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Strength and weakness of social identity theory
Strength and weakness of social identity theory
Outline social identity theory
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In the Social Identity Theory(SIT), TT, looked at inter groups relations from an identity perspective. They claimed, layered on top, beside and underneath inter group conflict is identity issues. Therefore, group identity becomes a psychological engine that allows us to understand how group conflict emerges. In this essay I will focus on 3 concepts SIT suggests. The first social comparison and distinctiveness are concepts which give insights about person’s psychology in his group’s affect on it. For gay people, it is obvious that they are not in a helathy place with these 2 concepts. After I talk about instability which is a cognitive alternative that shows gays that their relative position in the society can be changed. Later, I talk about 5 stage model which incorporates macro and micro to explain intergroup relations. I …show more content…
We want to belong to groups that are distinctive and positively valued. This has some important implications on the groups in the movie. Because people are motivated to evaluate themselves positively, they tend to evaluate positively those groups to which they belong and to discriminate against groups they perceive to pose a threat to their social identity. For instance, in the fight for proposition 6, the Christian group, despite being rarely active in politics in general, hugely supports Briggs to maintain their distinctiveness and kick gay group out of the social cycle. Also, this concept implies that antigay violence may help heterosexist people feel more positive about being heterosexual. There are many examples of this in the movie, from gay men being attacked by police to be stabbed by perpetuators due to the gay group they belong to. Lastly, we see the big element of distinctiveness when Harvey’s campaign group is hesitant about getting a woman into their group. This shows they want to stay different and not mix up with
Walmart can be studied using structure functional theory and social conflict theories. Social functional theory is the relationships among parts of society and how these parts are functional(have beneficial consequences) or dysfunctional (have negative consequences. Most Americans today love to shop at Walmart because they continue to give consumers the best prices on over 120,000 products and are one stop shopping.
Did you know that in 2014, shoplifting and worker’s theft cost the retail industry a loss of thirty-two billion dollars (Wahba, 2015)? According Wahba “a common misperception about shoplifting is that retailers can ‘afford’ the loss of a candy bar or a pair of jeans” (2015). This type of reasoning certainly does make more sense when explained through the context of a criminological theory. For example according to the Rational Choice theory individuals weigh the costs and benefits associated with a criminal and or deviant act and then make a conscious choice. Other criminological theories explain criminal and deviant behavior using a biological, psychological, social, conflict, or multifactor component. Taking that into consideration in this
Personal identity, in the context of philosophy, does not attempt to address clichéd, qualitative questions of what makes us us. Instead, personal identity refers to numerical identity or sameness over time. For example, identical twins appear to be exactly alike, but their qualitative likeness in appearance does not make them the same person; each twin, instead, has one and only one identity – a numerical identity. As such, philosophers studying personal identity focus on questions of what has to persist for an individual to keep his or her numerical identity over time and of what the pronoun “I” refers to when an individual uses it. Over the years, theories of personal identity have been established to answer these very questions, but the
Dilemmas with identity is a discussion that will persist in both formal and informal settings. The ability to understand the complexity of identity is crucial for creating an environment in which people will no longer dismiss or overlook others, leading them to question the validity of their identity. An improved social environment is also needed to cease the categorizing, labeling, and generalizing of minority groups, and to understand the different methods of analyzing our own
Tajifel, H. a. (1986). The social identity theory of inter-group behavior. Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/258189
People go through many obstacles when they face their social identity. Some can overcome their differences, but others may not have they change to even face them due to the treatment that they get from society. Social identity is the one of many controversial and complex problems that many individuals deal with. Because, sometimes it used to be misunderstood making reference to racism and/or others complex matters. “On Being a Cripple” and “How It Feels to Be Colored” are two essays in which both characters suffer from some kind of discrimination. Indeed, in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” by Zora Neale Hurston and “On Being a Cripple” by Nancy Mairs, each author shows different attitude, endures challenges, and change toward social identity.
Social identities and factors and/or experiences that have shaped your worldview. My Ethnic and cultural traditions and values have molded my social identities, in which both my Ethnic and cultural traditions and values and social identities have formed my worldview. According to my social identity wheel: My race is Asian/Pacific Islander and Filipino American. My ethnicity is Filipino. My sexual orientation is heterosexual. My religion is Roman Catholic. My age is of a young adult. I am a female. My national origin is the United States of America. My sense of who I am is based on my ethnic group that I have identified myself to belong in.
