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The Search for Social Identity Leads to "Us' versus "Them"

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The Search for Social Identity Leads to "Us' versus "Them"

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Human societies are constantly rearranging themselves, causing profound disruptions in our social lives. The industrial revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries fragmented communities as people moved for work, the decay of empires in the early 20th century reconfigured nations and national identities, and the Great Depression of the 1930s shattered people's economic security and future prospects. But we are now in what is perhaps a time of unprecedented uncertainty. The early 21st century is characterized by rapid and overwhelming change: globalization, immigration, technological revolution, unlimited access to information, sociopolitical volatility, the automation of work and a warming climate.

People need to have a firm sense of identity and of their place in the world, and for many the pace and magnitude of such change can be alienating. This is because our sense of self is a fundamental organizing principle for our own perceptions, feelings, attitudes and actions. Typically it is anchored in our close interpersonal relationships, such as with our friends, family and partners, and in the variety of social groups and categories that we belong to and identify with-our nationality, religion, ethnicity, profession. It allows us to predict with some confidence how others will view us and treat us.

Imagine navigating all the situations and people we encounter in day-to-day life while continually feeling uncertain about who we are, how to behave and how social interactions will unfold. We would feel disorientated, anxious, stressed, cognitively depleted, and lacking agency and control. This self-uncertainty can, in fact, be experienced as an exciting challenge if we feel we have the material, social and psychological resources to resolve it. If we feel we do not have these resources, however, it can be experienced as a highly aversive threat to us and our place in the world.

Generally, self-uncertainty is a sensation that people are motivated to reduce. When people are increasingly unsure about who they are and how they fit into this rapidly changing landscape, it can be-and indeed has become-a real problem for society. People are supporting and enabling authoritarian leaders, flocking to ideologies and worldviews that promote and celebrate the myth of a glorious past. Fearful of those who are different from them, they seek homogeneity and become intoxicated by the freedom to access only information that confirms who they are or who they would like to be. As a result, global populism is on the rise.

Seeking Social Identity

One powerful source of identity resides in social groups. They can be highly effective at reducing a person's self-uncertainty-particularly if such groups are distinctive and have members who share a sense of interdependence.

Groups play this central role in anchoring who we are because they are social categories, and research shows that social categorization is ubiquitous. A person categorizes others as either "in-group" or "out-group" members. They assign the group's attributes and social standing to those others, thereby constructing a subjective world where groups are internally homogeneous and the differences between groups are exaggerated and polarized in an ethnocentric manner. And because we also categorize ourselves, we internalize shared in-group-defining attributes as part of who we are. To build social identity, we psychologically surround ourselves with those who are like us.

This psychological process that causes people to identify with groups and behave as group members is called social categorization. It anchors and crystallizes our sense of self by assigning us an identity that prescribes how we should behave, what we should think and how we should make sense of the world. It also makes interaction predictable, allows us to anticipate how people will treat and think about us, and furnishes consensual identity confirmation: people like us-the in-group members-validate who we are.

This self-uncertainty social-identity dynamic is not in itself a bad thing. It enables the collective organization that lies at the heart of human society. Human achievements that require the coordination of many in the service of common goals cannot be achieved by individuals on their own. Yet this dynamic becomes a problem when the sense of self-uncertainty and identity threat is acute, enduring and all-encompassing. People then experience an overwhelming need for identity-and not just any identities but ones that are well equipped to resolve those disorienting, even scary, feelings.

Reducing Uncertainty through Group Membership

Some features of groups and social identities are especially well suited to reducing self-uncertainty. Most important, groups need to be polarized from other groups and have unambiguous boundaries that distinguish between those who are "in" and those who are "out." Internally they need to be clearly structured, typically in a hierarchical way. These features make the group cohesive and homogeneous, such that members are interdependent and of one mind in sharing a common fate.

Diversity and dissent reinstate uncertainty and are therefore avoided. When these facets do occur, individuals and the group as a whole react decisively and harshly, creating an atmosphere of suspicion that lays the ground for persecution of alleged deviants. It breeds an opportunity for personal dislikes and vendettas to escalate under the guise of protecting cohesion.

