Collective Identity in Social Psychology
See also: social identity theory and social identity approachSocial psychologists has had interest in concepts of identity and individuality since its early days, tracing as far back as to the work of George Mead. His theories focused on the relationship between individual identity and society. He theorizes a chicken-and-egg relationship between society and identity. Prexisting social structure and conditions shape a person’s identity, which in turn, interacts with others and shapes the new and emerging social structure.
More contemporarily, Polletta and Jasper defined collective identity as “an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution.” The collective identity of a group are often expressed through the group’s cultures and traditions. The origin of the identity can be from within the group or outside the group, but ultimately, a collective identity is only formed upon the group members’ acceptance of the identity.Though defining collective identity to be a self-central concept, they emphasize on its distinction from concepts like ideology, motivation, and personal identity.
Not to be confused with social identity theory or self-categorization theory, collective identity focuses on the identity of the group as a whole, while the other theories focus on the identity of an individual(self)’s association with a group.
Read more about this topic: Collective Identity
Famous quotes containing the words collective, identity, social and/or psychology:
“Yet the companions of the Muses
will keep their collective nose in my books
And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and its cares, friends and a social habit, or politics, or music, or feasting. Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know.... this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology that has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand in the first place why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.”
—Naomi Weisstein, U.S. psychologist, feminist, and author. Psychology Constructs the Female (1969)