the desire to develop and maintain a favorable self-image motivates people.
The self-image includes both a personal self, which reflects idiosyncratic
aspects of the self, and a social self, which reflects information about the
groups to which people belong.

Because their sense of self is influenced by information about the groups
to which they belong, people are motivated to join groups that have a
favorable social status. Furthermore, people try to enhance the status of
the groups to which they belong (ingroup bias) and to diminish the status
of other groups (outgroup derogation). That is, they try to improve their
status relative to other groups. According to social identity theory, such
relative judgments (i.e., being in a group that is better than other groups)
enhance favorable feelings about people's own groups and, through these
feelings, about themselves (the "positive distinctiveness dynamic").

Tajfel ( 1981) demonstrated the important identity-conferring properties
of group membership through a series of now classic minimal group experi-
ments. Tajfel arbitrarily created groups by using meaningless distinctions,
such as a preference for types of abstract art or the overestimation or
underestimation of the number of dots in a displayed array. Once created,
these group categories were found to have powerful effects on people's
attitudes and behaviors toward their own and other groups. For example,
as already noted, people both enhanced their evaluations of their own group
and derogated other groups. Furthermore, if given the opportunity, they
distributed resources in ways that maximized the superiority of their own
group's resources relative to the resources of other groups.

According to the social identity theory argument, the desire to enhance
their social selves motivates people's attitudes and behaviors in intergroup
situations. In other words, people want to maximize the value of the groups
to which they belong because that value influences their social selves. The
social self, in turn, influences feelings of self-worth and self-esteem.

The chapters in this volume build on the social identity theory-based
assumption that people create a social self. By using information about the
groups to which they belong to inform their sense of themselves, people
shape their social selves in terms of the categories that are salient in group
divisions (social categorization). Having differentiated the world into cate-
gories, people then judge their worth as individuals at least partly through
the favorability of the status of the groups to which they belong.

The chapters in this volume were first presented at a conference on the
social self held at the Institute of Personality and Social Research of the
University of California, Berkeley, in July 1996. The conference participants
generally agreed that the core argument of social identity theory--that peo-
ple use group memberships to define themselves--was an important and
valuable beginning point for a wide variety of analyses. The chapters reflect
the diversity of approaches that researchers have taken to this argument.

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