Differentiationbetween people because of their group membership is a necessitybecause it is needed by individuals as a basis for orientations and decisions in their everyday life.
Discriminationbetween people is a problembecause it is an inappropriate and unjustified differentiation between people because of their group membership. It is judgment and interpretation and not clear-cut “objective” characteristics of the intergroup treatment itself which define instances of social discrimination. Differentiation changes into dis- crimination when two parties disagree about the appropriateness and justifiability of a respective distribution and of the underlying categorization. Dissent results from per-
spective-specific evaluations of a group’s entitlement to certain shares of resources derived from the categorization which provided the basis of judging this entitlement. The dissent may be located between actors and targets, or it may exist between actors and targets on the one hand and external observers on the other. With this conception of social dis- crimination as social interaction we obviously do not intend to “define away” the social problem but to clarify the psychological processes breeding it.
As evidence on the positive–negative asymmetry in social discrimination exemplifies, in the negative more than in the positive domain, differential treatment of own group and outgroup in the negative domain requires elaborate and substantial justifications on behalf of the actor. The abundance of incidents of derogation, rejection, and hostility against outgroups across time and societies demonstrates that ample justifications must be available. Strong ingroup identification and beliefs which interpret unstable or inse- cure situations as threat from outgroups seem to be key candidates to provide these types of justification. Some approaches see the roots of these social and political beliefs in per- sonality variables such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, or dogmatism. Personality differences, however, cannot account for the homogeneity of people belonging to dominant groups which is necessary for a broad consensus either actively or, in most cases, passively, to support disadvantageous treatment of minorities.
As Staub (1989) convincingly demonstrates, even “the roots of evil” could not generate such extreme cases as dehumanization or genocide in a society, if a vast majority would not yield more or less direct support to the whole elimination machinery.
Moreover, it is the interplay between ethnocentric and other discrimination- legitimizing ideologies, created and defended by political and religious elites, gradually coagulated in collective beliefs and social norms and, finally, the sometimes blind, often utilitarian conformity with these norms, which account for the obvious homogeneity in dominant group members’ aversive behavior toward minorities. It would be naive to think that a tolerant society would ever be constituted of solely tolerant, non-authoritarian, individual citizens. Rather, a society is tolerant because people conform to norms pre- scribing tolerance (Kinder, 1998; Pettigrew, 1991). Unfortunately, after a major political change, these people would not have much difficulty in gradually conforming to very dif- ferent norms. This is exactly the sad lesson that the Kosovo conflict recently taught us:
Victims can easily turn into perpetrators as soon as political power changes, and their retaliatory violence is in no way less dehumanizing and cruel than what they have suf- fered before.
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The Social Identity Perspective in
Intergroup Relations: Theories, Themes, and Controversies
John C. Turner and Katherine J. Reynolds
Introduction
There has been a steady growth of research on intergroup relations in the last 30 years and the social identity perspective, comprising social identity theory (SIT; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory (SCT; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, & Wetherell, 1987), has played a leading role in this development. In fact, research in this tradition is being pursued more vigorously now than ever before (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1999;
Ellemers, Spears, & Doosje, 1999; Haslam, in press; Mummendey & Wenzel, 1999;
Oakes, Haslam, & Turner, 1994; Spears, Oakes, Ellemers, & Haslam, 1997; Tyler, Kramer, & John, 1999; Worchel, Morales, Paez, & Deschamps, 1998). Its basic ideas about the role of social categorization and social identities in group processes are now widely accepted throughout the field (e.g., Brewer & Brown, 1998; Fiske, 1998). These ideas are moreover finding their way into new areas (Abrams & Hogg, 1999; Haslam, in press; Turner & Haslam, in press; Turner & Onorato, 1999).
This chapter will provide an overview of the social identity perspective by discussing key ideas and addressing important misunderstandings. The latter are worth discussing to identify themes in current research and directions for the future. It will be argued that there has been a failure to take seriously the metatheory behind the perspective. The ten- dency has been to divorce psychological processes from the social forces that structure their functioning. SIT and SCT emphasize that intergroup relations cannot be reduced
Note: This research was supported by a Large Australian Research Council grant to John Turner, Kate Reynolds, and Alex Haslam.
to individual psychology but emerge from an interaction between psychology and society (Tajfel, 1972a, 1979; Turner, 1996).
The first section summarizes the basic ideas of SIT and SCT while highlighting the similarities and differences between them. In the second section a series of questions, which raise key themes and controversies within social identity research, are addressed.
The final section attempts to identify and examine the necessary features of a compre- hensive social psychological analysis of social conflict between groups. It is concluded that the social identity perspective, although not intended as a “sovereign” approach to inter- group conflict, has made a significant contribution toward understanding intergroup rela- tions, and that future progress depends on the metatheoretical ideas within which SIT and SCT developed being fully understood and embraced.