Theory Template

 Acronym

SIT

Concise description of theory

Social identity theory is a conceptualization recognizing that the way we perceive others and ourselves on both our unique characteristics and our membership in various group. It also compare the other individual to other individual group to help the them to define exactly who they are actually. The theory was proposed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in 1970’s and 1980’s through which they explained the intergroup behaviour. There are two identity a) Personal Identity : Its bout the person characteristics which can be the person appearance personality. E.g. Hight of person, Weight of the person etc. b) Social Identity : It is basically talked about the group the person belong to, such as citizen of a particular country, student of a particular university etc. So to understand the Social Identity Theory we need to understand the three mental process involved in it so that we can evaluate it properly. That are social categorization, social identification and social comparison. 1) Social Categorization: It is the process of classifying people into group based on similar characteristics. In this categorization there are further two more groups that are ingroup and out group. In-group is defined a group in which people come up with same interest or identity, and opposite to that out-group are those people who do not belong a specific in-group. 2) Social Identification: It is basically accepting as self-descriptive the qualities attributed to one’s group, e.g. a doctor will behave like a doctor and help the patient. 3) Social Comparison: It is evaluated by ourselves or our own group by comparing it with others, in the absence of objective measure for self-evaluation we compare ourselves to others to find out how we are actually doing the comparison. Importance of social identity theory This theory identify themselves in terms of their characteristics in terms of their characteristics and their own group membership to prevent stereotype and discriminating others. Some of the key extension and development of the social identity approach focus on contextual factors that can affect the silence and strategy expression of identity theory. The identity is transformed and radicalized through collective struggle and importance of emotion to group identity and group life.

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