Importance of Groups/Group Identity Flashcards
Social Identity Theory
- Personal and social identity in group situations
First used by Turner & Brown (1978) attempting to answer ‘Why do people in groups discriminate against each other?’ They suggested a need for positive social identity which requires them to establish a positively valued distinctiveness for their own group compared with other groups.
Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups which people belonged are an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group.
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. Tajfel and Turner (1986) further proposed that people strive to achieve or maintain a positive social identity (boosting self-esteem) and that this positive identity derives largely from favourable comparisons that can be made between the in-group and relevant out-groups.
Weaknesses of SIT
Brown (2000)
Five issues have proven problematic for Social Identity Theory:
1. the relationship between group identification and in-group bias
2. the self‐esteem hypothesis
3. positive – negative asymmetry in intergroup discrimination
4. the effects of intergroup similarity
5. the choice of identity strategies by low‐status groups.
Minimal Group Experiments
Tajfel and Billig (1974)
The Minimal Group Paradigm is a methodology employed in social psychology to investigate the minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur between groups.
The subjects were boys aged between 14 and 15 and were pupils of a state school in a suburb of Bristol. There were 48 subjects in all: 24 in the F Condition and 24 in the NF Condition. Two groups of subjects were tested: one group was made familiar with the social and physical setting of the experiment in a situation closely resembling the actual experiment, and came back for a second session in which the actual experiment was conducted; the second group came only for the actual experimental session.
The results clearly indicate that the “familiar” group engaged in more out-group discrimination than the “unfamiliar” one.
The Summer Camp Studies / Robbers cave
Sherif (1954, 1958, 1961)
Validated his realistic conflict theory.
Carried out 3 times, the field experiment involved two groups of twelve-year-old boys at Robber’s Cave State Park, USA.
Stage 1: establish groups
2 groups separately bonded and created an internal hierarchy , both adopted names and then became aware of the other group, heightening group affiliation and defensiveness over camp facilities.
Stage 2: Increase friction
2 groups placed in direct conflict for a team trophy and prizes, began to establish territory and created flags, derogatory songs were chanted to each other, escalated to flag burning, when a group won the competition, the losing group raided their camp, stealing medals and prizes (knives)
Stage 3: Integration phase
First stage of reconciliation, get-to-know activities failed and resulted in a food fight.
Super-ordinate goals cannot be achieved without collaboration, drinking-water issue could only be resolves together. Resulted in reduced tensions and transport home was shared.
Group identity was beyond utility function, burning flags doesn’t gain anything for the team?
SIT - Social Categorisation
We divided the world into “them” and “us” based through a process of social categorisation. Group division produces new cognitive scheme of the world. Categorises super-imposed onto otherwise undifferentiated people. Peoples feelings about themselves and others becomes organised around cognitive labels and partition arises emphasising in-group similarity and out-group difference.
SIT - Social Identification
The basis of self-definition changes within a group. Personal identity gives way to social identity. Groups also offer the possibility of a new identity, we can suddenly become members of a group and become someone who embodies characteristics of that group instead of having individual characteristics.
Groups don’t have to be bad, they just provide a sense of belonging (eg. Students, British Citizens, Females etc). We can be many things at once and our sense of self/what we are can change.
SIT - Social Comparison
Once we have categorised ourselves as part of a group and have identified with that group we then tend to compare that group with other groups. If our self-esteem is to be maintained our group needs to compare favourably with other groups.
Self-esteem tied to our group identity is also attached to the position in our group and other groups. Comparisons are made between groups and value differences are established between groups.Social comparisons between groups are focused on establishing in-group distinctiveness. But does this require out-group hostility?
This is critical to understanding prejudice, because once two groups identify themselves as rivals, they are forced to compete in order for the members to maintain their self-esteem. Competition and hostility between groups is thus not only a matter of competing for resources (like in Sherif’s Summer Camp Study) like jobs but also the result of competing identities.
Outcomes of SIT
If our group identity is low status and not helping our self-esteem, there are cognitive alternatives/strategies:
- accept low status and neg. identity, regard the subordination as legitimate
- we may attempt too move to more privileged groups, not always plausible (i.e. race)
- social change belief structure, push for change for the whole group rather than individual members trying to exit (i.e. LGBTQ)
Summer Camp A02
The events at Robbers Cave mimicked the kinds of conflict that plague people all over the world. The simplest explanation for this conflict is competition. Assign strangers to groups, throw the groups into competition, stir the pot, and soon there is conflict. There is a lot of evidence that when people compete for scarce resources (e.g. jobs, land etc.) there is a rise in hostility between groups. For example, in times of high unemployment there may be high levels of racism among white people who believe that black people (or asylum seekers) have taken their jobs. The study was a field experiment which means it has high ecological validity.
However, the Robbers Cave study has been criticized on a number of issues. For example, the two groups of boys in the study were artificial, as was the competition, and did not necessarily reflect real life. For example, middle class boys randomly assigned into two separate groups is not rival inner city gangs, or rival football supporters.
Ethical issues must also be considered. The participants were deceived, as they did not know the true aim of the study. Also, participants were not protected from physical and psychological harm.
Nor should the results be generalized to real life because the research used only 12 year old white middle class boys and excluded, for example, girls and adults. The sample was biased.
Real world application for Minimal Group Paradigm
Rubin, M., Paolini, S., & Crisp, R. J. (2010).
Researchers have recently applied minimal group methodology to investigate prejudice against migrants.
The researchers created two hypothetical groups, ‘Group A’ and ‘Group B’. Group assignment was random. The members of the groups were all hypothetical people, and therefore, they had no distinguishable differences. The researchers then chose some members of each group at random to leave their original group and join the opposite group; these members were referred to as migrants. Participants then rated each group member on a seven-point Likert scale for favourability.
Migrants were rated as significantly less favourable than non-migrants. Participants rated their own group higher on the positive traits and lower on the negative traits. The findings also showed that raters perceived higher variability among their own group’s negative traits as well as the out-group’s positive traits. The ratings showed that participants viewed their own group more positively as well as more diverse than the out-group.
Elaborated Social Identity Theory
The Battle of Westminster
Reicher (1996).
Group actions change individual identities, including how the out-group perceives us -
Weakness: SIT explains very little about what contributes to our collective group beliefs. How predictive is SIT? Or better at explaining afterwards?
Strength: SIT explains conflict in terms of psychologically normal processes. This gets away from the pathology models of authoritarianism.
Complimentary to the self-categorisation theory, unusual to how other theories stand.
Self-categorisation theory
Turner, et al (1994).
The SCT explains the shift from “I/Me” to “We/Us”.
We have many social identities (gender, occupation, nationality…) some of which may feel more salient at a specific moment than others. [This is an early stage of SIT.]