Some of the strengths of the social identity theory are that; throughout the years it has supported many empirical studies, it has also demonstrated the social categorization in intergroup behaviors, allowed us to differentiate between social and personal identities and has provide explanations for other areas of psychology (conformity). A weaknesses of the Social identity theory is that its application is restricted in the sense that it has very low ecological validity. Another weakness is that SIT favors situational factors rather than dispositional is not supported by evidence. The social Identity theory can be used to how to explain how we form our social and personal identities in the terms of in and out groups. SIT can also be used to explain why there is conflict between humans and different societies.
Think about your daily life. What does your schedule look like? Where do you go? What do you do? Most importantly, who are you with? No matter what you are doing or where you are going, I am sure you aren’t doing it alone; if you are alone, you are more than likely on your way to meet up with others. This is simply because we are social creatures; The human species as a whole was made to interact with each other; we weren’t meant to do life alone. We tend to seek out a group of other individuals who share similar beliefs, ideas, and interests; we look for the “me too” from others. This is what Tajfel and Turner (1979) defined as the Social Identity Theory.
The doctrine of self identity is one that has throughout history been a way for people to identify who they were in relation to other individuals and society as a whole. To take into account how an individual’s identity is shaped, it is imperative to know it through the context of oneself and of society. This will not only provide a more holistic approach to understanding how self identity is shaped, but also how it relates to race. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Nikki-Rosa” and Zora Neale Hurston’s “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” reflect on the idea of racial self identity through harsh critiques from societal and internal pressures seeking to label and categorize people on the basis of race.
In all aspects of their lives we associate with various groups, for example demographic, cultural or peer groups. Social Identity theory developed by Henri Tajfel in 1979 explains how people develop a sense of belonging and membership in particular groups. This theory explains behaviors in terms of social groups, we form social groups and create perceptions of others and ourselves that are influenced by the various groups to which we belong. A social group is a set of individuals who hold a common social identification or view themselves as members of the same social category (Chen & Li, 2009). Individuals can have multiple, co-occurring identities which could vary. This paper aims to explain how the Social Identity theory is used to explain violence and prejudice behavior and it also looks at the advantages and disadvantages of this theory compared to other theories in explaining the same behavior.
The realistic group conflict theory proposes that whenever there are two or more groups seeking the same limited resources, there will be an escalation towards conflict (Sherif, Harvey, White, Hood, & Sherif, 1961). This conflict can be in various forms including negative stereotypes, negative beliefs, and discrimination between the groups. The groups will form their own interpretations of “ingroups” and “outgroups.” The interpretations then become fuel for competitive action over any limited resources. This action is motivated by their thoughts, which they also deem as “rational” (Houghton, 170). This was tested by Muzafer Sherif with subjects being randomly assigned to groups, and all the participants were without psychological abnormalities. As ethnicity did not have a direct role in his experiment, it is possible to draw from his results, if only with a certain degree of confidence in its relation to national groups.
In today’s society, gender plays a major role in determining rather or not, the world sees women as soft and gentle or men as hardcore. Gender is defined by how much of a manly man he could be or being feminine by acting lady like (Newman 2016). Due to this role taking women are constantly not seen as threat and has be undermined for over centuries. The perception of being what they world see you as and using it for your own advantage is role taking (Newman 2016).
The question ‘who am I?’ raises speculations about who we are as human beings and why we behave the way we do. This is of great interest to social psychologists. One particular theory about this social identity is that it is not fixed or innate but that it is something that changes over time and is constructed through our social interactions with other people. This essay will explicate the idea of socially constructed identities and consider the evidence for and against this view with examples of research studies from both social constructionism (Phoenix, 2007) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Turner and Brown, 1978).
The main limitation of the social Identity theory is that it states that group memberships is one of the main contributors of creating social identity (Stets & Burke, 2000), so the lack of a group membership is one of the causal factors for crime (Brown, 2000). This is not always the case as groups exist where they internally promote negative values such as gangs (Cartwright, 2011) so the problem here is that the lack of belonging to a social group, or a community may not necessarily predicate into crime.