Social Identity and Intergroup Communication

In Chapter 2, you learn that the self-serving bias holds that we usually attribute our own successes to internal factors and our failures to external effects. Because we want to feel good about our group memberships as well, we tend to make the same attributions. So if your sorority sister gets an A on a difficult exam, you may attribute it to her intelligence; if she fails, you may assume that the exam was unfair.

Clearly, our group memberships strongly influence our communication. This is because our group memberships are such an important part of who we are. According to social identity theory, you have a personal identity, which is your sense of your unique individual personality, and you have a social identity, the part of your self-concept that comes from your group memberships (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). We divide ourselves into “us” and “them” partly based on our affiliations with various co-cultures. The groups with which we identify and to which we feel we belong are our ingroups; those we define as “others” are outgroups. We want “us” to be distinct and better than “them,” so we continually compare our co-cultures to others in the hope that we are part of the “winning” teams.

Studies in intergroup communication, a branch of the discipline that focuses on how communication within and between groups affects relationships, find that these comparisons powerfully affect our communication (Giles, Reid, & Harwood, 2010; Pagotto, Voci, & Maculan, 2010). For example, group members often use specialized language and nonverbal behaviors to reveal group membership status to others (Bourhis, 1985). So, a doctor might use a lot of technical medical terms among nurses to assert her authority as a doctor, whereas sports fans use Facebook posts to support their fellow fans, team members, and coaches, and to denigrate those of rival teams (Sanderson, 2013).

Note: The project does not offer any solutions for dealing with bullies or advise students to engage in conflict with those who abuse them. It simply offers them a peer experience, to show them that they’re not alone, and tries to show them that life will go on after the bullying ends.

Our group identification and communication shift depending on which group membership is made salient—or brought to mind—at a given moment. For example, students often consider themselves ingroup members with fellow students and outgroup members with nonstudents. However, a group of students at different schools might identify themselves in smaller units. For example, suppose community college students consider themselves outgroups from students attending a four-year university. If all of these students discover that they’re rabid fans of the Hunger Games trilogy or that they volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, they might see each other as ingroup members while discussing these interests and experiences.

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JOHN BOEHNER’S tearful response upon becoming Speaker of the House in 2011 gained him much media airtime, perhaps because we are prone to criticize open displays of emotion from men. KEVIN DIETSCH/UPI/Landov

In addition, your group memberships are not all equally salient for you at any given time, and your communication reflects this. For instance, suppose you are a female Egyptian American Muslim from a middle-class family and a straight-A student with a love of languages and a passion for outdoor adventure sports. When displaying who “you” are, you may emphasize your “studentness” (by wearing your college insignia) and sports enthusiasm (by participating actively in sporting events). Your race, religion, and socioeconomic status don’t come as much to the forefront. But remember that other people treat you based on the groups to which they think you belong. So someone else might focus on other aspects of how you look or talk and see you primarily as “a woman,” “a Muslim,” or “an Egyptian.”

The ways in which others perceive our social identity influences communication on many levels. In the 1960s, Rock Hudson was a Hollywood heartthrob who kept his identity as a gay man a secret. At that time, audiences would not likely have accepted him in heterosexual romantic roles if they knew that he was not interested in women. Today, straight actors take on gay and lesbian roles (such as Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall in Brokeback Mountain). But it isn’t certain whether audiences will accept gay and lesbian actors in straight roles. To be sure, the openly gay Neil Patrick Harris has no problem playing the womanizing Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother. But some actors, including Rupert Everett and Richard Chamberlain, have noted that coming out hurt their careers irreparably, and they have advised young gay actors to maintain their privacy in regard to their sexuality (Connelly, 2009; Voss, 2010).