colloquium at Waterloo

[Yvonne Weppler]

Colloquium Presentation

Department of Psychology
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
 
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

2:30PM

PAS 1241

Dr. Ying-yi Hong
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


"Static versus Dynamic Approach to Social Identity and Cultural Processes"

 

According to Social Identity Theory, social identities play a crucial role in self-conception and intergroup perceptions.  We asked whether the beliefs people hold would make a difference in their social identification processes.  Our goal is to integrate social identity and implicit theory approaches.  Specifically, we make a distinction between a static approach and a dynamic approach to social group perception.  The static approach is associated with viewing human character as fixed and attempts to diagnose fixed attributes from social group memberships, whereas the dynamic approach is associated with viewing human character as malleable and attempts to understand the dynamics of the social groups (such as goals and missions).  I will review studies that have shown, on the one hand, people holding the static approach are more likely to view their self-claimed social identities as useful guides for important aspects of the self than are people holding the dynamic approach.  On the other hand, because people holding the static approach have inferred a set of fixed attributes from social group membership, they are less likely than are people holding the dynamic approach to reduce their prejudice of a maligned group even when the maligned group belong to a common ingroup.  In sum, to people holding a static approach, social identities seem to prescribe a set of preformed attributes that are immutable to changes in intergroup contexts.  To people holding a dynamic approach, social identities are constantly being negotiated in different intergroup contexts.  I then apply these two approaches to understand the cultural frame switching process that often found among bicultural individuals.