Monday, 10 August 2015

Contemporary Social Psychological Theories,
Ed. Peter J Burke, Stanford University Press, 2006,
Chapter 6 "Social Identity Theory" (pp. 111-136), page 111

Hogg continues his definition:

Social identity theory defines group cognitively - in terms of people's self-conception as group members. A group exists psycholigically if three or more people construe and evaluate themselves in terms of shared attributes that distinguish them from collectively from other people. Social identity theory addresses phenomena such as prejudice, discrimination, ethnocentricism, stereotyping, intergroup conflict, conformity, normative behaviour, group polarisation, crowd behaviour, organisational behaviour, leadership, deviance and group cohesiveness.

That's quite a laundry list of issues, not all of which will get addressed in my research. However, many of them can be seen in the way that JBYs define themselves in relation to Gentile Christians (and vice-versa) - even the use of 'Jewish' and 'Gentile' in that sentence can be read with pejorative overtones - and the way that each group define and alter their boundaries to include or exclude behaviours, beliefs and inconvenient history.