Identity Salience

Perceptual Salience

The study of how we notice, process, store, and draw upon information about people is social cognition or the study of social or person perception. One well-substantiated finding in this literature is that perceptually distinctive information catches our attention—for example, one man in a group of women, one Republican in a group of Democrats, a person who is taller than everyone else, and so forth. There is an adaptive reason for this. Humans have a limited cognitive capacity to process information, and so we have evolved to pay most attention to and think most carefully about things that are outside the “ordinary”—that are figural against the background of the immediate situation or the broader context of everyday life and experience. At the most basic evolutionary level, people need to consider and understand contextually distinctive stimuli to know whether those stimuli pose a danger—a sudden movement in the bushes, is it a lion about to pounce?

One interesting implication of this is David Hamilton's notion of illusory correlation based on paired distinctiveness. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, Hamilton and his colleagues were able to show that people tended to overestimate the correlation between distinctive human attributes and distinctive human groups. The clear implication for how we subjectively construct others’ identities is that undesirable human attributes (which are cognitively [Page 370]distinctive because they are both perceptually rare and they signal possible danger) tend to be paired with minority groups (numerically or experientially distinctive)—leading to, or reinforcing, unfavorable stereotypes of minorities.

Social Identity Theory

Researchers studying social cognition tend to focus mainly on salience as perceptual distinctiveness—salience is something “out there.” Proponents of social identity theory, originating in the work of Henri Tajfel and John Turner, focus on salience as a psychological state of mind—something “in here”—that is associated with self-conception and identity-related behavior.

For social identity theorists, people's overall conceptualization of self, of who they are, is textured and compartmentalized into more or less discrete self-conceptions grounded in idiosyncratic personality attributes (kind, inquisitive, trustworthy, etc.) and specific relationships with others (brother, friend, wife, etc.) that define one's personal identities and group memberships (American, engineer, Muslim, etc.) that define one's social identities. People do not experience themselves in totality but rather through the lens of the particular self-conception or identity that is psychologically salient in a particular context.

Social identity theory is primarily a theory of how people's conception of who they are is associated with their membership of social groups and categories and with group and intergroup behaviors. The focus is on social identity rather than personal identity. It argues that people mentally represent social groups and identities as complex fuzzy sets of related attributes (behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, customs, dress, etc.), called prototypes, which capture similarities among members of the group and differences from relevant outgroups. Prototypes describe group attributes. Prototypes of one's own group, ingroup prototypes, are also prescriptive—telling one how one should and ought to behave as a group member.

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