how do you identify yourself more specifically what groups would you say that you belong to i'm not just talking about facebook groups or discord groups i'm talking about the groups that you interact with every day the groups that you feel that you belong to you may identify as a student of temple university we may identify as a member of your immediate family or maybe even as a catholic for every group that you belong to there's an opposing group there's another group out there these are people that don't identify in the same way you might call
them the others the students who go to other colleges who come from other families or practice other religions these groups and more importantly the conflicts between them have shaped human history for example fighting over land in the name of religion has created many countries borders and policies that we abide by today conflicts between different racial ethnic or religious groups still dominate our headlines and affect the lives of people all around the world so along with that why are we so loyal to the groups that we belong to and why does identification with one group inevitably
cause conflict with another group finding the answer to both of these questions has become a lifelong work for many social psychologists and one of these british psychologists is henry tajfelt in the late 1970s tashfell and his team conducted a series of studies that would lead to the creation of something called the social identity theory and this video is all about that social identity theory and how it plays into the ways that individuals and groups make decisions as individuals we go through usually three stages and enter into groups which eventually develop into the us versus the
mentality that has shaped the story of human history these three stages are categorization identification and comparison and i'm gonna go over each one of them so the first stage of the social identity theory is categorization you cannot belong to a group unless you know that that group exists and we do this through observation of the world around us it happens all the time usually without you even thinking about it it doesn't take long to see that people are divided into different groups all it takes is you can just walk into a school cafeteria or you
can listen to the news groups are labeled by their religion their nationality physical abilities so on and so forth i could be here until tomorrow coming up with ways that humans have categorized other humans basically they're categorized things that set people apart and a lot of how you do this categorization is based on how you were raised and where you grew up secondly identification once you start to categorize the world into different groups it's time to look at yourself how do you identify and there's so many ways to answer this question you can identify yourself
as a man a woman or a non-binary person you can identify as a catholic a muslim or a scientologist you can identify as straight lesbian or pansexual or you can choose to identify as none of these things when it comes to psychology what you identify with is literally limitless i know these topics may not be the most politically correct but it shows how fluid our identities are understanding your identity and what you want to be does more than just continue to simplify how you look at the world and the different groups within it it can
also give you a sense of belonging which is very powerful in fact maslow's hierarchy of needs is and has remained a crucial model for understanding human behavior and what motivates us to make decisions and at the bottom of this hierarchy the very basic level is something called basic needs before we can explore the world at large we need to feel safe and know where our next meal is coming from and once these basic needs are satisfied we then seek love and belonging and we can get this love and belonging simply by identifying with certain groups
this desire for belonging may also influence the way in which we mold ourselves to fit into that group for example maybe you join a fraternity and you start wearing that fraternity's letters around campus or maybe you become a young professional and jazz up your wardrobe to look more like the other professionals at your work hairstyles fashion trends and even decisions on where to live may all be influenced by a person's desire to fit in with a certain group and even the style of our hair or the car that we drive makes it obvious that we
belong to a certain group for example i drive a mustang and there's tons of other people out there that don't drive mustangs but hate on them all the time but i have traveled a lot and i have found that other mustang owners connect very tightly to other mustang owners as another example when we communicate this identity to people in that group we are then validated and we feel a necessary sense of love and belonging as another example one of my friends recently got a nose ring which is something i normally wouldn't expect of him anyways
we went to a sensory deprivation tank which i highly recommend and the cashier there immediately complimented him on it at first i thought it was really crazy how quickly they hit it off they had a 20 minute conversation in the lobby but then i realized the cashier also had a nose ring and that they were in the same group in short they identified with their nose rings and it brought them closer together so after categorization and then identification comes comparison so why do we get this type of validation from making our identities more obvious it's
because the last stage of the social identity theory is comparison and this is where the us versus them mentality starts to come into play one of henry tajfel's experiments regarding the social identity theory asked participants to compare and assess people in different groups and these participants were given a group to identify with throughout the experiment taj fell's team asked participants to give points to other participants and even though the groups were arbitrary they weren't really categorized by any meaningful manner participants were more likely to give points to people in their group and this is a
clear reflection of how we compare ourselves and people in our group to outsiders it's in our nature to make these categorizations in comparison yuval noel harari author of one of the great books sapiens says homo sapiens evolved to think of people as divided into us and them us was the group immediately around you whoever you were and them was everyone else in fact no social animal is ever guided by the interest of the entire species to which it belongs no chimpanzee cares about the interests of the chimpanzee species and no snail will lift a tentacle
for the global snail community early homo sapiens weren't motivated by identity politics they were motivated by limited resources including food water and shelter they could trust that people in their own group would share the wealth and provide for people within their own group but them letting them have access to these limited resources could threaten the livelihood of our whole group this mentality could explain why people in taj fell's experiments were more likely to give points to people in their own group and this story is all too familiar have you ever heard someone say that they
are worried that immigrants are taking jobs away from citizens or that the country is overrun by people of a different faith or identity these are the same fears that early homo sapiens had when they lived as hunter-gatherers it's just a different environment these fears motivate politicians to make laws banning people from having certain rights or even as history as shown putting others into internment camps as i near the end of this video i want to say that there is a lot more to learn and explore with social identity theory and after all not everyone who
is part of a group wishes or chooses to be identified with that group for example having the label of convict or felon can be hard to move on from but i think that's a topic for another video and within these groups people can move up the ranks or down the ranks and actually be categorized into even smaller groups so keep learning keep listening and keep exploring different areas of psychology that might provide further insight into the ideas of identity and belonging i hope you guys have learned a bit about how social identity theory works and
if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below or watch more of my videos in the social psychology playlist thank you so much for watching
