Sociocultural Approach - The individual and the group

Social Identity Theory:

• social behaviour is determined by the motivations of the person and their personal group membership
• a person does not have 1 personal self but several social selves that correspond to group memberships
• group memberships – to be a part of a group
• can boost self-esteem and create sense of importance
• can increase self-imaging by discriminating and holding prejudice against the groups we don’t belong to
• make a distinction between the in group = group you’re in, the out group = groups you don’t belong to (us and them)

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Social Cognitive Theory:

• States that parts of someone’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others in a social context.
• Learning things through observation of others performing the desired behaviour
• For observational learning to be a success, 4 components must be addressed: attention, retention, reproduction potential, motivation
• Attention – you can’t learn much by observation unless you perceive and attend to it
• Retention – in order to reproduce the modelled behaviour, you must code the information into long term memory
• Reproduction potential – observer must be able to reproduce the model’s behaviour
• Motivation – observer expects to receive positive reinforcements for the modelled behaviour

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Stereotypes:

• Social perception of someone in terms of their group membership or physical attributes
• Generalisation that is made about a group and then attributed to members of that group – can be positive or negative generalisations
• Stereotyping affects the behaviour of those who hold the stereotype and those wh are labelled by the stereotype.

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Formation of Stereotypes:

• Done through the social identity theory schemas
• Schemas – we selectively attend to certain characteristics
• States that formation of stereotypes is based on social comparison and group generalisations.
• Social comparison – we seek positive social identities to enhance our self-esteem – comparing our ingroups and out groups

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