SELF AS GROUP MEMBER Flashcards
Compared to relationships with parents, the effect of childhood friendships on adult
attachment style is?
a. not at all important
b. less important
c. equally important
d. more important
c. equally important
Social Identity Theory
What are Personal identities?
self-aspects that make a person unique
(ex. personality)
Social Identity Theory
What are Social identities?
self-aspects based on group membership
- The more a person values a group, the more strongly they identify with it
(race, ethnicity, or smth we choose: our major)
Explain the three Cognitive Processes in Social Identity Formation?
- Social categorization
- Social identification
- Social comparison
- Social categorization: People automatically categorize themselves and others into social groups
* E.g. race, ethnicity, gender - Social identification: Once people categorize themselves as part of a group, they adopt the identity of that group
* Self-stereotyping: a person adopts the values and norms of the group
* Creates an emotional bond with other in-group members (have smth in common) - Social comparison: People make automatic comparisons between groups and do so in a way that tends to be favourable to their in-group
* In-group favouritism and outgroup bias
What is self stereotyping?
a person adopts the values and norms of the group
Explain the Minimal Group Paradigm study?
- Assigned a group randomly:
- Coin toss, or painting preference
In a subsequent resource allocation task, participants tend to allocate more resources to in-group members than out-group members
Suggests that:
* People readily identify with a social group
* Group categorization, even if based on meaningless criteria, tends to trigger in-group favouritism
Explain how Identity Salience Depends on Context?
- Personal identity is more salient when interacting with in-group members
- Social identity/ in-group identity is more salient when interacting with out-group
members, especially in an inter-group context- Leads people to think and behave in ways that are consistent with the norms of their in-group
What is the Outgroup Homogeneity Effect?
People tend to perceive out-group
members as more similar to each other and
in-group members as more diverse
Explained by the context shifts in the
salience of people’s identities (we are more likely to interact with ingroups)
- People tend to behave more similarly to their in-group in intergroup contexts
- The other group perceives this similarity in behaviour and concludes that the rival group members are all similar to each other
How does the Outgroup Homogeneity Effect function?
Steps:
- Context we are with ingroup
- The group identity is Salient
- We tend to follow group norms more closely
- Outgroup perceives ingroup members as highly similar
Why Do We Identify with Groups?
- Evolutionary perspective
In our evolutionary past, humans were in competition for resources so it was useful to form groups to increase safety and secure resources
- Implies that in-group favourtism is a result of competition between groups for resources
Why Do We Identify with Groups?
- Self-Enhancement Function
- Individuals gain personal self-esteem from associating with a successful/ positive
group
Leads to:
* Elevating the in-group over the out-group by focusing on positive qualities and achievements of the in-group
* Devalue positive qualities and achievements of an out-group
We feel good about ourselves when our group is valuable
What is Basking in Reflected Glory? (Study)
Field study on several American university
campuses
- Recorded what clothing students were wearing the Monday after a big football match played against a rival university
- Asked students’ opinion about their team’s performance
Results:
* Students were more likely to wear clothing associated with their university if their university team won the football match
* More likely to use first person pronouns (“we”) if the team won and more likely to use third person pronouns (“they”) if the team lost
TO SUM: To maintain strong self-esteem, people tend to closely associate themselves with a group when it is successful and establish distance from a group when it fail
What do threats to self lead to?
Threat to self led to prejudicial attitude against outgroup member (ex. Jewish
job candidate)
How might we use prejudice to increase self esteem?
- Threat to self led to prejudicial attitudes which increased self-esteem
- Suggests that prejudice partly stems from a desire to restore self-integrity
What is the other implication for self enhancing our groups?
Status improvement
Self-enhancement will generally motivate people to maintain/gain status for their group
* Higher-status group members are motivated to maintain status quo
- Lower-status group members are motivated to improve their status
* How they accomplish this depends on the permeability of group boundaries
* i.e. to what extent is it possible to change group (ex. white passing/ SES)
If group boundaries are impermeable…
Impermeability of group boundaries results in strong identification with the group
Can’t change it, so might as well identify with it
What happens when group boundaries cannot be permeated?
