Social Identity Theory
Social Identity Theory
Introduction
People's behaviour in groups is fascinating and frequently disturbing. As soon as humans are bunched together in groups, they would start behaving similarly. One minute is all that is required to create an opinion and categorize others according to what they perceived is right.
Definition
SIT is defined as "the individual's knowledge" of personal membership in specific social groups, together with the "emotional value and significance" placed on such membership by the individual (Tajfel, 1982).
SIT proposes the process of categorizing oneself as a group member gives an individual's behaviour a distinct meaning, creating a positively valued social identity. Therefore when an individual is interacting with another person, they will not act as a single individual but rather as a representative of the group.
Issues of Social Identity Theory
The three issues of SIT namely are personal identity, social perception and stereotyping.
People have personal identity which makes them unique. Personal identity refers to something about being an individual without reference to a larger group. For example, being the best employee of the month.
Social perception refers to the categorization of behaviour among a certain group. It explains how we perceived others. This social perception to form and maintain the social identity is influenced by three activities: categorization, homogenization and differentiation.
This process shows how perception occurs among people which include categorizing people, forming homogeneous images of people within those groups. Racist and sexist discrimination is inevitable such as the case of females working as engineers.
Quoted by Crump, Logan and McIlroy (2007), female discrimination is referring to “there was an obvious gendering of the workforce with most technical...
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