Social identity and group Flashcards
Lecture 11
Personal esteem and group esteem
Self-esteem and group esteem are related. The groups we belong to (and relationships) are essential to feeling good about ourselves.
But they are not identical.
You can feel good about yourself, but not about (some of) your groups.
You can feel good about your groups; but not about yourself.
Motivated to join groups: the need to belong
Baulmeister and Leary posited that people join groups simply because they have basic, core, need to belong.
- Being excluded has strong negative effects on our psychological wellbeing.
- Being included has strong positive effects on our psychological wellbeing.
- Nearly all people at all times throughout history have sought out others and formed groups.
Ostracism effect:
- Anger.
- Sadness.
- Perceiving life as less meaningful.
- Loss of control (leads to anti-social behaviour).
When people feel lonely, they are especially likely to want to join groups.
Motivated to join groups: defining ourselves and self-esteem
Social identity theory:
- People determine who they are in part by the groups they belong to.
- Social identities play an important role in defining ourselves (when our groups are challenges or attacked, it is thus an attack on the self).
- They highly shape wha is moral/immoral, real and not real.
- They provide us with pride and self-esteem.
- This is both at a collective level and at a personal level.
- Without groups, we wouldn’t really be able to know who we are.
Research has found that after criticising another group (or writing positively about one’s own group), people’s self-esteem tends to raise.
People align more with groups that are doing well - people wear more shirts in support of their favourite teams if they have won compared to if they have lost.
Motivated to join groups: sociometer theory
Forming groups is essential to survival: humans are saferin groups, which has an obvious evolutionary benefit.
Humans have a ‘sociometer’ which acts as a guage to determine if we are effectively immersed enough with others/have enough belonging.
This gauge is self-esteem: if the gauge is low then it triggers us to find social relationships and groups.
But, we only need so many of these, at a certain point the gauge is full and we need not continue.
Motivated to join groups: terror management theory
People are motivated to achieve a sense of permanence and immortality.
Groups provide people with a sense of symbolic immortality and a sense of self-esteem (which is a marker of symbolic immortality).
If you contribute to something that outlives theself, than you gain symbolic immortality.
Morality salience in experiments has been found to:
- Increase the humannes people attribute to their own group.
- Increase people’s desire for close relationships.
- Increase people’s motivation to join groups.
- Increase support for people who uphold the values of the gorup, and increased desire to punish those who do not.
When the norms/values associated with one’s culture/group are threatened, death thought accessibility increases.
Motivated to join groups: uncertainty-identity theory
This theory posits that people join groups to reduce uncertainty.
Social identity theory argues it is really about uncertainty reduction (self-esteem is not the motive; self-esteem is the outcome of groups reducing uncertainty).
They also argue that morality salience has the effects it has due to it eliciting uncertainty (and the motive to join groups that morality thoughts cause is just really to reduce uncertainty).
Motivated to join groups: meaning maintenance model
Posits that all threats - morality thoughts, self-esteem being diminished, uncertainty, etc. - all boil down to a disruption to expections and sense making.
What most motivates people is meaning, by which these authors mean having schemas and expections that are reliable, predictable and make sense.
Studies show that a lot of the other motivations to join groups are elicited by things like viewing absurt art, or reading a story with no ending.
In-groups and out-groups
People tend to show an increadibly strong preference for their own groups over out-groups - this is a virtual axiom in social psychology.
This includes allocation of resources, voting decisions, overall positive/negative views, who parents want their children to marry, and even the humanness people attribute to a person.
Secondary emotions are things that people perceive of as unique to humans: love, nostalgia, guilt.
People rate members of their own groups as higher on these emotions than members of out-groups (this is not the case for emotions people believe to be shared with animals).
Viki and Pina (2006) found that this extends to a large list of traits and not just emotions.
That is, people think uniquely human triats (or more descriptive of humans vs animals) are more prevalent in in-groups than out-groups.
More direct comparisons between out-group members and animals also occur.
These increase in times of conflict.
In-group heterogeneity effect
The in-group is perceived as being varies; the out-group is perceive of as being the same.
One out-group member represents the entire group more than one in-group member represents the entire group.
