SL - The individual and the group - Social Identity Theory (SIT) Flashcards
Tajfel (1971)
Aim ->
Method ->
Tajfel had his participants - 14/15yo schoolboys - pick a favourite picture, which then acted as the basis for the groups to which they were allocated.
The boys then, on their own, had the chance to allocate points to other members of their group, alongside allocating points to members of the other group. The points would later be converted into money.
Results -> The boys tended to try to give as much as they could to members of their own group, although there was an element of fairness in their allocations. However, there were times when the boys would give a smaller number of points to one of their own if that meant that even less would be allocated to a member of the other group.
Conclusion -> Tajfel concluded that we tend to value relative success (‘beating’ others) more than we do absolute success (doing the best we can regardless of others). Group membership is one factor that affects our behaviour, making us tend towards ‘winning’ behaviours more than ‘achieving’ behaviours. It takes very little to make people start acting with a social identity (as a member of a group).
Evaluation ->
✔ Generalisability and validity -> Although the generalisability and validity are challenged, there are strong counterarguments against these concerns. Although the study only used boys, there has been a pilot study that used girls as well as boys, and the findings were similar to the main experiments, suggesting better generalisability than might be expected. The study also had good control (as it was a lab experiment), clear operationalization, and ‘counterbalancing’ (as the grids were randomly ordered for the participants). For this reason, the results are not as lacking in validity as the initial challenges to this study suggest.
✔ Supports/supported by SIT, CIaldini (1976), and Nass Fogg, and Moon (1996)
❌ Poor validity and generalisability -> This study was conducted in a laboratory and so it has low ecological validity. The task also has low mundane realism and low construct validity as it is unlikely that point-allocation genuinely measures inter-group attitudes and if it reflects discriminatory behaviour in the ‘real world’. In addition, there is low generalisability as the participants were all 14/15-year-old schoolboys.
❌ Ethical issues -> Was the deception regarding the boys’ belief about why they were allocated to a particular group justified?
Nass, Fogg and Moon (1996)
Aim ->
Method -> Ppts were told either that they were working as part of a team, interacting with a computer. Ppts were told that their performance was either going to be evaluated with the computer (interdependence condition) or separately from the computer (independence condition). Ppts then completed a desert survival problem, where the task required the ranking of various items in terms of how useful they might be in the case of crashing in the desert. They had to enter their rankings into their computer. Each computer was set up to offer a different set of rankings (designed so that it always re-ranked every ppt’s own rankings in exactly the same way), including a brief but neutral description of each item and how it might affect survival. It was made clear that the computer may not give the ‘right’ answers, and so ppts had to consider how useful the computer’s rankings might be. Ppts were given the chance to change their rankings if they wanted to. The amount by which ppts changed their rankings was treated as a measure of behavioural conformity.
Finally, ppts completed two questionnaires with scales, related to their interaction with, and attitudes towards, the computer. This was to determine the degree to which ppts considered themselves to be working with their computer.
Results -> Nass, Fogg & Moon found that the more strongly ppts felt themselves to be interdependent with their computer, the higher their reported team affiliation, the more cooperative they considered themselves to be, the better they considered the information from their computer to be, and the more conformity they showed to their computers’ rankings
Conclusion -> Overall, these results show that humans will form affiliations even with a computer, and will show similar patterns of behaviour as they do when affiliated with other people. This affects both attitudes and actions. When we feel part of a team, our attitudes to others changes. Specifically, we are more positive towards, trusting of, and cooperative with ingroup members.
Evaluation ->
✔
✔
❌
❌
Cialdini (1976)
aim ->
Method ->
Cialdini conducted several different studies relating to students’ willingness to identify with their university depending on whether their (American) football team had won or lost a match.
Results ->
Significantly more students were observed wearing university-branded clothing the Monday after a victory in a weekend game than after a loss. This suggested that students wanted to be associated with success rather than with failure.
Significantly more students who had been told that they’d done poorly in a phone ‘quiz’ about their university described a football team’s victory as ‘we’ than did students who’d been told they’d done well in the quiz. This suggested that associating with success is a way of boosting self-esteem.
Significantly more students used ‘we’ when describing a win than they had done when previously they’d had to describe a loss. This suggested that being connected to a losing team is experienced in the same way as a personal failure and that a self-esteem boost is then desirable
Conclusion ->
Overall, students tended to demonstrate their affiliation to a winning team more than to a losing team in a behavior termed ‘BIRGing’ (basking in reflected glory). This serves to boost self-esteem.
Evaluation ->
✔
✔
❌
❌
Social identity theory (SIT)
Proposed by Tajfel and Turner (1979)
There are three key processes within SIT (we refer to them as ‘processes’ rather than ‘stages’ because it’s hard to separate them out and there is a lot of overlap between them, with various other processes occurring at the same time):
1) Social categorisation - perceiving people in any given social setting to belong to different social groups (the in-group plus a number of out-groups).
2) Social identification - clarifying what it means to belong to one of these groups and adopting that group’s values and behaviours.
3) Social comparison - where one considers how the in-group compares to any given out-group on any relevant characteristic.
There are a few key ideas from SIT that are important to remember:
Self-esteem: we want to feel good about ourselves. Therefore, we will try to belong to groups that are positively viewed by others and/or we will try to improve the way others view the groups we belong to. The more our groups are valued, the better we feel about ourselves.
Positive distinctiveness: we want our social groups to come out on top of any other groups that we compare ours to. We want to be different and better.
Out-group homogeneity: it’s easier to engage in social identity processes if we assume that all members of any given out-group are very similar to each other.
Origin of conflict:
Groups are easier to make judgements about if we assume that everyone in them is the same. This is where stereotypes most clearly develop.
The more comparable the group (the more similar, local or socially relevant), the more pressure there is to establish positive distinctiveness, and the more likely it is that we will discriminate against members of the other group in order to create that positive difference.
When we have identified a group that we feel we belong to, we will automatically compare it to any other relevant groups that are present.
Conflict resolution:
Through education, we can help members of opposing groups either to understand how their group is not in competition with the other group (clarifying the group identities so that they’re no longer so comparable) or we can demonstrate that the two groups are so close that, in fact, they’re the same. Sherif achieved the latter in his study.
