Social Identity Theory

Social identity theory states that a person’s sense of who they are base on their group membership(s). It originates from the research of Henri Tajfel. There are four main processes involved:

• People have a natural tendency to divide into conflicting groups.
• Our sense of who we are is based on membership of groups e.g. your job, what team you support, and this affects self-esteem.
• We make comparisons, and these are biased towards in-groups, and against out-groups.
• We like our groups to be distinctive from and superior to other groups.

So we divide the world up into ‘them and us’, we bind up our own identity with that of our group, and we make biased judgements in favour of that group. If we perceive that our own group is not different enough or superior enough we try to change that, either by helping our own group, or acting against the outgroup.

Tajfel believed that stereotyping is a normal cognitive process – we tend to group things together. In doing so, we tend to exaggerate the similarities of things within the group, and exaggerate the differences between groups. When applied to people, it leads to a group mentality. Prejudice comes about because for self-esteem to be maintained, our group needs to compare favourably with other groups. Once two groups identify themselves as rivals they are forced to compete in order for the members to maintain their self-esteem.

Tajfel’s work has made him the most influential social psychologist of the present day. The idea that our sense of self is in large part based on group membership has been fully adopted by mainstream social psychology.

However, SIT’s view of self-esteem as based on group membership seems simplistic, given the importance of other factors such as our skills, appearance and abilities. Rubin & Hewstone (1998) failed to find experimental support for the idea that intergroup discrimination elevates self-esteem or that low self-esteem motivates discrimination.

Authoritarian Personality Theory

Authoritarian Personality Theory

The idea of the Authoritarian Personality (AP) was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War, as Adorno and colleagues (1950) tried to explain the attraction of Fascism to certain types of people. Strongly influenced by Psychoanalysis as well as by the character and childhood histories of Hitler and other prominent Fascists and Nazis, the AP theory suggests that a harsh upbringing can lead to a warped personality that values authority very highly. This means not just that they will try to dominate others, but that they value the authorities e.g. government, church and despise anyone who is non-conventional.

The AP theory explains prejudice in that these character traits predict one's potential for fascist and antidemocratic leanings and behaviour. Therefore is explains prejudice mainly as an individual trait rather than as a force in society.

Adorno et al devised a personality scale called the F-Scale which measured attitudes towards authority, work, honour, sexuality and even the occult, asking for opinions on statements like, "People can be divided into two distinct classes: the weak and the strong". People who scored highly were said to have several key attributes, including:

• Conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional values.
• Authoritarian Submission: submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities.
• Authoritarian Aggression: tendency to condemn & reject outgroups.
• Power and "Toughness": preoccupation with the dominance-submission, leader-follower dimension.
• Destructiveness and Cynicism: generalized hostility, vilification of the human.
• Sex: exaggerated concern with sexual "goings-on."

Later research by Altemeyer et al (1981) found that only the first three of these traits reliably correlate.

The theory become highly popular and well known, but soon began to be rejected by the scientific community (Scott, 1992). The F-Scale was shown to be unreliable, suffering from an ‘acquiescence response set’ – where people are more likely to agree than disagree with questionnaire questions. As all questions were phrased in such a way that an ‘agree’ answer was associated with a higher F-score, it may be that some participants just agreed to most or all without much thought.

The theory itself provided a description of a supposed personality type with out any clear explanation of how people become this way. It was complex, and has been largely superseded by the simpler ‘RWA’ (Right-wing authoritarian) model of Altemeyer. In focusing on personality, it also neglects the social aspects of prejudice.

Cognitive therapy

A couple of queries about cognitive therapy....


Philosophers such as Hume had suggested that emotions lead to thoughts. Cognitive primacy is an idea dating from the work of Magda Arnold in the 1960s, that it works the other way around: our thoughts come first, and our emotions follow. This was influential on the founders of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Beck, for example, stated that there are three 'faulty views' which lead to depression: So Beck stated that 3 beliefs cause depression and therefore that thoughts come first, and emotion follows after. This 'cognitive triad' includes negative views of the self, negative views of the world and negative views of the future.

For example, a person fails an exam:

Negative view of self - "I'm a failure"
Negative view of the world - "Everyone is against me"
Negative view of the future - "I'll never be good at anything"

It is worth noting that this viewpoint links to theories of stress: Magda Arnold founded Appraisal Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory) which influenced Lazarus and Folkman's 'Transactional Model of Stress' (1984). The first two stages of this are are the appraisals of the stressor and the self. So again, thought processes are seen to come first, and emotions and behaviour (in this case stress) afterwards.

In reality it is not quite so simple... Schachter & Singer (1962) found that people assess their own emotional state in part by observing their own physiological state, e.g. by how fast their heart is beating. So the interaction between emotions, thoughts and physical states is complex and probably not one-way.