SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY

SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY

• Part of an individual’s self-idea which derives from his information
of his/her membership in a social group (or groups) together with
the value or emotional significance connected to that
membership.

• Henri Tajfel's greatest contribution to psychology was social

identity theory. «Social identity is a person’s sense of who they're
primarily based totally on their group membership(s).»

• Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family,
football team etc.) which people belonged to have been an
important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups provide us a
sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.
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• We divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process
of social categorization (i.e. we placed people into social groups).

• This is known as in-group (us) and out-group (them). The central

hypothesis of social identity theory is that «group members of an in-
group will seek to find negative aspects of an out-group, thus
enhancing their self-image.»
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 SOCIAL IDENTITY THEORY
• Social identity theory, in social psychology, the
study of the interplay among personal and social
identities.
• Social identity theory goals to specify and predict
the situations below which individuals consider
themselves as individuals or as group members.
• The theory additionally considers the
consequences of personal and social identities
for individual perceptions and group behaviour.
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 THE GROUPS IN YOU

• Think about the different groups you belong to now.

• Which groups do you think of?
• For example, a sports team, your gender, the
community you grew up in, a group of colleagues, a
community where you play online games, or the
political party you voted for in the last elections.
These are all groups that you belong to.
• These categories are not always tangible. For
example, left-handers are an abstract category.
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• So, group membership partially defines your identity.
• Groups tell us who we are and who we are not.
• Accordingly, groups partly determine our feelings.
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• We can feel a sincere, warm feeling when thinking about
the members of the group we belong to.

• A good attitude is formed within us towards our group and

its members.

• However, we can also feel anger when our group is

mistreated from the outside, or when in-group members
mistreat others, or when group members feel guilty for
some reason.

• More precisely, social identity is the part of an individual's

self-concept arising from the value or emotional
importance attached to that membership, along with the
knowledge of membership in a social group or groups.
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 THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL IDENTITY
THEORY
• Social identity theory roughly consists of two parts.

• The first, more basic psychological part, describes the cognitive

processes underlying social identity definition and the
motivational assumption that people strive for a positive social
identity.

• The second, socio-structural part describes how people cope with

a negative social identity.

• Before discussing these two chapters, we will first present a brief

chronological plan by describing the "minimal group experiments"
that encouraged the development of SIT. 8
 GROUPS, JUST IN THEIR MINDS
• The most famous research into SIT was carried out by
Tajfel et al. (1970). These experiments were known as
“Minimal Groups” studies, because Tajfel was looking
at groups that people had the minimal possible
reason to feel loyal to.
• He researched the minimum criteria for group
formation and the minimum conditions for in-group
favor to occur.
• To this end, he designed a clever experimental setup
in which groups were reduced to their basic cognitive
core.
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• Students who participated in the experiments
were allocated to one of two groups, ostensibly
on the basis of their preference for either the
painter “Klee” or “Kandinsky.”

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• After being assigned to one of the groups, the
participants allocated small amounts of money
between the unnamed members of the "Klee" and
"Kandinsky" group (except themselves).
• The results of these resource allocations showed
that participants preferred people in their group
more than those assigned to the other group.

• The findings of minimal group studies were

surprising because they contradicted the main
view of intergroup relations up to that time: the
realistic conflict theory (Sherif and Sherif, 1969).
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• Although the participants in the minimal
group studies allocated more money to their
groups than the other group, there was no
way the person herself could directly benefit
from it.

• Social identity theory and realist conflict

theory emphasize different primary factors
underlying intergroup attitudes: social identity
emphasizes identity, while realistic conflict
theory emphasizes material resources.
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 FROM CATEGORY TO IDENTITY
• He suggested that individuals categorize themselves
as members of the minimum category to which
they are assigned, the Klee or Kandinsky group.
• So the group has become a part of the person's
identity.
• Tajfel argued that just as people strive for a positive
personal identity, they also strive for a positive
social identity.
• You always belong to one of the two social
categories or a third (for example, outside) category.
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• We learn about ourselves by knowing
which categories we belong to.

• Henri Tajfel and John Turner

suggested that there are three
mental processes involved in
considering others as "us" or "them".
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 1-SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION
• We categorize objects to describe: table, car,
house etc.
• Similarly, we categorize people to understand the
social environment: student, teacher, American,
technician etc.

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 2-SOCIAL COMPARISON

• After classifying ourselves as part of a group

and identifying with that group, we tend to
compare that group with other groups.
• If our self-esteem is to be maintained, our
group should compare positively with other
groups.

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 3-SOCIAL IDENTITY

• We adopt the identity of the group to which we

categorize ourselves.

