Social Identity

What is a Group?

We are all part of groups, but it may be difficult to define what a group is. Consider these scenarios:

• Everyone in a theater or cinema?

• Everyone with brown hair?

• Two people who job together twice a week?

These examples are called aggregates: they have things in common, but nothing uniquely psychological binds them together.

Researchers have suggested possible features of what makes a group:

• Common fate: Jewish people in Nazi Germany shared stigmatization and genocide, considering their fate as individuals was shared by others.

• Accepted social structure: Organizations or companies with hierarchies and social roles (CEO, managers, workers).

• Face to face interaction: Important in defining a group.

Johnson and Johnson's definition:
Groups possess several key features:

• Group members are interdependent.

• They follow norms or rules of behavior.

• They typically join together to achieve a common objective.

Johnson and Johnson suggests:
A group is two or more individuals in face to face interaction, each aware of his or her membership in the group, each who are aware of others who belong to the group and each aware of their positive interdependence as they strive to achieve mutual goals.

While applicable to smaller groups (work teams, families, friendship groups), this definition's utility is compromised when we think about larger groups.

Many of them would not have interacted face to face, and many large groups such as gender, religious or ethnic groups do not meet everyone face to face nor do they have a common objective. So do they still qualify as groups? Do people need these features to feel part of a group?

Even when people are not with other group members, the group still strongly defines who the person is, who they associate with, how they live and what they do. People do not need to be in the presence of others from their group in order to be influenced by it.

These criticisms have led some psychologists to propose a more general definition applicable to both smaller and larger groups:
A group exists when two or more individuals perceive themselves to be members of the same social category.

The important word here is they perceive themselves to be in that group. It doesn't matter if other people don't define them as being part of that group, it's the perception of being in that group that's important. The key to the definition is how much people identify with that group.

Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory was proposed by Tajfel and Turner in the late 1970s. It was originally mainly a theory of prejudice and intergroup relations but it quickly widened to become a theory of group membership and self-concept, that incorporates aspects of social comparison, social cognition and socio structural analyses.

The basic premise of social identity theory is that by being part of a group (political, religious, sports, etc.), our personal identities (the 'I') are redefined as collective ones (the 'we').

As Abrams and Hogg suggested group membership is when personal identity becomes collective identity. So our personal identity is unique information about ourselves, collective identity is information about the groups we belong to.

The resulting social identities are then associated with a set of norms (group prototypes) that positively distinguish the in group from other groups. Group members' adherence to such norms can help protect self esteem by elevating the group's status, and it gives the world meaning and order. Intergroup competition can pose a threat to the image of the in group; group members attempt to sustain intergroup differentiation by maximizing the validity of in group norms through intra group differentiation.

Individuals experience collective identity based on their membership to a group, such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, or a sports team.

Stages of Social Identity Theory

When forming social identities, we go through three main stages:

1. Categorization: We categorize objects to understand and identify them. Similarly, we categorize people (including ourselves) to understand the social environment. We use social categories like black, white, Australian, Christian, Muslim, Liverpudlian, students, or bus drivers because these categories are useful to us.

   If we can assign people to a category, then that tells us things about those people, That's important information to us if we want to do something like take a bus somewhere. Similarly, we find out things about ourselves by knowing which categories we belong to. We define appropriate behavior by reference to the norms of the group we belong to, but you can only do this if you can tell who belongs to your group.

   An individual may belong to many different groups.

2. Social Identification: We start to adopt the identity of the group we have categorized ourselves as belonging to. If you have categorized yourself as a student, you will likely adopt the identity of a student and act in ways you believe students act, conforming to the norms of the group. There will be an emotional significance to your identification with this group, and your self esteem will become bound up with group membership.

3. Social Comparison: Once we have categorized ourselves as part of a group and identified with that group, we then tend to compare that group, our 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 and discrimination, because once two groups identify themselves as different or as rivals, they are forced to compete in order for the members to maintain their self esteem.

   Competition and hostility between groups is not simply a matter of competing for things like resources, so things like jobs or money, but also the result of competing identities.
   \text{Turner: There is a tendency to define our own group positively in order to evaluate oneself positively.}

Why Categorize?

We categorize the social world to understand what something is by knowing what it is similar to and different from. We categorize on the basis of similarity and difference comparisons with other social entities because we have an innate tendency to categorize the world in order to reduce our cognitive load.

The social environment is somewhere where we are bombarded by information. And if we dealt with that on a case by case or a very individual basis, we would find that we are overloaded in terms of cognition. We also categorise in order to give the world meaning and order. It reduces the uncertainty in our social lives and as I've mentioned it helps maintain our self esteem. We all identify with a number of groups and this makes up our social identity.

The social environment is information-rich, and dealing with it individually would overload our cognition. Categorization gives the world meaning and order, reduces uncertainty, and helps maintain self esteem. We all identify with many groups, making up our social identity.

