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?

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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).

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