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When a Social Identity Is Negative
• One aspect in which minimal groups are minimal is that they are
neutral in terms of their valence. Natural groups, by contrast, do
typically have evaluative connotations.
• That is, some groups are generally respected and enjoy a high
social status (e.g., physicians), whereas other groups have low
status, sometimes even to the extent that they can be regarded
“stigmatized groups” (e.g., the unemployed).
• Because SIT predicts that people are generally motivated to
achieve a positive social identity, members of low status groups
should be motivated to improve the social standing of their
group.
• By contrast, members of high status groups should be
particularly motivated to protect the social standing of their
group. 18
• For example, imagine that you are a player in a hockey team
that, for the third year in a row, finds itself at the bottom of
the league. How would you feel, and what would you do?
• The group’s bad performance likely has a negative impact on
the team members’ social identity. How can they cope with
this threat?

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• The first one individual mobility, involves trying as an
individual to seek entrance to a higher status group like
another hockey team.
• The second option collective action, involves working as a
group for status improvement.
• The third option is to be socially creative and to change the
comparison group or the dimension of comparison .

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When do people engage in collective action, and
when do they engage in individual mobility?

• For individual mobility to be possible in the first place, the group

must be permeable, which is the case for sports teams but less
so for social categories like gender and ethnicity.
• When boundaries are closed, the stability and legitimacy of the
status differences play an important role in whether one opts
for collective action or social creativity.
• When status differences are illegitimate and unstable collective
action will become more likely; when low status is legitimate
and stable, however, social creativity becomes more likely.

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 APPLICATIONS TO HEALTH
• Social identification has important implications for
(improving) mental and physical health.
• After making their ethnic identity salient, ethnic
minority group members showed a greater “health
fatalism,” i.e., a belief that it will be of no use to
engage in a more healthy lifestyle.
• Social identity can also be used to stimulate positive
health behaviors.
• A study on anti-smoking advertisements demonstrated
that their effectiveness partly depends on the extent
to which a message is framed in terms of the target’s
social identity. 22
• ‘Customizing’ a health message to fit a target’s social
identity increases the effectiveness of the message.
• A second way in which social identification influences
health outcomes is through its stress-attenuating function.
• For example, Haslam, O’Brien, Jetten, Vormedal, and Penna
(2005) examined stress in Norwegian heart patients who
were recovering from heart surgery in a clinic.
• Social identification was positively related to social
support, and the negative relation between identification
and stress was mediated by social support.
• Identification may also have a positive effect on well-being
when the group itself forms the basis of stress.
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• According to the rejection identification model (Branscombe,
Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999), group-based rejection initially
threatens one’s self-esteem, but through a strengthened
identification with the group, the person can in turn cope with
the stress, eventually leading to restored self-esteem.
• In line with the model, Branscombe and colleagues showed
that when Black Americans thought about discrimination
against their racial group, this initially led to depressed self-
esteem.
• However, this social identity threat led in turn to a
strengthened ethnic identification, which then led to higher
self-esteem.

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Applications to Organizational Psychology
• Organizational identification, which is a special form of it,
refers to the ‘’Perception of being a union with or belonging
to an organization and the experience of seeing the success
and failure of the organization as their own success and
failure".

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 Social identity theory has been demonstrated for a range of common
challenges faced by organizations. These relate to;

1. Cognitive categorization of the self as a member of the organization (How can

leadership connect individual employees to work toward common goals?
When will differentiation in employee rewards enhance individual ambitions
or invite protest?)

2. Evaluative judgments of the organization (Which organizational features are

important to recruit and retain employees? Which help secure customer
loyalty?)

3. Emotional commitment to the organization (How to motivate workers to go

the extra mile? How to create a sense of belonging when employees only
communicate online?)

4. Identity change (How to accommodate minority employees? How to secure

cooperation through an organizational merger?)
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 Leaders Can Define a Shared Identity

• Many companies use performance evaluations and incentives

that compare workers against each other, for instance, to
determine who receives a bonus or qualifies for promotion.

• This is generally seen as a legitimate and effective system to

motivate employees to work hard.

• However, the downside of such practices is that they foster

competition between individuals and emphasize their personal
identity, inviting people to think of themselves as individual
workers, instead of as parts of a larger team or organization.

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• An important challenge for leadership in cases such as
this is to help individual employees build and retain a
sense of identification with the team or organization.

• Indeed, employees are more inclined to follow the

guidance of leaders if they clearly support the
preferences of their own team members and protect
them against claims of other teams or organizational
members.

• Leaders who are able to do this well allow workers to

self-categorize at the group level instead of the
individual level.
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Intervening to Improve Intergroup Contact and Collaboration

• An important theme in social identity debates,

SIT shows how it can be used to improve
intergroup relations in a variety of contexts.
• In this context, the most effective idea is to
reduce prejudice against out-group members.
• This idea has been used for corporate
companies to merge.
• The way to encourage intergroup assistance
and cooperation is through training using SIT
principles. 29
• This training is provided in schools and
universities to improve intergroup relations.
• One of the challenges many schools and
universities face is the increasing diversity in
the student population.
• If we give an example to this diversity, we can
show the difference in the number of boys
and girls, different cultures, and the
distribution of male or female students
according to the department.

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