Identity, Social

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Social identity is defined as an individual’s identification with others. In contrast, the concept of personal identity can be understood as an individual’s identity apart from others. At the same time, social identity and personal identity are clearly related. Furthermore, whereas individuals are usually thought to have a single personal identity, they have many social identities associated with the many different collections of other individuals with whom they identify. These different collections of other individuals are usually thought of as social groups, though there are different ways to understand the idea of a social group, explain its boundaries, and account for the attachment individuals have to social groups. For example, individuals might identify with others by race, gender, nationality, and religion (very large social groups or social categories), with those in their workplaces and communities (intermediate size social groups), and with friends and family members (small social groups). In all cases, social identity provides a social basis for how individuals see them-selves—a sense of self or self-image —that depends on their seeing themselves as being much like a reflection of those others with whom they identify.

There are two broad approaches to understanding social identity: the social identity approach (particularly in the form of self-categorization theory) and the sociological approach to identity (Hogg, Terry, and White 1995). The social identity approach derives principally from the work of Henri Tajfel and John Turner, who explain social identity in terms of the individual’s knowledge that he or she belongs to certain social groups, combined with the emotional and value significance this membership imparts. Self-categorization theory concerns the cognitive processes by which individuals come to identify with others and embrace membership in social groups. In experimental research, individuals exhibit in-group favoritism and out-group biases for arbitrarily constructed social identities. This can be understood as an “accentuation effect” of group membership, whereby once individuals believe a particular social category applies to them, they perceptually “accentuate” both the similarities among stimuli falling within that category and the differences between stimuli from that and other categories (Tajfel 1959). Tajfel argued that the accentuation effect helps explain such phenomena as stereotyping, prejudice, and ethnocentrism.

The sociological approach to identity derives from the symbolic interactionist thinking of George Mead, and assumes there to be a reciprocal relation between the self and society or between the self and individuals’ social identities (Stryker 1980). Social groups are seen as being structured in terms of different roles, and individuals accordingly have different types of relationships to social groups depending on the roles they occupy in those groups (Stets and Burke 2000). Roles can be paired with counter-roles (such as parent and child), or in more complicated group and institutional settings (such as in business firms) where roles are more highly differentiated, they can exhibit a variety of interconnections with one another. On the assumption that there is a reciprocal relation between the self and society, roles are subject to interpretation and negotiation, while at the same time individuals generally seek to match their own self-conceptions or self-images with social expectations of their roles. Thus, whereas social identity theory focuses on in-group and out-group relationships with respect to particular social groups, the sociological approach focuses on how individuals’ social identity relationships are structured and negotiated within social groups.

Neither the social identity approach nor the sociological approach to identity pays significant attention to the relationship between social identity and personal identity. Yet the meaning of social identity as “identification with others” implies that there is a separate someone who identifies with others, and thus that individuals have an identity apart from or over and above their social identification with others. Also, the idea that an individual has many social identities implies some concept of personal identity, if only because it assumes the existence of a single subject to whom those multiple identities belong. Thus, the concepts of social identity and personal identity are related to one another, and need ultimately to be explained jointly to give a full understanding of either concept. Unfortunately, little has been done to develop this more comprehensive kind of explanation.

SEE ALSO Collective Wisdom; Communication; Gender; Groups; Groupthink; Identification, Racial; Identity; Identity Matrix; Mead, George Herbert; Prejudice; Race; Role Theory; Self-Classification; Self-Identity; Social Cognitive Map; Social Psychology; Society; Sociology; Symbols

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hogg, Michael A., Deborah J. Terry, and Katherine M. White. 1995. A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory. Social Psychology Quarterly 58 (4): 255–269.

Stets, Jan E., and Peter J. Burke. 2000. Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory. Social Psychological Quarterly 63 (3): 224–237.

Stryker, Sheldon. 1980. Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings.

Tajfel, Henri. 1959. Quantitative Judgment in Social Perception. British Journal of Psychology 50: 16–29.

John B. Davis