9.2 Why Do People Join and Identify With Groups?

Think ABOUT

For the better part of human history, the groups into which people were born—such as family and caste—largely defined what a person could be and do, and it was not possible to voluntarily exit those groups and join different ones. Even in the most progressive of modern societies, ethnicity, social class, nationality, family, and gender are ascribed by others to people at birth and still influence how people think and behave. People don’t choose their membership in these groups, yet these aspects of identity are hard to shake off. For example, the most unpatriotic person may take a strong interest in her country’s medal count when the summer or winter Olympic Games roll around every two years. Why should people be so proud of their country’s sports success when they didn’t choose where to be born and have played no direct role in their team’s success? When you hear about the final count of medals from the Olympic Games, do you automatically look to see how your nation did compared with others?

Fortunately, most group memberships are not ascribed. If you are reading this textbook, chances are you have the opportunity to join any number of intramural sports teams and social clubs, committees, religious groups, and political parties. You can even move up the career ladder to join a higher social class. Of course, joining groups such as these also requires time and effort, and in some cases, entails stressful initiations and perhaps the loss of individual freedoms.

Why do people identify with groups that they are arbitrarily born into? And why join groups at all, given the commitments and personal sacrifices involved?

Promoting Survival and Achieving Goals

One answer to these questions is that belonging to groups has been crucial to the development and survival of humans as a species. Over the course of evolution, humans survived because they relied on social networks to acquire and share food, transmit information, rear children, and avoid predators and other threats (Brewer & Caporael, 2006). Within this environment, individuals with characteristics that helped them to get along with others—such as the desire for social acceptance, cooperativeness, and loyalty—had better chances of living long enough to pass on their genes to future generations. Those who lacked those characteristics had a poorer chance of survival and reproduction. Through the natural selection process, modern humans might possess an innate desire to belong to groups and to avoid being kicked out of them (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

This evolutionary perspective on group living suggests that people will almost always identify strongly with the family and cultural groups in which they were raised. People form close bonds within kinship groups, and with non-kin in the vicinity, because people do not survive for very long without the cooperation of others (Kurzban & Neuberg, 2005). This helps us understand why people have a generally positive view of their hometown, local region, and country.

People also form and join groups to accomplish goals that they would be unlikely to accomplish on their own (Sherif, 1966). Most human achievements—from making a movie to incarcerating criminals—require the coordination of many people working in groups. For example, the textbook you are currently reading is the product of thousands of people who collaborate in a vast network of specialized groups, from lumberjacks to copy editors to truckers to ink manufacturers.

Reducing Uncertainty

Life is filled with uncertainties, from the location of your keys to the content of next week’s physics exam. People generally dislike being uncertain about themselves. Nor do they like being uncertain about who other people are and how they might behave. According to uncertainty-identity theory (Hogg, 2007), people join and identify with groups in order to reduce these negative feelings of uncertainty about themselves and others.

Uncertainty-identity theory

The theory that people join and identify with groups in order to reduce negative feelings of uncertainty about themselves and others.

315

How does belonging to groups reduce uncertainty? Groups reinforce people’s faith in their cultural worldview and their valued place within it. Most core beliefs can never be proven through personal experience. Even scientific facts—such as the fact that the earth revolves around the sun—are not things that people generally see firsthand. Rather, confidence in these beliefs comes from social consensus: As more people share a belief, the truer that belief will seem to be (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Festinger, 1954). Group ceremonies (e.g., rites of passage) and group-made products (e.g., fairy tales) reinforce these beliefs, starting at the beginning of development.

FIGURE 9.1

Group Identification Reduces Uncertainty
When participants were made to feel uncertain about themselves, they identified more strongly with a new group that was high in entitativity.
[Data source: Hogg et al. (2007)]

A second way groups reduce uncertainty is by prescribing norms and roles. As we discussed in chapter 2, norms are rules for how all members of a group ought to think and behave. Most norms are unspoken agreements about what behavior is acceptable or unacceptable, but they can also be expressed formally, as when some deadheads handed out flyers instructing concertgoers to “stay cool.” Whereas norms dictate how all group members should behave, roles are expectations for people in certain positions. When you are eating at a restaurant, you obey a norm against shouting or yelling loudly, but your server has a unique role that allows him to walk off with your credit card, even though you cannot walk off with his.

Norms and roles reduce uncertainty by providing clear guidelines for how people should think and act. As a result, people don’t need to think too hard about how to conduct themselves from one situation to the next. When people feel especially uncertain about who they are, uncertainty-identity theory predicts that they will become more strongly identified with tightly knit or entitative groups that can offer a sense of self-understanding.

