Social Identity Theory: Future Challenges

Social Identity Theory: Past Achievements, Current Problems, and Future Challenges is the article I focused on. With in the article they focused on main subjects as well as some sub-subjects including; the achievements—why there is in group bias, understanding responses to status inequality, stereotyping and perceptions of group homogeneity, and changing attitudes through contact. Problems for social identity theory—the relationship between group identification and in-group bias, the self-esteem hypothesis, the positive—negative asymmetry phenomenon, the effects of intergroup similarity, and choice of identity maintenance strategies by low-status groups. Also, the challenges for the future—expanding the concept of social identity, predicting comparison choice, adding an affective component, managing identities in multicultural contexts and the social identity process at implicit levels. This article covered a lot of detailed information with a lot of sub-topics so I will be covering the main details that I thought was interesting in the article rather than each individual sub-topic. Social Identity Theory (PIT) has been around for centuries and has been changing through time but keeping the same understanding throughout. Social psychologists have used the terms pre-eminent theoretical in reference to SIT. Mainly “pre-eminent” is used because there is no question that social identity concepts are widely diffused and extensively employed as explanatory tools throughout our discipline. Much influence has been from the field of social psychology in from which SIT has created the idea of intergroup relations and having that our attitudes and behaviors have changed in the facts of group cohesion, performance and decision making, leadership, social influence, and stereotyping. The rapid growth of SIT into the mainstream is because of the interests of the future historians of science. With that they have …show more content…
SIT is concentrated on the latter effect and that it starts from the assumption that social identity is derived from group memberships. With achievements you always have areas that you need to focus on. Explaining group bias—this is focused on the idea of in-group favoritism, even when there are few or no obvious extrinsic causes for it. A common observation, which is so minimal, is the group discrimination that often involves maximizing different motives within the group. In-group bias was discovered in terms that members tend to feel better about themselves after engaging in such discrimination. In-group bias is a huge strength in identification and is a powerful predictor of in-group …show more content…
SIT has had a problem in which is may be difficult to continue the validity and should be welcomed as opportunities to refine and modify the theory if needed, rather than just ignoring the ideas. The relationship between group identification and in-group bias—SIT assumes that a positive social identity is mainly based on favorable intergroup comparison. A good reference they have found is that there should be a positive correlation between strength of group identification and the amount of positive intergroup differentiation (or in-group bias). The self-esteem hypothesis is the idea that in-group bias is motived by a desire to see one’s group, and hence oneself, in a positive light. There are two different types of people within the self-esteem hypothesis; positive intergroup differentiation result in elevated self-esteem (people feel better about themselves having judged or treated the in-group more favorable than the out-group) and people with initially depressed self-esteem (perhaps because the in-group is not very high status). It is very easy to be able to observe this hypothesis with such a wide range of abilities and having the motives associated with social