- Social creativity
- Social competition
- Social creativity: Lower-status group members will modify their perception of their in-group’s standing
- Adopt dimensions of comparison that emphasize the positivity of the in-group
- e.g. Placing value on kindness and humor rather than money and power
- ***OR: Downward comparison with a different out-group in order to make the current standing of the in-group appear more positive
- Social competition: Lower-status group members band together and advocate for reducing the status difference between group
If group boundaries are permeable…
Individual mobility: Lower-status group
members seek to individually transfer into the higher-status group
- i.e. individual will focus more on their personal identity and accomplishments and distance themselves from their group membership
What strategy is most likely for a low-
status group when group boundaries are
highly impermeable?
a. Collective action to challenge the status hierarchy
b. Individual mobility, as people switch to higher-status groups
c. Avoiding attempts to change their group’s status
d. Cooperating with high status groups to maintain the status quo
a. Collective action to challenge the status hierarchy
What is a Token?
When a high-status group takes in an individual member from a lower-status group
* Being a token leads to heightened awareness of how one is different from the group they’ve been accepted into
* Consistent with distinctiveness theory
- Creates added performance pressure and can have cognitive consequences
Cognitive Consequences of Being a Token (explain the study)?
Participants led to believe that they were sharing their opinions on everyday
topics with three other students via video (actually videotaped confederates)
Experimental manipulation:
* Token: other students are all of a different gender than the participant (ex. woman assigned with 3 men)
* Non-token: other students are all the same gender as the participant
- Tested memory for this interaction
- Received a list of opinions and had to identify whose opinion belonged to who
FOUND:
Tokens had poorer memory for the interaction than non-tokens
* Remembered fewer of the opinions that they had expressed and fewer of the opinions that others had expressed
What are the implications of the tokenism study?
Being a token may shift attention to self-presentation concerns and away from the task at hand leading to disrupted cognitive processing
* Impairments to cognitive processing shown in the absence of differential treatment
Implications for organizations:
* Increasing the number of minority members in an organization should reduce their self- consciousness, decrease pressure, and improve cognitive processing
Why Do We Identify with Groups?
- Uncertainty reduction
- Individuals seek to gain certainty about themselves and the world
- Identifying with a group accomplishes this goal by prescribing group norms and offering a framework for how one should be and how to understand others
Prototypicality
What is a Prototype?
in-group’s central characteristics, values, and norms for behaviour
Prototypicality
What is Prototypical members?
people that are most representative of the
in-group prototype
Prototypicality
What is Peripheral members?
less typical of the in-group
How is Prototypicality and Self-Certainty related?
Being a peripheral member of an important group leads to experiencing self-uncertainty
- Motivates greater conformity to in-group norms in order to become more prototypical and gain greater self-certainty
(conform more to be closer to prototypicality)
Study: Does feeling peripheral in a group increase self-uncertainty?
Recruited American participants
* Completed a test assessing artistic vs scientific personality
Experimental manipulation:
* Peripheral: Participant’s score is closer to the French average than American average
* Prototypical: Participant’s score is closer to the American average than French
average
- Measured self-uncertainty
FOUND:
Peripheral participants experienced more self-uncertainty than prototypical
participants
- This should motivate them to identify more with their in-group and behave in a
more prototypical way
Study: Does self-uncertainty increase in-group favouritism in peripheral members?
American Uni students
Told to either write three facts that make u certain / uncertain
Completed a personality test and all students got the same personality feedback
* Prototypical: Profile is similar to other students’ at your university
* Peripheral: Profile is more similar to students at a rival university
Then Evaluated essays about students’ views of their university (positive / negative)
FOUND:
- For peripheral participants, high self-uncertainty led to more in-group
bias, but self-certainty did not
- For prototypical participants, self-uncertainty did not affect in-group
bias
(so in group bias only effects peripheral students with self-uncertainty)
What are the implication of self-uncertainty for in-group favouritism?
- Sometimes peripheral members may identify with an important in-
group more strongly than more prototypical members- As an attempt to gain self-certainty
- This reasoning has been used to explain why extreme groups and
behaviour are attractive to some people- Extremist groups provide a certain, very clear, and prescriptive direction /norms for the self
Jordan recently joined an environmental advocacy group but feels like a peripheral member because they are not
yet well-integrated into the group’s activities. As a result, Jordan experiences self-uncertainty about their place in
the group. Based on the uncertainty reduction function of group identification, what behavior is Jordan most likely to engage in?
a. Jordan will strongly conform to the groups norms and values to become a more prototypical member and gain self certainty
b. Jordan will distance themselves from the group to reduce the discomfort of self - uncertainty
c. Jordan will attempt to redefine the groups core identity to better align with their personal beliefs
d. Jordan will maintain their peripheral status without making any changes, as self uncertainty has little impact on group behvaiour
a. Jordan will strongly conform to the groups norms and values to become a more prototypical member and gain self certainty
In summary, which Factors Determine Identification with a Group?
- Importance of the group
- Social context
- Status and permeability of group boundaries
- Prototypicality