That members are accepted and trusted fully is important not only for the group but also for the members themselves. After all, they desperately want to be included so that their identity is validated and their uncertainty thus reduced. Prospective and new members-and those who suspect they are viewed with suspicion or are uncertain about whether they are fully accepted-will go to extremes on behalf of the group to prove their membership credentials and loyalty. These individuals are vulnerable to zealotry and radicalization. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists who publicly engage in violent acts of terrorism and racial hatred are one example of this extremism.

The social identity embodied by such groups also needs to be uncomplicated so that it can be taken at face value as "the truth." Subtlety and nuance are anathema because they are an impediment to uncertainty reduction. Clarity on where the group stands allows its members to know how they should think and feel-as well as behave. Such identities are bolstered by having a strong ideology that identifies distasteful and morally bankrupt out-groups who can be demonized and cast in the role of "enemy." Conspiracy theories thrive in this environment because they establish these out-groups as agents of historical victimization by the in-group.

How Uncertainty Breeds Populism

If self-uncertainty motivates people to identify with a group and internalize that identity as a key part of who they are, they need to be confident that they know exactly what their group's identity is. When you need what you consider to be reliable and trusted sources of identity information, where do you turn? The first port of call is whoever you believe is consensually viewed by the group as its leadership-typically someone whose leadership position is also formalized.

Recent research on how self-uncertainty affects the type of leaders that individuals prefer paints a potentially alarming picture. People just need someone to tell them what to do-and ideally those directives are coming from someone whom they can trust as "one of us." Self-uncertain people have also been shown to prefer leaders who are assertive and authoritarian, even autocratic, and who deliver a simple, black-and-white, affirmational message about "who we are" rather than a more open, nuanced and textured identity message.

Perhaps most troubling is that self-uncertainty can enable and build support for leaders who possess the so-called Dark Triad personality attributes: Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy. Self-uncertainty, in other words, seems to fuel populism.

Another source of identity information is "people like you" who you feel embody the group's identity and see the world in the same way as you do. These can be people with whom you interact face-to-face or as friends, or they can be sources of information such as radio and television channels, particularly news outlets, that you watch. But nowadays these sources are overwhelmingly information and influence nodes on the Internet, such as Web sites, social media, Twitter feeds, podcasts, and so forth.

The Web is an ideal place to decrease the discomfort of self-uncertainty because it provides nonstop access to unlimited information that is often cherry-picked by individuals themselves and algorithms that do it discreetly. Therefore, people are accessing only identity-confirming information. Confirmation bias, a powerful and universal human bias that is especially strong under uncertainty, separates information and identity universes that fragment and polarize society. Online, people can easily seek out groups that may not be readily available in their physical lives.

The Internet further empowers confirmation bias under uncertainty because people want to be surrounded by those who think alike so that their identities and worldview are continuously confirmed. The contours of "truth" then get mapped onto these self-contained social-identity universes. In this scenario, there are no absolute truths and no motivation to seriously explore and incorporate alternative viewpoints because that would be kryptonite to social identity's power to reduce self-uncertainty. This dynamic helps to explain why people dwell in increasingly homogeneous echo chambers that confirm their identity.

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The Search for Social Identity Leads to ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’

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Uncertainty in the world threatens our sense of self. To cope, people embrace populism

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"Who Are You"? The Never Ending Journey Of Identity Development

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"Who Are You"? The Never Ending Journey Of Identity Development

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You might think you're one and the same person all your life. Think again - Your true identity only settles after your last breath.

Photo by Gerome Viavant on Unsplash

'Who are you?' Instinctively you'd probably answer that question stating your name, age, background, hobbies and job. Explaining who you truly are, is no topic for small talks. And there's no shame in that. Your true identity...

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'Who Are You?' The Never-Ending Journey Of Identity Development

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You might think you're one and the same person all your life. Think again - Your true identity only settles after your last breath. 'Who are you?' Instinctively you'd probably answer that question stating your name, age, background, hobbies and job. Explaining who you truly are, is no topic for small talks.

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The Perks of being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

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The Perks of being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

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Dear Patron: Please don't scroll past this. The Internet Archive is a nonprofit fighting for universal access to quality information, powered by online donations averaging about $17. Join the one in a thousand users that support us financially-if our library is useful to you, please pitch in.

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The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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standing on the fringes of life...offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to seewhat it looks like from the dance floor.This haunting novel about...

