Social stereotypes and social groups; Henri Tajfel (in red book)

Pg 133 – “…Stereotypes can become social only when they are shared by large numbers of people within social groups or entities – the sharing implying a process of effective diffusion.”

~ Sharing something makes it social. Since culture requires at least two people sharing something to be a culture, then culture is inherently social. Identity, on the other hand, is not.

Pg 134 – “Two social functions of stereotypes will then be considered: first, their role in contributing to the creation and maintenance of group “ideologies” explaining or justifying a variety of social actions; and, second, their role in helping to preserve or create positively valued differentiations between one’s own and other social groups.”

~ The purpose of the article.

Pg 134 – “The basic cognitive process in stereotyping is categorization, the structuring of sense data through grouping persons, objects and events (or their selected attributes) as being similar or equivalent to one another in their relevance to an individual’s actions, intentions or attitudes. The essential cognitive function of stereotyping is thus to systematize and simplify information from the social environment in order to make sense of a world that would otherwise be too complex and chaotic for effective action. When G. W. Allport discussed the categorization process in his classic (1954) book on prejudice, he assigned to it the following “five important characteristics” (pp. 20-22):
1. It forms large classes and clusters for guiding our daily adjustments.
2. Categorization assimilates as much as it can to the cluster.
3. The category enables us quickly to identify a related object.
4. The category saturates all that it contains with the same ideational and emotional flavour.
5. Categories may be more or less rational.

~ So categorization leads to stereotyping. But categorization (in some other set of notes) also leads people to feeling less (or in the case of stereotyping, more) threatened. Categorization, therefore, is what tries to keep change at bay by making the categories more or less stationery.

Pg 136 – “They help us to predict when and how various aspects of these categorizations fit or do not fit requirements posed by the need to systematize the information which individuals receive or select from their environment.”

~ What categories do.

Pg 142 – …A stereotype does not become a social stereotype until and unless it is widely shared within a social entity. As long as individuals share a common social affiliation which is important to them (and perceive themselves as sharing it), the selection of the criteria for division between ingroups and outgroups and of the kind of characteristics attributed to each will be directly determined by those cultural traditions, groups interests, social upheavals and social differentiations which are perceived as being common to the group as a whole.”

~ Ingroups and outgroups are the point of categorization. People want to be in the ingroup if they feel a certain personal (non-social) identity threatened in order to keep that personal identity from being threatened. Really, you could almost say that any culture or collective identity stems from a non-social, personal identity’s need to not be threatened. (Also I think really important to my theory).

Pg 144 – “The point is that we shall never be able to formulate adequate guidelines for research on collective social behaviour if we do not go beyond constructing sets of independent variables seen as functioning in a social environment which is assumed to be psychologically unstructured in its homogeneous and all embracing ‘inter-individuality’.” (quoting other source).

~ So by constructing variables we are categorizing things already, trying to create ingroups and outgroups and keep our own knowledge and personal identity from being threatened.

An Integrative theory of Intergroup Conflict; Henri Tajfel and John Turner (in red book)

Pg 95 – “…The interaction between two or more individuals that is fully determined by their interpersonal relationship and individual characteristics, and not at all affected by various social groups or categories to which they respectively belong.” (interpersonal)

~ If one does not share any cultures with someone it becomes completely interpersonal (Impossible)

Pg 95 – “The other extreme consists of interactions between two or more individuals (or groups of individuals) which are fully determined by their respective memberships in various social groups or categories, and not at all affected by the interindividual personal relationships between the people involved.” (intergroup)

~ If one shares all cultural aspects with someone it becomes completely intergroup. (Impossible)

Pg 96 – “The belief system of “social mobility” is based on the general assumption that the society in which the individuals live is a flexible and permeable one, so that if they are not satisfied, for whatever reason, with the conditions imposed upon their lives by membership in social groups or social categories to which they belong, it is possible for them (be it through talent, hard work, good luck, or whatever other means) to move individually into another group which suits them better.”

~ Possible selves are possible because we accept that positive change can happen. The problem is that if positive change can happen, so can negative change. The same reason we join cultures (to feel less threatened) is the same thing that creates motivation for us to do better and join other cultures (change).

Pg 96 – “At the other extreme, the belief system of “social change” implies that the nature and structure of the relations between social groups in the society is perceived as characterized by marked stratification, making it impossible or very difficult for individuals, as individuals, to invest themselves of an unsatisfactory, underprivileged, or stigmatized group membership.”

~ So this is saying that if a culture feels threatened people have a hard time identifying with it because the very reason one joins a culture cannot be the reason why one associates with a culture.

Pg 100-1 – “We can conceptualize a group, in this sense as a collection of individuals who perceive themselves to be members of the same social category, share some emotional involvement in this common definition of themselves, and achieve some degree of social consensus, about the evaluation of their group and of their membership of it. Following from this, our definition of intergroup behavior is basically identical to that of Sherif (1966, p. 62): any behavior displayed by one or more actors’ identification of themselves and the others as belonging to different social categories.”

~ Good definition of culture/collective identity.

Pg 101 – “Social categorizations are conceived here as cognitive tools that segment, classify, and order the social environment, and thus enable the individual to undertake many forms of social action. But they do not merely systematize the social world; they also provide a system of orientation for self-reference: they create and define the individual’s place in society.”

~ Categorizations are both for the one to understand themselves better and for the self to understand others better.

Pg 101 – “Social groups, understood in this sense, provide their members with an identification of themselves in social terms.”

~ Why social groups exist, in part.

Pg 101 – “There are at least three classes of variables that should influence intergroup differentiation in concrete social situations. First, individuals must have internalized their group membership as an aspect of their self-concept: they must be subjectively identified with the relevant in-group. It is not enough that the others define them as a group, although consensual definitions by others can become, in the long run, one of the powerful causal factors for a group’s self-definition. Second, the social situation must be such as to allow for intergroup comparisons that enable the selection and evaluation of the relevant relational attributes. Not all between-group differences have evaluative significance (Tajfel, 1959), and those that do vary from group to group…Third, in-groups do not compare themselves with every cognitively available out-group: the outgroup must be perceived as a relevant comparison group. Similarity, proximity, and situational salience are among the variables that determine out-group comparability, and pressures toward in-group distinctiveness should increase as a function of this comparability. It is important to state at this point that, in many social situations, comparability reaches a much wider range than a simply conceived “similarity” between the groups.”

~ How ingroups and outgroups understand themselves. They must understand themselves, identify themselves, compare others in their ingroup and compare themselves with similar outgroups. This is how they work to keep the ingroup from being overly threatened by other outgroups. It is how personal identities maintain their connection to a certain culture.