Social Psychology - categorisation, identity and intergroup relations

Social catergorization - basic cognitive propensity to place things and people into categories. Catagorization as 'rational' and normal process. Catagories are organised bu level of inclusiveness. Catagorise are organised hirearchically so that the less inclusivse, smaller, catagories are nested beneath more inclusive, larger, catagories.

Tajfel and Wilkes 1963

• in case 1 lines randomly labeled A or B
• in case 2 shorter lines labeled A and all the longer ones labelled B
• in case 3 there were no labels
• accentuation principle
• catagrization of stimuli leads to perceptual accentuation of inter-category similarities and inter-category difference on salient dimensions

Biling and Tajfel 1973

• favouritism as a function of belief similarity and common group membership
• although participants in a minimal group study favoured similar others over those whom no similarity information was provided
• there was much stronger favouritism for others who were simply explixitly catagorised as being ingroup members
• statistically significant favouritism was expressed only towards ingroup members

Widler 1984

• outgroup attitude as a function of pleseness of contact and outgroup typicality of target
• relative to no contact, attitueds towards a rival college improved only when a contact was both pleasent and with a typical member of the other college
• we tend to categorise others as relevent ingroup or outgroup prototypes
• we tend to view people as memebers of a group, not as idiosyncratic individuals

Conflict

• ethnocentrism - "a view of things in which one's own group is the centre of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it..."(Sunner, 1906)
• intergroup…