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Rudy Esposo Download PDF

A tour-de-force by New York Times bestselling graphic novelist Gene Yang, American Born Chinese tells the story of three apparently unrelated characters: Jin Wang, who moves to a new neighborhood with his family only to discover that he's the only Chinese-American student at his new school; the powerful Monkey King, subject of one of the oldest and greatest Chinese fables; and Chin-Kee, a personification of the ultimate negative Chinese stereotype, who is ruining his cousin Danny's life with his yearly visits. Their lives and stories come together with an unexpected twist in this action-packed modern fable. American Born Chinese is an amazing ride, all the way up to the astonishing climax.

American Born Chinese is the winner of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature, the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, an Eisner Award nominee for Best Coloring, a 2007 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller. Gene Luen Yang was the fifth the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and is a MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of what's popularly known as the MacArthur "Genius" Grant. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/118944.American_Born_Chinese)

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American Born Chinese - Rudy Esposo Flip PDF | AnyFlip

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Check American Born Chinese from Rudy Esposo here. Like American Born Chinese? Just add American Born Chinese of Rudy Esposo to My Favorites. Embed American Born Chinese to websites for free. Check all flipbooks from Rudy Esposo. Upload PDF to create a flipbook like American Born Chinese now.

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brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

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brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

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Jacqueline Woodson: Brown Girl Dreaming Unit Plans

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Jacqueline Woodson: Brown Girl Dreaming Unit Plans

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My Name is Maria Isabel by Alma Flor Ada

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My Name is Maria Isabel by Alma Flor Ada

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https://www.google.com/search?q=my+name+is+maria+isabel+pdf&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS1007US1011&oq=my+name+is+mari&aqs=chrome.2.0i355i512j46i512j0i512l3j46i512j69i57j0i512l3.5610j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:3fa58b76,vid:b3AYl64yMAM

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In 2017, the long running children's television show, introduced a new character as a way to explain autism. Julia is painting alongside some other friends (all muppets), when Big Bird approaches the group. Known for its delicate and honest handling of sensitive topics, Sesame Street has previously created characters and scenarios to address race, poverty, and death. Big Bird initially has trouble understanding Julia's different actions until Alan (the human character) explains what autism is like for Julia. Through the segment, Big Bird learns that he can be friends and have fun with Julia, despite her differences, and that autism can be different depending on the person. In the end, all the characters break into an inclusive song, "we can all be friends," illustrating that we all have things that make us unique individuals.

discussion

Why does Alan indicate that Julia likes when people knows she has autism? Why did Sesame Street include that line?

How are we made aware of Julia's disability? What are some of the different ways she experiences and responds to various situations?

What does Big Bird learn about Julia and himself in playing tag?

What do we learn about autism through Julia's character? What do we learn about how we might interact with someone who has a disability?

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Sesame Street-Julia - Critical Media Project

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In 2017, the long running children's television show, Sesame Street introduced a new character as a way to explain autism. Julia is painting alongside some other friends (all muppets), when Big Bird approaches the group. Known for its delicate and ... Continue reading →

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Critical Media Project: Disability Lesson Plan

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Critical Media Project: Disability Lesson Plan

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Critical Media Project : Class Lesson Plan

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Critical Media Project : Class Lesson Plan

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Critical Media Project: Race and Ethnicity Lesson Plans

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Critical Media Project: Race and Ethnicity Lesson Plans

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Critical Media Project : Age Lesson Plan

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Critical Media Project : Age Lesson Plan

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Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they hit the water, that they were drowning-that they had to experience death before entering adulthood. The next day, I told my father about the dream. He revealed that, when I was three, when we were living in Pittsburgh, he took me to see a truckful of catfish being pumped into an artificial pond. I was too young to remember this. But somewhere in my mind the vision of fish being spewed into water had lodged itself, resurfacing more than twenty-five years later.

These days, it's common to find an image emerging, unbeckoned, from the reservoir of the past. We spend hours wading through streams of photos, many of which document, in unprecedented ways, our daily lives. Facebook was invented in 2004. By 2015, Kate Eichhorn writes in " The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media," people were sharing thirty million images an hour on Snapchat, and British parents "posted, on average, nearly two hundred photographs of their child online each year." For those who have grown up with social media-a group that includes pretty much everyone under twenty-five-childhood, an era that was fruitfully mysterious for the rest of us, is surprisingly accessible. According to Eichhorn, a media historian at the New School, this is certain to have some kind of profound effect on the development of identity. What that effect will be we're not quite sure.

