Identity is both personal and social

Our identities are formed not only by what makes us different from other individuals, but also by the ways in which we identify with certain others. For example, you are different from your brother because your personalities and interests are different, but you also identify with each other for being part of the same family and sharing the same nationality. Identity is both individual and collective; both personal and social.

In their seminal work on intergroup conflict, Henri Tajfel and John Turner (1979) described the distinction between personal identity, which is a set of features that distinguishes the individual unique self from all other persons, and social identity, which is the internalization of collective identifications. The latter could be belonging to groups (collectives of people that are defined by and recognized by their members, such as nationality) or to categories (collectives that are externally defined without necessarily being recognized by their members, such as income level).

A significant difference between individual and collective identification is that the former emphasizes difference and the latter similarity. Contemporary perspectives have stressed that this is indeed only a matter of their respective emphases: both emerge out of the interplay of similarity and difference, and need to be understood in one integrated model.

One such model is social identity theory (Jenkins, 2008), which arose from criticizing an influential body of social theory that holds that the most important marker for identity is difference: on defining what one is not; on a contrast with an Other. The social identity approach instead stresses that “to say who I am is to say who or what I am not, but it is also to say with whom I have things in common” (Jenkins, 2008). We thus need to be considering dynamics of external and internal definition; exclusion and inclusion; categorization of others and group identification; out-group and in-group; them and us.

This approach is however still limited by being rooted in social sciences. There is more to the concept of identity, which is to be sought in psychology: individual personalities, independent from membership of social groups, yet also formed by those. All cultures value and encourage certain personality traits more than others, and personality types can look differently across cultures. This is one of the topics this blog aims to explore.


References:
Jenkins, R. (2008). Social Identity (3rd ed.) New York: Routledge.
Tajfel, H. & Turner, J C. 1979. An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict. In W.G. Austin and S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks- Cole.