Social Identity Theory

Social Identity Theory posits that individuals identify with the group they belong to and develop ingroup favoritism and outgroup discrimination through social categorization, and that individuals’ identification with the group constitutes the basis of group behaviors.

Brief History

Social Identity Theory was originally proposed by British social psychologist Henri Tajfel in the 1970s. Later Tajfel’s student John Turner further improved the theory and put forward the self-categorization theory in 1985. In 1970, Tajfel employed the Minimalist Group Paradigm to observe how groups function. In his experiment, the subjects were randomly divided into two groups and asked to perform resource allocation tasks. Results show that subjects would allocate more resources to other members of their own group rather than those from the other group and give these members more positive reviews, even though they do not know each other. In other words, there are ingroup favoritism and outgroup...