Self-Categorization Theory

Self-categorization theory addresses the problem of the psychological group. Are there such things as psychological groups? How do they form? How is a collection of individuals able to act, think, and feel as a group, collectively, as if, in the extreme, the group members shared a common mind? It is taken for granted that human beings are individual persons, that they have unique personalities and differ from other individuals, but it is also known that they belong to social groups and that these social groups can have a psychological reality for their members. People do not just describe others as belonging to groups, they describe themselves as groups (not as if they were groups, but as groups). They talk about “we” and “us” as well as “I” and “me”; they act under the right circumstances in a highly uniform, consensual, unified way as a crowd, a nation, an army, a mob, an audience, and so on; they experience collective emotions and feelings and share similar attitudes, beliefs, and values. Can people be or become a group, psychologically, subjectively, in terms of their identities, perceptions, feelings, beliefs, motives, and so on? Or is it just an illusion because people are really, fundamentally, nothing but individuals?

Self-categorization theory, in contrast to a popular point of view in North American social psychology, asserts that human beings are and are able to act as both individual persons and social groups. The theory [Page 793]assumes that a person might act as a unique personality in one context, but display collective similarities as a group member in another. Human beings are very good at varying the degree to which they act in terms of either individual differences or collective similarities, and the theory tries to explain how such flexibility is possible.

Self-categorization theory explains individuality and group behavior (and the relationship between them) in terms of the way that people define and perceive themselves. Like many other theories, it focuses on what is called the self-concept, the collection of identities, definitions, descriptions, categories, concepts, and so on, that people use to define and experience themselves, the self-categories that people use to answer the question, who am I? or who are we? Like other theories, the theory assumes that people define themselves differently in different situations and that the way they categorize themselves will influence how they will react to that situation. For example, you may react very differently to a news story about the criminal behavior of a young child if you think of yourself as a police officer rather than as a parent. Self-categorizing is simply the process whereby a person defines the self in terms of varying kinds of “I,” “me,” “we,” or “us” categories such as “the real me,” or “me as opposed to you,” or “we Australians compared with you Americans” or “us Earth people as opposed to you alien Martians.” Nearly all theories before self-categorization theory tended to assume that the self-concept was basically, primarily, or predominantly about defining the person as a unique individual being, that it revolved around ways of defining I or me. Self-categorization theory holds that people see themselves at different levels, of which the individual level is only one. In particular, it makes a distinction between personal and social identity.

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