How does social identity play a role in prejudice and discrimination?

How does social identity play a role in prejudice and discrimination?

There's been substantial research that has explored how our own personal identity influences how prejudiced we become. As you will recall from Module 3, we have a well-established self-concept. Part of that self-concept comes from the group we belong to. This is what we called our social identity.

According to Social Identity Theory the group we associate ourselves with will have an influence on how we think about the people we meet. Fundamentally, as we noted in our module on attitude, we evaluate the things we encounter in our lives. Importantly, when it comes to people, we categorize them: male, female, Black, White, Asian, Indian, old, young, etc.

We identify with our ingroup -- those people with whom we share a sense of belonging and a feeling of common identity.

We also distinguish ourselves from outgroups -- those people that we perceive as distinctly different from or apart from our ingroup.

We also will naturally compare ourselves to our ingroups and to our outgroups, and we compare the groups themselves. When we compare ingroups and outgroups, we end up developing an ingroup bias. That is, we tend to favor our own group relative to the outgroup.

In doing so, we develop certain stereotypes and beliefs about the other group. Once established, these stereotypes are maintained by conformity to the group norms. Everyone in the ingroup tends to agree about the characteristics of the outgroup. Our contact is primarily with members of our ingroup, and not the outgroup, therefore the opportunity for us to change our beliefs is limited.