Inclusion and Social Identity PDF

Chapter 3 INCLUSION AND SOCIAL IDENTITY - Master problem of social life - Connection between the individual and the collective, including groups, organizations, communities, and society itself - Peak rescue group - Requires individuals to identify with the collec...

Chapter 3 INCLUSION AND SOCIAL IDENTITY - Master problem of social life - Connection between the individual and the collective, including groups, organizations, communities, and society itself - Peak rescue group - Requires individuals to identify with the collective self, act for good of the group rather than being individual heros FROM ISOLATION TO INCLUSION (64) **The Need to Belong** - Baumeister and Leary - Argue for need to belong - Pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and impactful interpersonal relationships - A need like hunger or thirst - people often feel that they 'find themselves' while alone (shorter periods) - long periods of isolation is a risk factor for psychological disorders like depression, paranoia, schizophrenia - Loneliness is different than being alone - The aversive psychological reaction to a perceived lack of personal or social relations - Emotional loneliness - Occurs when the problem is a lack of a long-term, meaningful, intimate relationship with another person - Triggered by divorce, break-up, romantic failures - Social loneliness - Occurs when people feel cut off from their network of friends, acquaintances, and group members - Triggered by moving, children being rejected by peers, being a new employee - Alleviating loneliness - Joining groups - People in groups are healthier and happier - Having friends (even weird or unpopular friends) - Impersonal groups do not have the same effect on loneliness - Checking out with a cashier does not make people feel less alone - Social groups will not solve emotional loneliness, need close friends and damily - Loneliness is contagious - if you are linked to a lonely person you are more likely to be lonely - degrees of separation - people were 52% more likely to be lonely if connected to a lonely person at one degree of separation - 25% more likely at two degrees of separations - 15% at three degrees of separation **Inclusion and Exclusion** **Ostracism** - People want to not only be accepted but sought out by their group - Ostracism - Most distressing, maximum exclusion - To be deliberately ignored and excluded by others - 'feeling out of the loop' - Individuals experience more negative moods, feel less competent, they do not feel as close interpersonally to the other group members - Kippling Williams - Ball toss study - Feelings of frustration, anxiety, nervousness, loneliness - Betrayal, shock, surprise - Williams's temporal need-threat model of ostracism - Reflexive stage - Flood of negative emotions signal something is wrong - Reflective stage - Review the experience searching for an explanation for the way they were treated, adopt a behavioural strategy to minimize the negative effects of exclusion - Resignation stage - Alienation, helplessness, loss of self-worth, depression - Reaction to stressful, threatening circumstances to gain a sense of control - Fight response - Confront, or act out - Flight response - Withdraw psychologically or physically - Tend and Befriend - Don't struggle against the group but instead tend to the group's needs even while they are actively rejecting you - Social reconnection and more sensitive to social cues, more interested in working for the group - William's study on cyberostracism - People in online spaces feel similar feelings in response to being ostracized - Women more likely to tend and brefriend and blame themselves for ostracism - People are more likely to be antisocial when excluded - More likely to blame entire group - Gaertner's Noise Study - People more likely to turn up noise to harmful levels on multiple people when they feel all people excluded them rather than one member of a group - Rejection/exclusion as a predictor for school shootings **Inclusion and Human Nature** **The Herd Instinct** - McDougall and Darwin have been studying this over 100 years - Benefits of living in groups outweigh the costs - Sociality sewed into DNA of humans for this reason - Evolution would favour joiners who are sensitive to signs of social exclusion - Mark Leary's Sociometer theory - Feelings of self-worth function as a monitor for social exclusion - Self-esteem as an indicator of acceptance into groups - Rejected people have lower self-esteem - Cardiovascular, hormonal, immune system responses to exclusion - Inclusion causes lowered heart rate, blood pressure and an increase in levels of the neuropeptide and hormone oxytocin - When being left out of a group the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula were particularly active, associated with physical pain sensations and other negative social experiences - People who are more sensitive to pain are more likely to respond negatively to social rejection FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO COLLECTIVISM (76) **Creating Cooperation** - Individualism - Based on independence and uniqueness of each individual - Assumes people are autonomous, must be free to act and think in the ways that they prefer rather than submit to group demands - Collectivism - Recognizes that human groups are not mere aggregations of independent individuals but complex sets of interdependent members who must constantly adjust to the actions and reactions of others around them - 4 axis which individualism and collectivism differ on - Social relations - Social obligations - Social motives - social self - exchange relationships - individuals monitor their inputs into the group, strive to maximize the rewards they personally receive through membership, and are dissatisfied if their group becomes to costly for them - expect to receive rewards in exchange for their person investment - if cannot identify personal rewards for helping, they will not help - Communal relationships - Concerned with what the group receives - Help more, concerned with what the group receives - Norm of reciprocity - Requires payback grom members based on what they do - Group culture - Any definable group with a shared history can have a culture - Once a group has learned to hold common assumptions, the resulting automatic patterns of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and behaving provide meaning, stability, and comfort - May support individualism or collectivism - Ultimatum game - You get to split \$20 with a mystery individual, however if they reject the offer you get nothing - Collectivist societies more likely to split evenly - Equity norm - Recommends that group members should receive outcomes in proportion to their inputs - Individualistic - Equality norm - All group members regardless of inputs should get an equal share of the payoff - Collectivist **The Social Self** - Answering the "who are you?" question - Mentioning individual traits or interests - individualistic - Mentioning social roles and relationships - Collectivist - Personal identity - Encompasses all those unique qualities, traits, beliefs, skills that differentiate one person from another - THE ME - Social identity - Includes all those qualities that derive from connections with and similarity to other people and groups - THE WE - Collectivists more nice and trusting of their ingroup, but not outgroups - Individualists - Attribute behaviour to internal, personal characteristics of the person - More emotionally detached from groups - Put personal goals above group - Collectivists - Attribute behaviour to social circumstances - Consider personality as a flexible set of tendencies that can change when a person moves between social settings - More respectful of group members - Western and English speaking countries are more individualistic - 60% of people will be the same orientation as their general culture (collectivist culture, 60% are collectivist) - Cultures may be vertical (hierarchical authority structures) or horizontal (authority structures are flat) - Optimal Distinctiveness Theory **Brewer** - Most people have 3 fundamental needs - Need to be assimilated by the group, need to be connected to friends and loved ones, need for autonomy and differentiation - Individuals most satisfied when they achieve optimal distinctiveness - Unique qualities are noted and appreciated, they are bonded with intimates, they feel similar to group members in many respects - Joining smaller or less mainstream groups will make people feel more unique FROM PERSONAL IDENTITY TO SOCIAL IDENTITY (84) **Social Identity Theory: The Basics** - Tajfel and Turner Developed social identity theory to understand the causes of conflict between people who belonged to different groups - Created a minimal intergroup situation - Gathering of two volunteer groups with no history, shared future or connection - People paid attention to these groups and favoured their members - Explained by Social Categorization and Identification which become identity - Social categorization is the beginning process of generating a person's social identity - Perceivers classify those they see into groups - Stereotypes are formed about groups. What traits a group shared and how they differ from one another - People also self-stereotype, especially when they have been recently reminded of their membership in a certain group - What groups we personally INDENTIFY with have more impact on our sense of sense - I have brown eyes but I don't identify heavily with that group - As social identification increases, individuals come to see their membership in the group as more personally significant - Group identification can be so strong that we identify as group members first and individuals second - People identify themselves as members of groups faster when the groups are minority groups **Motivation and Social Identity** **Evaluating the Self** - Individuals are motivated to think well of themselves - So they think well of the groups they are in - Self-understanding is a core motive for most people and that groups offer people a means of understanding themselves - People who belong to prestigious groups have higher self-esteem - Collective self-esteem measure - Membership esteem - Am I valuable to the groups I belong to? - Private collective self-esteem - Do I think positively or negatively of the group that I am involved in? - Public collective self-esteem - Do other people think positively or negatively of the groups I am involved in? - Identity - Are the groups I belong to an important or unimportant part of my identity? - Bask in reflected glory - Stressing association to successful group although they have contributed very little to the success - Sports fans, swifties - Cutting off reflected failure - Casual fans can switch allegiance to a different team in the face of loss, highly integrated fans cannot **Protecting the Collective Self** - Ingroup-outgroup bias - Look more favourably on ingroup than outgroup - Can cause people to believe more negative things about an outside group - Even if groups are not perceived positively, their members have higher self-esteem - Social creativity - Group members compare the ingroup to the outgroup on some new dimension **Stereotype Verification and Threat** - Stereotypes both create and constrain identity - People prefer to interact with people who confirm their stereotype about certain groups - Negative ingroup stereotyping protects individual's feelings of self-worth - If you are reminded that women are 'bad drivers' you will be less bothered by your traffic accident - Stereotype threat - When individuals know that others they are interacting with may be relying on group stereotypes to judge them - May undermine individual's actual performance - Self-fulfilling prophecy **Protecting the Personal Self** - People more disturbed by threats to personal self-esteem rather than collective self-esteem - More likely to deny negative associations - You did poorly vs your group did poorly - More likely to readily claim positive feedback - You did great vs group did great - People will turn away from groups which threaten personal self-esteem - Individual mobility - People will shift allegiances, leaving groups that are lower in status or prone to failure to seek membership in more prestigious and successful groups