Community Action

Collective Identity as a Community Member

There is wide agreement in social psychology that a person's sense of who he or she is (that is, his or her sense of identity) varies with the social context. A key distinction has been made between individual identity (“I” or “me”) and collective identity (“we” or “us”). Whereas a person's individual identity derives from a set of personal features that distinguish him or her from other individuals (“I am female, a New Yorker, a lesbian, a lawyer, and I like French cuisine”), a person's collective identity is based on features that he or she shares with other (but not all other) individuals in a given social context such as gender (women), city of residence (New Yorkers) or sexual orientation (lesbians). In other words, in contrast to individual identity, which is self-definition as a unique individual, collective identity represents a self-definition as an interchangeable group member.

Salient Principles of Collective Identity

A person can have many different collective identities depending on the number of communities or groups to which he or she belongs. However, not all of these collective identities are salient at the same time. Which specific collective identity moves into the psychological foreground is a joint function of personal variables and more immediate social and contextual variables. For example, depending on a person's unique prior experiences or life history, his or her membership in one specific community (the community of race or ethnicity, for example) may be more important than the membership in another community (such as city of residence). As a result, the person is more ready to define himor herself in terms of membership in the former community than in the latter community. (“First and foremost I am black.”) Collective identity salience also depends on the immediate social context because defining oneself as a member of a particular [Page 240]community is more meaningful or fits better in some contexts than in others. For example, categorization in terms of ethnic group membership fits better when white and black students discuss issues of white privileges than when they are discussing issues of abortion. In the former case, students are particularly likely to define themselves in terms of their collective white or black identity, and this tendency will be further intensified if students of their own race are outnumbered by students of the other race, so that their race is particularly distinctive in the immediate social context.

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