The Social Identity Theory

The Social Identity Theory was proposed by Henri Tajfel (1979) - he suggested that the groups that people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world.

In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group (the group we don't belong to). For example, the Americans are a bunch of losers!

Therefore, we divided the world into "them" and "us" based through a process of social categorization.

Tajfel and Turner (1979) proposed that there are three mental processes involved in evaluating others as "us" or "them":

1) Categorization. We categorize people in order to understand the social environment. Examples of categories are race, appearance, mods etc.

2) Social Identification. We adopt the identity of the group we have categorized ourselves as belonging to. There will be an emotional significance to your identification with a group, and your self-esteem will become bound up with group membership.

3) Social comparison. We tend to compare our group with other groups, which leads to conflict and competition. 

In the 1960s, rockers and mods fought because they disagreed on quite a lot. Rockers were seen as scruffy and rebellious whereas mods were seen as quite clean-cut and snobbish.