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)

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

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.

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