Eichhorn sees both sides of the coin. On the one hand, she says, children and teen-agers have gained a level of control that they didn't have before. In the past, adults refused to acknowledge children's agency, or imposed on them an idealized notion of innocence and purity. Adults were the ones writing books, taking photos with expensive cameras, and commissioning paintings, all of which tended to commemorate childhood-to look back at it-rather than participate in it. The arrival of cheaply made instant photos, in the nineteen-sixties, allowed children to seize a means of production, and the arrival of the Internet gave them an unprecedented degree of self-determination. "If childhood was once constructed and recorded by adults and mirrored back to children (e.g., in a carefully curated family photo album or a series of home video clips), this is no longer the case," Eichhorn writes. "Today, young people create images and put them into circulation without the interference of adults."

This practice can be hugely beneficial. New technology-especially the smartphone-allows us to produce a narrative of our lives, to choose what to remember and what to contribute to our own mythos. For Eichhorn, this is the latest instance of a long-held, if mysterious, practice. "Long before children were able to create, edit, and curate images of their lives," she writes, "they were already doing so on a psychic level." Freud called these images "screen memories"-no pun intended-and he thought that we used them to soften or obscure painful experiences. Humans have always tried to cope with the difficulty of memory, to turn it "from an intolerable horror to something which is reassuringly innocuous and familiar." Social media just makes us more adept at it.

On the other hand, Eichhorn writes, such media can prevent those who wish to break with their past from doing so cleanly. We're not the only ones posting; our friends and family chronicle our lives, usually without our consent. Growing up online, Eichhorn worries, might impede our ability to edit memories, cull what needs to be culled, and move on. "The potential danger is no longer childhood's disappearance, but rather the possibility of a perpetual childhood," she writes. We may, in short, have traded "screen memories for screens."

This is of particular import for those who yearn to establish new identities. People who transition, for instance, often rely on having a clean break, visually, with their previous appearances; as Eichhorn points out, one of the early promises of the Internet, when it was just "texts and clip art," was that it "presented itself as a safe place [for transgender youth] to try on an aspect of their identities they could not explore in their material lives." Now that the Internet is more permanent, and more pervasive, it's hard to avoid the relics of past identities. Eichhorn cites one of her students, Kevin, an aspiring film critic from a small town in upstate New York. By his second year of college, Kevin says, his Facebook stream "was getting really weird. I had my new friends from New York posting about queer performance art and these guys from my high school posting about dirt biking in a gravel pit and tagging me in photographs from high school. I needed to move on." Although he deactivated his social-media accounts and created new ones under a pseudonym, he continued to be tagged in old photos. "I guess that Kevin is out there for good," he says. "I just have to live with him and all those people he was trying to escape."

The persistence of certain images is more of a problem for some than for others. There are moments, elevated not by the fact of being recorded but by the impossibility of being erased, that become traumatic. These situations-in which a naked photo or an offensive tweet destroys a person's public life-are unfortunate, and widely covered (for example, in Jon Ronson's " So You've Been Publicly Shamed "). Eichhorn details the case of Ghyslain Raza, a Canadian teen-ager who, in 2002, recorded himself wielding a golf-ball retriever as though it were a lightsabre. The video, which was found by a classmate, titled "Star Wars Kid," and uploaded to the Internet, was viewed by millions of people; as Eichhorn points out, this all happened at a time when virality, as a phenomenon, wasn't really a thing. Raza was bullied at school and ended up in a psychiatric ward. In 2013, still unable to escape the video, despite legal action, he spoke publicly about his experience, describing his contemplation of suicide.

Everyone, Eichhorn writes, benefits from experimentation in adolescence. During that time, we exist in what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called a psychosocial "moratorium"-a stage in which we hover "between the morality learned by the child and the ethics to be developed by the adult." The moratorium is a period of trial and error that society allows adolescents, who are permitted to take risks without fear of consequence, in hopes that doing so will clarify a "core self-a personal sense of what gives life meaning." The Internet interrupts the privacy of this era; it tends to scale up mistakes to monumental proportions, and to put them on our permanent records. Colleges and employers now look at social-media accounts for evidence of character. Eichhorn spends less time than she might have on how this affects today's teens. What is it like to live under threat? What are the ramifications when an entire generation never gets the chance to experiment freely or to remake themselves?