To test this hypothesis, Hogg and colleagues (Hogg et al., 2007) formed small groups of participants who did not previously know each other. Half of the participants were told that they and the other members of their group had all responded very similarly on a series of questionnaires and that their group was very different from other groups. In other words, they learned that their group was high in entitativity. The other participants were told that there wasn’t much similarity in how the members of their group had responded, and that all the groups were fairly similar to each other. This information should have made their group seem low in entitativity.

Think ABOUT

Then, in what seemed to be an unrelated task, half the participants were asked to write about ways in which they felt uncertain about themselves, their lives, and their future, while the other half of the participants wrote about aspects of their life that made them feel certain. Finally, all of the participants were asked how much they identified with the group that they had just become part of in the study. As the researchers predicted, increasing uncertainty about the self increased group identification, but only when the group was high in entitativity (see FIGURE 9.1). If you think back to when you first started college or university, did you quickly identify with a new group in order to manage the uncertainty of such a major life transition?

316

In addition to reducing uncertainty about oneself, norms and roles also reduce uncertainty about other people by making their behavior seem orderly and predictable. For example, groups usually have a norm of cooperating and agreeing with the other members of the group (Turner & Oakes, 1989). So even if you know nothing about an individual, if you know what groups she belongs to, you can expect her to behave in line with those groups’ norms and roles. For example, after reading the introduction to this chapter, you may have a reasonably clear expectation of how a deadhead would act. Of course, as we will see later, such generalizations and stereotypes can also lead to errors in judgment.

Bolstering Self-esteem

According to social identity theory, belonging to groups is an important source of self-esteem (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Turner et al., 1987). As the theory maintains, personal identity—an understanding of oneself as an individual—is shaped by group memberships. If groups are a source of identity, and if people are motivated to view themselves in a positive light, then it follows that people would be motivated to view their groups positively as well. Indeed, people generally show a strong ingroup bias, behaving more favorably toward groups they belong to than to those that they don’t (Hogg, 2006). In the next chapter we will show how ingroup bias sometimes leads people to dislike outgroups. But for now we can see that social groups satisfy the person’s need for a clear and positive sense of self.

Social identity theory

The theory that group identities are an important part of self-definition and a key source of self-esteem.

Ingroup bias

A tendency to favor groups we belong to more than those that we don’t.

Think ABOUT

If groups are a source of self-esteem, then you might as well identify most strongly with those groups that help enhance your self-image. You probably have a variety of group identities that may help you feel good about yourself. Try listing several things that make you the person you are. Chances are your list will include group memberships, such as “student,” that you see as very positive.

People also enhance their self-esteem by identifying with successful or high-status groups. For instance, they might bask in the reflected glory of a team victory even when it is evident that they had no personal involvement in or responsibility for the group’s accomplishments (see chapter 6) (Cialdini et al., 1976). By belonging to groups, people can feel good about themselves without lifting a finger!

Managing Mortality Concerns

As you’ll recall from the discussion in chapter 2 on the existential perspective in social psychology, people need to cope with the threatening knowledge of their mortality. They do so by clinging to two psychological resources: faith in a cultural worldview and a sense of self-esteem. Belonging to groups strengthens these resources by allowing people to feel connected to something that is bigger and longer lasting than their personal existence. Although a person is painfully aware that she inevitably will die one day, she can take solace from the fact that because she belongs to an ancestral line, a national or religious group, a political movement, a scientific or artistic field, or some other enduring group, some part of her will live on symbolically after her body has perished. Studies in support of this idea show that people who are reminded of their death (in comparison to other negative topics) tend to view their country, religious organization, and other groups to which they belong more favorably, and as higher in entitativity and longevity (e.g., Castano & Dechesne, 2005; Sani et al., 2009).

317

SECTION review: Why Do People Join and Identify With Groups?

Why Do People Join and Identify With Groups?

People are born into some groups and join others voluntarily. People strongly identify with both types of groups. Here is why:

Promoting survival and achieving goals

During human evolution, group cooperation benefitted survival and reproduction.

Hence, modern humans have an innate desire to belong to groups.

Reducing uncertainty

People dislike feeling uncertain about themselves and others.

Belonging to a group reduces negative feelings of uncertainty.

Bolstering self-esteem

Groups are a source of self-esteem.

By viewing their group in a positive light, people feel better about themselves.

Managing mortality concerns

Groups connect people to something bigger and longer lasting than their own existence.

Hence, belonging to a group eases mortality concerns.