Social Identity Theory: Us, Them and the Languages We Speak

1A jogger falls in the wrong shirt

In 2005 Mark Levine and colleagues at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom recruited students who were fans of Manchester United football club. Each fan first wrote about why they loved the club. Then they were sent to another building. On the way, a jogger (an actor) slipped on a grass bank, fell and held his ankle, crying out in pain. The researchers changed one thing: the shirt he wore.

Figure 1. Fans helped a stranger far more often when he wore their own team’s shirt (Levine and colleagues, 2005, study 1).

In a second study the researchers changed what the fans were thinking about: they wrote about being football fans in general, not Manchester United fans. Now the jogger in the Liverpool shirt was helped almost as often as the one in the Manchester United shirt, and both far more often than the jogger in a plain shirt. Who counted as “one of us” had widened, and so had helping.

21. Tajfel and Turner’s three processes

Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979) argued that people get part of their self-esteem from their groups, through three processes that happen one after another:

32. Basking in reflected glory

Robert Cialdini and colleagues (1976) counted how many students at seven American universities wore clothes bearing their university’s name on Mondays. More did so after their football team had won at the weekend. When asked to describe a game, students more often said “we won” after a victory and “they lost” after a defeat. Linking yourself to a successful group, called basking in reflected glory, raises self-esteem; distancing yourself from a failing one protects it. Fans celebrating a national team’s win show the same thing.

43. When a group’s status is low

Tajfel and Turner predicted three strategies when people feel their group compares badly with others:

• Individual mobility: leaving the group, or distancing yourself from it, if the boundaries allow (for example, avoiding your home language in public).
• Social creativity: changing the comparison, such as valuing a different quality (“our language has the richest proverbs”).
• Social competition: challenging the higher-status group directly, for example by campaigning for your language to be used in schools or the media.

54. Language as a badge of identity

Language is one of the most powerful markers of group membership: within seconds, an accent tells listeners which groups a speaker may belong to. Howard Giles’s communication accommodation theory describes two responses:

• Convergence: shifting your speech towards the listener’s (vocabulary, accent, language choice) to gain approval or show solidarity, as when a visitor greets market sellers in Kinyarwanda.
• Divergence: emphasising differences in speech to mark your own group identity, as when fans chant in their own language at a match against a foreign team.

65. A wider “us”

Levine’s second study suggests a practical lesson: helping and trust grow when people adopt a superordinate identity, one that includes former out-groups. After the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda’s Ndi Umunyarwanda (“I am Rwandan”) programme, launched in 2013, has promoted a shared national identity above other social categories. Social identity theory predicts that such an identity can reduce in-group favouritism, provided people genuinely accept it rather than feel it is imposed.