Social Identity Theory

How People Represent Themselves: Personal and Social Identity

People have a repertoire of different ways to conceive of themselvesthey have many different identities that can be classified as personal identities or social identities. Personal identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of idiosyncratic personal attributes (e.g., witty, shy), or personal relationships (e.g., X's friend, Y's spouse). Social identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of the attributes of specific groups one belongs to (e.g., American, Democrat, nurse). Personal identity is tied to the personal self and associated with interpersonal or idiosyncratic individual behaviors; social identity is tied to the collective self and associated with group and intergroup behaviors.

Recently, Marilynn Brewer has argued that in some cultures, particularly more collectivist cultures, social identity rests more on people's networks of relations with one another within a group than on self-definition in shared attributes and is thus associated with the relational self.

How People Represent Groups: Categories and Prototypes

Human groups are social categories that people mentally represent as prototypes complex fuzzy sets of interrelated attributes (behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, customs, dress, and so forth) that capture similarities within groups and differences between groups. Prototypes represent attributes that maximize the group's entitativity the extent to which a group appears to be a distinct and clearly defined entity. Prototypes also maximize meta-contrast the ratio of differences between the group and other groups to differences within the group. One way to think of a group prototype is what comes immediately to mind if, for example, one were to say to you, “French,” “Republican” or “terrorist.”

Overwhelmingly, we make binary categorizations where one of the categories is the group that we are in, the ingroup. Thus, prototypes capture similarities within the ingroup and accentuate differences between our group and a specific out-group. Ingroup prototypes can therefore change when one compares one's group with a different outgroup. For this reason, prototypes are context-dependent. Generally speaking, however, group prototypes are not completely context-determined usually a core component is modified or qualified to varying degree by context. If a particular contextual change is enduring, the prototype changes more profoundly and more enduringly.

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