Connecting the person to the social: The functions of social identification.

Abstract

After decades of emphasizing the individual, U.S. social psychologists have rediscovered the social self. Nudged by their European colleagues, who have typically placed more emphasis on group-level phenomena (Doise, 1986), significant numbers of U.S. investigators have turned their attention to questions that address the links between self and others. Social psycholo­ gists are theoretically committed to exploring the links between individuals and their social worlds. Yet, with our skill in creating specific social settings for experimental participants, we sometimes fail to pay attention to the larger social system in which people actually engage, choose, respond, and despair. A comprehensive analysis of the social self needs to attend to these issues and to develop theoretical models that explicitly incorporate the social as well as the individual.