Sunday, 23 August 2015

Contemporary Social Psychological Theories,
Ed. Peter J Burke, Stanford University Press, 2006,
Chapter 5 "Identity Theory" (pp. 88-110), page 89

Stet's third assertion covers a different form of identity:

Individuals not only occupy roles in society but are also members of groups. Therefore individuals also have social identities. Here, individuals themselves as members of particular categories such being an America, aDemocrat, a Catholic and so forth. In the same way that role-identities are defined by culture, culture also defines the meanings of different group memberships and the behaviour expected from those memberships. In social identities, people categorise themselves as similar to some, labelled the in-group and different from others, the out-group. Once again, I think that this fails to address the point that some identities are given rather than chosen or adopted, and that the characteristics of some groups are not defined by culture; either they are defined by the group itself or by some external given definition.