Brewer:
In group-bias can either mean:
- A love of the in-group and no negative views of the outgroup.
- A love of the ingroup and really negative views of the outgroup.
- Anything in between those that leads to liking the ingroup more than the outgroup.
In normal conditions, ingroup love is not that related to outgroup hatred.
But, these factors increase the chances of outgroup hate occurring:
- Perceived threat:
- Relative/deprivation/social comparison: the outgroup has more than it deserves.
- Realistic conflict: there are limited resources; I must favour my group/people.
- Belief in moral superiority (we are right, you are wrong; we can’t both be right).
- Distrust.
Forming groups
If we have all these psychological needs satisfied by group members, then it makes sense that we would be motivated to form groups.
Indeed, in the absence of existing groups memberships, people are remarkably quick to not only form groups, but to then favour those groups.
Minimal group paradigm:
Researchers invite individuals into lab.
They split people based up on some physical characteristics, or some shared interest or trait, or on something very vague (like being a ‘grounded’ thinker).
This work showed that people would favour others who they have not even met if groups were formed on these characteristics.
Often these groups are actually created by random number generators.
Even when these groups were computer generated and based on (basically) nothing, participants still favoured the people in their own novel group.
These people had no interaction prior to the study and did not know each other.
These people were not grouped on anything really but randomness, though they thought there was a reaon.
Minimal group limitations:
- Ecological validity: groups are not formed in this way in real life (but this is kind of the point - even if groups are made on more substantial grounds, it is really interesting how quick people are to cling to any group).
- Are these entirely ‘minimal’ groups? They are still formed based on something (what if it was all computer/randomly generated and the participants knew this. Would they still favours the ingroup?
Behaving in a group
Groups can create ‘deindividuation’.
When self-awareness is lost, people can be more prone to anti-social behaviour:
- Swept up in the moment.
- Also less likely to get caught or held responsible in many cases (or to think you are).
- High levels of mimicry of others in a situation.
Thinking in a group
“Risky shift” - groups tend to make riskier decisions than individuals.
Group polarisation effect:
- If discussing an outgroup with your own group, it tends to create an even stronger negative view of the outgroup.
- The average leaning of individuals is maximised and intensified when discussing things in a group.
Ingroups and moral reasoning
Moral foundations theory: morality can be split into harm, fairness, purity, in group and authority.
Harm: did someone get hurt in some way.
Fairness: was everyone treated equally; no one was exploited.
Ingroup: did you betray the group? did you put yourself above the group?
Authority: was legit authority followed? did you fulfil your role?
Purity: was is degrading, humilitating, or disgusting? was it virtuous?
Right wing people tend to rely more on ingroup authority and purity than left wing people.
Left wing people tend to rely more on fairness and harm than right wing people.
Crowd behaviour
Emergent norm theory:
- Non-normative behaviour develops in crowds due to new norms that form.
- The people who are most salient in a crowd shape the new norms.
Floyd Allport:
- Argued that groups simply intensify individuals behaviour.
- The behaviour that ensues in a crowd is just an amplification of the tendencies of the people in the crowd.
- The more like minded the crowd, the more dangerous (or positive) actions this can create.
Contagion theory (Lebond, 1885):
- Crowds (and groups when together) change the individual.
- A person might act in a group/crowd in ways that they would not act alone.
- The ‘hive mind’ develops in crowds and groups.
- Thinking as a group instrad of an individual is dangerous.
- Behaviour/choices will often be decided by the noisiest, most outspoken distruptive member of the crowd or group.
- Anonymity can reduce the effects of anxiety in terms of considering the consequences.
- people get swept up in the group.
Consensus/norms
Simply altering the number of people others think hold a viewpoint alters a persons own viewpoint.
Also think about being in a new situation, how would you act?
- You might rely on existing norms you know going into the situation.
- You probably look around to see how others are acting.
How others act gives you the ‘license’ (permission) on how to act or think yourself as well as the guidelines for how to act/think.
Of course, people will tend to downplay how influences they are by groups, as people tend to downplay how much they are influenced by social forces (alone in a crowd of sheep effect).
