Self defined as a human being in contrast to other lifeforms.
• Salience:
  • Explains how a situation is categorized and given meaning, influencing self-perception and behavior.
  • Depends on the perceiver's readiness to use a self-category and the fit of that category to the stimulus reality.
• Metacontrast Principle:
  • Individuals are categorized as a group to the degree that differences between them are less than differences between them and outgroups.
  • A person is prototypical of the group to the degree that differences between that person and ingroup members are less than differences between that person and outgroup members.
• Depersonalization:
  • As people define themselves and others as members of the same category, they self-stereotype in relation to the category and see themselves as more alike in terms of the defining attributes of the category.
  • Cognitive redefinition of the self mediates group behavior.

SCT and Social Influence

• Social influence is understood through the categorization process and the metacontrast principle.
• Referent Informational Influence: Ingroup members are viewed as similar to oneself, making them a valid source of information.
• Agreement with ingroup members leads to subjective validity and certainty.
• Strategies to address disagreement with similar others include changing views, influencing others, recategorizing ingroup members, and clarifying the situation.
• Leadership: Conceptualized as a group process related to influence and power within a group.
• Leadership rests on an individual's ability to be seen as prototypical of a shared social identity.

SCT and Individuality

• Impressions and judgments of oneself and others depend on the level of abstraction at which categorization operates.
• Individuality is shaped through categorization and social comparison.
• Personal identity depends on comparative reference, with individual differences understood as relative.
• Social identity processes can impact individual-level characteristics and abilities, cognitive performance, wellbeing, and self-reported personality.

SCT and Applications to Social Issues

• Provides insights into psychological function, spanning intergroup relations to individual functioning.
• Applied to areas like antiracism, prejudice reduction, social change, and health and wellbeing.
• Applied to improve school outcomes by affecting the norms, values, and beliefs that define the school.
• Strategies include clarifying the school's mission, restructuring school functions, and increasing member participation in decisions.

Explore Social Identity Theory (SIT), including the distinction between intergroup and interpersonal behavior. Review Tajfel's minimal group studies and the role of social comparison. Understand social categorization, social identification, and metacontrast principle within SIT.