Eichhorn does lightly gesture to a kind of universal human right, one that runs counter to the whims of companies that use data. "Forgetting-that once taken-for-granted built-in resource that all humans possessed-is now being pitted against the interests of technology companies," she writes, implying, with an endearing idealism, that we have a right to forget. (For some, this belief might reflect a distinctly American approach to the rest of the world.) More plausibly, she cites the right to be forgotten, which is the nickname of both data privacy regulations in Europe and movements against naming minors in the media. Either way, the implication is that the ability to detach from one's past self-to move laterally, as an individual, into a new body or personality-is a democratic ideal. We also have the right to stay as we are. In some cases, retaining our sense of self across chasms that might destroy it is more important than having a rebellious phase. Take, for instance, the case of migrants, which Eichhorn touches on briefly: "Family members left behind can now stay in constant touch with their sons and daughters and even track their footsteps across Europe." Here, memory is almost a form of political representation, enabled by social media; groups are able to preserve their history as they travel across continents.

Are all photos documentary? In " The Social Photo," Nathan Jurgenson puts forth the useful proposition that most online photos are about sharing experiences, not creating memories. In one passage, Jurgenson, a founder of Real Life magazine, writes that selfies are "less an accurate picture of me at this time in this place and more . . . a visual depiction of the idea of me." They're units of communication, more emojis or hieroglyphics than portraits; they have little context, aren't discernibly located anywhere, and typically come in the aggregate. For the most part, it wouldn't really matter if they existed in twenty years. This explains the prevalence of disappearing photos, like Instagram stories and Snapchat. (Jurgenson is also a sociologist for Snap Inc., Snapchat's parent company.) It also explains photos of food, which are rarely artful or worth saving.

For Jurgenson, taking social photos changes the way vision works-a process that began with the advent of cameras and is still evolving today. Teen-agers are cyborgs, and their phones are mechanical eyes that help them interpret their experience. "To document," Jurgenson writes, "is to be involved with our own experience instead of passively letting it float by." On this subject, Jurgenson has all the right, if somewhat dutiful, opinions: nostalgia is overrated, but he's not into "digital austerity." We shouldn't hark back to an era in which we were less attached to technology-mostly because that era doesn't exist. "Our reality has always been already mediated, augmented, documented," he writes, "and there's no access to some state of unmediated purity." We shouldn't ask whether social photography is good, but how it can be good.

Jurgenson, unlike Eichhorn, isn't worried about the Internet making it hard to bury past versions of ourselves. If anything, he fears the prevalence of death. Photos, he writes, "embalm" their subjects, encasing them in a "stilling sadness that kills what it attempts to save out of a fear of losing it." For him, the risk of constant documentation is alienation: a sense that our bodies are generating still moments rather than constant movement. He cites Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a German scholar who wrote about the effect of the railway on human perception. With its speed and glass windows, "the train flattens nature into something smooth and predictable, not something traveled within but something easily seen and consumed," Jurgenson writes. "As more of life is experienced through camera screens, does it occur at a similar remove, where the messiness of lived experience is made into something merely observable?"

It would, indeed, be stunning if we were able to see painful moments from the past-the ones we meditate on for years-as dead and embalmed. The trouble is, most difficult memories aren't captured by photos, videos, or tweets. Screens, like screen memories, are avoidant; they turn away from the painful. There are few crying children on Instagram. A friend, whose mother digitized all her family's old home videos, recently told me about a significant birthday party at the roller rink. What she remembered was the drama beforehand: at the time, she was obsessed with Rollerblades, and when the rink had only roller skates her mother rushed to a sports store to get an inline pair, barely saving the day. None of this, it turned out, was captured in the video. All it showed was the triumph-a redemptive moment after tears, and a happy loop around the rink.

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Nausicaa Renner writes on how the Internet-especially social-media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat-makes it difficult for people to escape their previous identities.

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Bringing Cultural Context and Self-Identity into Education: Brian Lozenski at TEDxUMN

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Bringing Cultural Context and Self-Identity into Education: Brian Lozenski at TEDxUMN

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story | TED

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Danger of a Single Story | TED

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My identity is a superpower -- not an obstacle

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My identity is a superpower -- not an obstacle | America Ferrera | TED