THE SELF AND SOCIAL IDENTITY

LECTURE 2

What is the Self?• A psychological approach to diversity

identifies principals that explain how individuals’ thoughts,feelings, and behavior are intertwined with the social context.

• We not only perceive differences, we experience our diversity.

Phenomenal Self• Refers to the part of self-knowledge that

is present in awareness at any given time.• People sensitive to factors that

distinguish them from other people around them.

• Being the only male in a female context makes maleness quite central.

Phenomenal Self• Much more likely to list maleness as a

prominent and important feature of one’s self-concept as compared with being male in a heavily male environment.

• The same applies to race and ethnicity. • It is common for members of majority groups

to complain that minority members seem obsessed with their ethnic, racial, or gender identity, but that seems to be partly a simple consequence of minority status.

Motive

• Self-knowledge does not emerge simply out of a dispassionate operation of cognitive processes.

• Beliefs about the self are subject to motivational forces. Also called drives or needs.

Need to Belong• We are motivated to form and maintain

interpersonal bonds.• Also called attachment theory.• Need to belong is a fundamental motive.

What Criteria?

(1) operate in a wide variety of settings(2) have affective consequences(3) direct cognitive processing(4) lead to negative effects when thwarted(5) elicit goal directed behavior(6) be universal

What Criteria?

(7) not be derivative of other motives(8) affect a broad variety of behaviors, and(9) have implications that go beyond

immediate psychological functioning.

Falsification

• Falsification is one approach to evaluating a hypothesis.

• The belongingness hypothesis could be falsified if it were shown, for example, that many people can live happy, healthy lives in social isolation,

• or that many people show no cognitive or emotional responses to significant changes in their belongingness status.

Interpret Data• In addition to such criteria, however

hypotheses about fundamental motivations must be evaluated in terms of their capacity to interpret, and

• explain a wide range of phenomena. Part of the value of such a theory is its capacity to provide an integrative framework.

Theory

• The need to belong has an evolutionary basis. • Necessary for survival and reproductive benefits.• Impossible for culture to eradicate the need to belong

(except for an occasional warped individual).• Forming social bonds have important benefits of defending

oneself and protecting one’s resources.• Positive affect follows from forming social binds• Negative affect follows when relationships are broken,

threatened, or refused.• People who are socially deprived exhibit signs of pathology.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(1) Social bonds form easily.(2) Classic study showed when unacquainted boys

are assigned to groups, strong loyalty and group identification ties ensued quickly.

(3) In-group favoritism appears at once.(4) Infants form social attachments.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(5) Social attachments form under adverse conditions (e.g., military veterans).

(6) Mere presence of other people can be comforting.

(7) People form attachments with former rivals.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(8) Belongingness motivations overcome antagonistic tendencies.

(9) Reluctance to break bonds.(10) Reunions, sending cards, greeting

rituals.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(11) Reluctance to dissolve bad relationships e.g., (abusive relationships).(12) People experience distress when they break off a relationship (e.g., getting a divorce is accompanied by negative affect).(13) People devote considerable cognitive processing to relationships.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(14) Information about out-group members stored and organized on the basis of traits.

(15) Information about in-group members is stored and organized on the basis of person categories.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(16) Cognitive processes tend to blur the boundaries between relationship partners and the self, in the form of including the other in the self.

(17)The need to belong leads to a cognitive merging of self with particular other people. Such patterns of subsuming the individual in the interpersonal unit indicate the importance of these relationships.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(18) Group membership exerts influence on cognitive patterns.

(19) People expect more favorable and fewer negative actions by their in-group than by out-group members, and these expectations bias information processing and memory, leading people to forget the bad things (relative to good things) that their fellow in-group members do.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(20) People tend to process information about out-group members in extreme, black – and – white, simplistic, polarized ways, whereas similar information about members of their own group is processed in a more complex fashion.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(21) The formation of social bonds is associated with positive emotions (e.g., falling in love, childbirth, religious conversion, fraternity or sorority pledging, and so forth).

(22) Happiness in life is strongly correlated with having some close personal relationships. Absence of close social bonds linked to depression.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(23) Threats to social attachments are primary source of negative affect. Anxiety is linked to damaged, lost, or threatened social bonds. Social exclusion may well be the most common and important cause of anxiety. Imagining social rejection increases physiological arousal.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(24) Depression and anxiety were found to be significantly correlated (negatively) with students’ sense of belonging to their university.

(25) Jealousy is another negative affective stated that is a common response to threats to one’s relationships.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(26) Loneliness is related to lack of intimate connections rather than lack of social contact.

(27) Guilt can be understood as responses to disturbances or threats to interpersonal attachments.

(28) Two specific events that thwart people’s need to belong are divorce and death. Divorce produces varied forms of distress, including anger, depression, desolation, and loneliness.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(29) Death of significant other ranks among the most stressful event. Grief takes form of a severe depression. Reaction to the loss of a linkage with another person.

(30)Anxiety about death an be regarded as stemming from a threat to belongingness.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(31) Emotional responses to the outcomes of self and other depend on whether the other person is a close relationship partner such as a good friend. For example, when the performance involves a domain that is important to the self, it is upsetting to be outperformed by another person, and the emotional distress is magnified if the other person is a close friend.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(32) Consequences of deprivation include negative effects on the immune system. Loneliness was associated with a decrease in immunocompetence, specifically in natural killer cell activity.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(33) Rejected children have a higher incidence of psychopathology than other children.

(34) Mental hospital admission rates are higher among divorced and separated people.

(35) Women with eating disorders tended to have been (as children) overly sensitive to separation from their mothers. They had more intense and severe separation and attachment difficulties than a normal comparison group.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(36) Suicide can be explained as a result of failure of social integration.

(37) Extraversion appears to be strongly related to happiness and positive affectivity. Extraversion encompasses sociability and enhances the tendency to form and maintain social ties.

Empirical Evidence in Support of Theory

(38) Psychotherapeutic process is facilitated by close personal bonds.

(39) Unconditional social acceptance (i.e., belongingness) by the therapist.

(40) Effectiveness of group therapy.

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

• Authors state it is implausible to suggest that all the empirical evidence in support of the theory can be explained away. At worst, they state, some of the findings have alternative explanations.

• Pragmatic benefit or material benefits• Correlational: Do unhappy people have fewer

close relationships? Or is the lack of close relationships the reason for their unhappiness?