Social Identity Theory

Personal and Social Identity

People can conceive of themselves in many different ways, among which the most important distinction is between one's personal identity and one's social identity. Personal identity is a definition and evaluation of oneself in terms of idiosyncratic personal attributes (e.g., generous, honest) and/or one's personal relationships (e.g., X's friend, Y's lover). Social identity is a definition and evaluation of oneself in terms of the shared defining attributes of specific groups to which one belongs (e.g., being male, a nurse, African-American, Hindu). Personal identity is tied to the personal self, whereas social identity is tied to the collective self.

Salience

People have many social and personal identities that vary in how generally important they are and how frequently they are used—how chronically accessible they are to one's self-concept. The interplay of chronic self-conceptual accessibility, situational cues, and deliberate personal or group goals primes particular personal or social identities as a way to categorize oneself and other people. These social categorizations are then automatically used to make sense of the situation. If the social categorization seems to fit the ways that people differ in the context and to make sense of why people are behaving in the way they are, then that particular social categorization becomes psychologically salient. When a social categorization, self-conception, or identity is psychologically salient, it becomes real in the sense that it is one's subjective reality in that context. It is how one sees oneself and others, and it governs the way one perceives, thinks, feels, and behaves.

Prototypes

Social identity theory focuses on social identity. It argues that social identity is associated with group and intergroup behaviors (e.g., conformity, stereotyping, normative behavior, cohesion, intergroup discrimination) that are quite different from the interpersonal and personal behaviors associated with personal identity. People cognitively represent groups in terms of prototypes—these are complex (fuzzy) sets of interrelated attributes that simultaneously capture similarities within each group and differences between two groups. If one says “Norwegian,” then what comes immediately to mind is a prototype of that national group. Prototypes are mental constructs that maximize entitativity; that is, they enhance perceived similarity within each group and differences between each group in order to make the groups seem to be entities that are as clear and distinct as possible. The prototype of a group to which one belongs, an in-group, can therefore change as a function of which out-group one is comparing one's group with. In this way prototypes are context-specific rather than transcontextually invariant.

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