Functions of Social Identity

1. Self Enhancement: Groups compete to be different in favorable ways to achieve positive distinctiveness, providing a positive social identity and self esteem. We want to be different from other groups, but we want to be different in a positive way.

2. Subjective Uncertainty Reduction: People want to know how to relate and what to expect from others, making life predictable. Identifying with groups reduces uncertainty and addresses these concerns.

Self Esteem and Group Membership

Much of our sense of self comes from the groups we identify with, and people have a basic need for self esteem. While self esteem can come from personal achievements, it is also very closely linked to your social identity. So the achievements and successes of your group. People strive to promote or protect the prestige and status of their own group relative to other groups because group evaluation is self evaluation. So the greater the group status and positive distinctiveness, the better for self esteem.

This is where we see in group favoritism and bias. Social identity theory suggests that people strive to achieve and maintain a sense of this positive distinctiveness for their group memberships. Positive distinctiveness entails feeling both valuable and distinct compared to other groups. The drive to view our in groups favourably makes intuitive sense from a self esteem perspective, but group distinctiveness also serves an epistemic function.

Group memberships allow us to know ourselves by making intergroup comparisons with similar outgroups. Fans often compare themselves to rivals and boost their team's esteem through positive distinctiveness.

Research has shown that because our social identity is important to our sense of self esteem, we tend to be more strongly identified with a sports team when it wins than when it loses because it boosts our self esteem. Some research has shown that sports fans will display their identification with a sports team who are doing well.

When that team is winning, they will wear t shirts around university campuses, for example, or through the language that they use. They may say things like we played a great game. So when a team wins, we tend to identify with that team more strongly. But when a team loses we tend to use language such as they didn't play so well, so we tend to distance ourselves from that team because it's not having a positive effect on our self esteem.

Because social identity derives its value from the evaluative properties of one's own group relative to other groups, social identification elevates our self esteem. Our self image and self esteem are heavily dependent on the groups we identify with.

Research has also shown that ethnic minorities that are disadvantaged, perhaps educationally, economically or politically, are typified by a lower self esteem when intergroup comparisons are made. So although we use our group identification to boost our self esteem, if we identify with a group who is disadvantaged this can also have a negative effect on our self esteem.

Subjective Uncertainty Reduction

A lack of a clear and certain identity is aversive, associated with stress, anxiety, depression, and disorganized behavior. Self categorization, responsible for social identification and group membership based behaviors, reduces subjective uncertainty. By identifying with a group we create these in group and out group prototypes and this creates less complex ways for us to navigate the world.

In addition to validating your self-concept and boosting your self esteem, It also gives us a very clear way of behaving in the world and a clear expectation of what we should be expecting from other people.

Social Identities and Behaviour

Social identities are associated with a set of norms which define group prototypes as members' shared representation of the attributes assumed to be most characteristic of the group and that also distinguish the group from other groups.

A prototype is not the same as a stereotype. A group prototype is a norm that positively distinguishes an in group. A prototype can be thought of as the best example to represent a certain category. Prototypes help remember key details about a certain concept or category. A group prototype of a cat would be an animal that has four legs and tends to meow.

A stereotype, by contrast, is an oversimplified generalization with the underlying assumption that all members in a particular group are the same.

Group norms are prevalent in most groups and they can help reduce uncertainty by providing guides for thought customs and behaviours.

We all identify with lots of groups. But when do we use which identity? Group categories must be salient (noticeable) to have an effect on our sense of identity. The identity that we use at any particular time depends on the salience of that identity (how important is the identity at that time), and how important is that identity for the self at that time. Identities can be:

• Chronically accessible

• Situationally accessible

A chronically accessible identity will be a valued and important and frequently used aspect of your self-concept. This might be related to your gender, it might be related to your ethnicity, it might be related to your religious values for example. Situationally accessible identities are aspects that are self evident and perceptually obvious in the immediate situation. So a situationally accessible identity may be things like your identity within your job or your profession. It might be an identity such as being a part time student or it might be an identity such as being a parent of a child who plays football or does gymnastics for example.

If we are representing our occupation or our profession at a jobs fair, our occupational affiliation will be highly salient. If I was going to an academic conference for example, my identity as a researcher or a lecturer would be highly salient in that situation. We would think of ourselves in terms of our professional identity in that situation rather than in terms of many of the other aspects of ourselves that we could consider. So I would be thinking of my role as a researcher in that situation, my profession, rather than aspects of my gender or my ethnicity or my role as a parent for example. So our prototypes or our norms associated with our profession, so my norms associated with being a researcher, would then dictate my behaviour at the job sphere, over and above my norms associated with being female or being a mother for example.

We access our identities in different ways in different situations.

Summary

• A group is defined as two or more individuals who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category.

• Social identity theory involves three stages: categorisation, social identification, and social comparison.

• Social identity is a source of pride and self esteem, provides positive distinctiveness, and simplifies our social worlds.

• Group identities are associated with prototypes and sets of norms.

• Identities can be chronically or situationally accessible.