Social Identity Theory

Cards (10)

  • Social Identity Theory
    Competition and conflict aren't necessary for prejudice, SIT claims knowing another group exists that we do not belong to is enough to cause prejudice
  • Social categorisation
    Placing yourself and others into particular groups, your group is your in group and the others are the out group
  • Social identification
    • Associating yourself with the culture of your in group, to emphasise the membership you may change your behaviour or appearance to fit in.
    • If your in group does well/is successful then you feel good
  • Social comparison
    • To boost your self esteem you make your in group look better than your out group and perceive it to be superior (in group favouritism)
    • people can deliberately make the out group look bad via prejudice (out group discrimination)
  • Blue eyes brown eyes study
    Teacher told kids that brown eyed people were superior, instant prejudice formed between the two groups, supports SIT
  • Wetherell replication of Tajfel's study
    • Replicated Tajfel's study using children from New Zealand
    • Found that New Zealand Polynesian children favoured their out groups more
    • suggests social identity theory may be culture bound
  • Application of social identity theory
    team/band/brand t-shirts
  • Weakness of social identity theory
    Can't explain:
    • individual differences
    • the effect of competition over limited resources
    • may not be able to generalise it to all cultures (Wetherell's study 1982)
  • Who proposed social identity theory
    Tajfel and Turner
  • Support for social identity theory
    Tajfel et Al (1970)
    • 2 groups randomly formed by choosing their favourite painting (minimal groups)
    • in groups and out groups formed despite allocation being random
    • ppts asked to assign maximum/minimum points to every member of both groups
    • ppts demonstrated favouritism towards their group and discrimination to the other