What´s Social Identity Theory Or Stereotyping?

The Social Identity Theory addresses phenomena such as prejudice, discrimination, intergroup conflict and stereotyping in terms of personality or interpersonal interactions. Tajfel and Turner (1979) suggested that the differentiation of two groups was enough for the emergence of prejudice. Stereotyping is seen as unfair generalisations about members of a group. It is viewed as problematic and resistent to change. Stereotypes are cognitive representations of how members of a group are similar to one another and different from members of other groups (Vescio & Waver, 2013). Both Social Identity Theory and Stereotyping aim at understanding what lead s to biased behaviours such as prejudice. Prejudice is defined as "the holding of derogatory social attitudes or cognitive beliefs, the expression of negative affect, ot the display of hostile or discriminatory behaviour towards members of a group on account of their membership of that group'' (Brown, 1995). It can be expressed in various ways such as abuse, assault, discrimination. Age, culture, race and gender are some of the cases of prejudice.
Social Identity Theory suggests that three cognitive processes are involved in becoming
prejudiced: social categorisation, social identification and social comparison. Social Categorisation is when an individual associates themselves with a certain group. Social Identification is when an individual starts to identify with that group and starts to follow the norms and attitudes of that group. Social Comparison is when members of a certain group start to believe that they are better than members of other groups.
"Social identity is the part of the self-concept that derives from group membership'' (Hogg & Vaughan, 1998).
Social Identity Theory suggests that people have a range of group and individual identities, which vary according to the social situation. Tajfel (1972) defines social identity as "the individual's knowleddge that he belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him of this group membership''. People strive for positive social identity and therefore they create a possitive meaning of their group membership as a way to increase their own self-esteem. The need of positive social identity may lead to negative discrimination towards the outgroup.This is a prerequisite for the emergence of prejudice, intergroup conflict and negative
stereotyping.
One of the research lines shows that being categorized causes to people to discriminate in favour of their own group (Tajfel et al., 1971). Turner and Tajfel (1986) suggested that people were more likely to show ingroup favoritism when they categorise themselves as members of a particular group. According to the theory people are part of in-groups and out-groups. Social Identity Theory emphasises the differences from members of the out-group and underlines the similarities between members of the in-group (Tajfel and Turner, 1986).This division also provides basis for the emergence of prejudice and discrimination from a particular group towards competing out-groups.
Consistent with this hypothesis, the research of Schmader (2002) indicated that women who felt that gender is a significant part of their social identity performed poorer in comparison to men on a stereotype relevant task. The results argue that the maths performance of the gender identified women can be negatively affected when it is linked to their gender.
Stereotype is defined as stored beliefs about the characteristics of a group of people (Hamilton and Sherman, 1994). It is activated when physical features associated with the stereotyped group are present or when no information is known about particular group members (Brewer, 1988). Stereotypes can be positive and negative, but the impact on individuals is still negative and they lead to prejudice.
Stereotype is an importnt pattern of peoples behavior because it reduces the amount of time they need to spent to fairly judge someone. It not only compensates people's lack of confidence, but also allows them to feel better about themselves and makes the world easier to understand. One disadvantage of this pattern is the fact that it deprives people from making objective assessment of out-group individuals. For example, stereotyping Black people as criminals is very popular in America. Marc Mauer (1999) explains that Whites believed that criminal behavior is a hereditary trait of Blacks. And again the popular stereotype that men are better at maths than women is refuted in another study. In their study Cvencek, Kapur & Meltzoff (2015) proved that there were non-significant gender differences on the standardized math achievement test between the boys and the girls from a Singaporean elementary-school. Another esearch has shown that depending on the circumstances the presence of stereotypes can actually improve the performance (Kray, Thompson, & Galinsky, 2001). This is the result of people's motivation and strong desire to prove a stereotype as wrong.
The stereotype content model categorizes stereotype in two dimentions: warmth and competence (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, Xu, 2002). Out-groups with higher status are envied because people cosider them competent but not good. And out-groups with lower status are pitied, because they compensate their lack of competence by being good. Researches (Cuddy & Fiske, 2002; Cuddy, Norton, & Fiske, 2005; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002) have proven that age prejudice exists. People have contradictory attitudes toward elder individuals because they are incessantly stereotyped as high on warmth and low on competence, which leads to an evaluative-mixed pattern of prejudice. Elder people are regarded to both with pity and admiration.
Prejudice and stereotyping are biased behaviors which contribute to social imparity. They are both very difficult to explain. In general prejudice is caused by psychological processes within peoples minds, but it is also linked to social influences such as negative stereotyping. Stereotype occurs because people tend to avoid mental work. It is an easy way to perceive and classify people, but does not always cause prejudice. Therefore Social Identity Theory as a way of maintaining positive self-esteem provides better explanation. What is more there are plenty of studies that support the fact that people have natural tendency to make themselves feel superior than others.