As a
forerunner to embarking on this Phd in Performance Writing, I went on a short
trip to France and took a couple of photographs of French “street furniture”.
The pictures depict signage that is viewed by most readers as distinctively
French. The font, colour and design have French characteristics. Every detail
performs as a French identity. How did this come to be so?
Social
identity theory is not new. The individuals self concept derived from a
perceived membership in a particular social group has for some time been the
subject of study. Ideas relating to sense of place, place attachment,
intergroup behaviour, group status and intergroup mobility have come to form
part of what is termed self categorisation theory or rather a social identity
approach to identity.
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| Tajfel |
In
my meanderings I have come across Henri Tajfel, a Polish, naturalised British,
social psychologist best known for
his pioneering work on the cognitive aspects of prejudice and social identity theory,
as well as being one of the founders of the European Association of
Experimental Social Psychology.
He conducted a series of
experiments, investigating the role of categorization. One of his most notable
experiments looked at the way that people judged the length of lines. He found
that the imposition of a category directly affected judgements. If the lines,
which were presented individually, were shown without any category label, then
errors of judgement tended to be random. If the longest lines were each
labelled A, and the shortest were labelled B, then the errors
followed a pattern. Perceivers would tend to judge the lines of each category
(whether A or B) as being more similar to each other than they
were; and perceivers would judge the differences between categories as greater
than they were (i.e., the differences between the longest B line
and the shortest 'A' line). These findings have continued to influence
subsequent work on categorization and have been replicated subsequently.
Tajfel viewed these
investigations into social judgement as being directly related to the issue of
prejudice. Imposing category distinctions on lines (A and B) was
like dividing the social world into different groups of people
(e.g., French, Germans, British). The results of his experiments showed
how cognitively deep-seated it was for perceivers to assume that all members of
a certain nationality-based category (for instance, all the French or all the
British) were more similar to each other than they actually were, and to assume
that the members of different categories differed more than they did (for
instance, to exaggerate the differences between the French and the British). In
this respect, the judging of lines was similar to making stereotyped judgements
about social groups. Tajfel also argued that if the categories were of value to
the perceiver, then these processes of exaggeration were likely to be enhanced.
The implications of this position were
profound. It meant that some of the basic psychological roots of prejudice lay
not in particular personality types, but in general, "ordinary"
processes of thinking, especially processes of categorising.
So where does this take me towards an
understanding of ‘written identity’? Is my perception that these French signs
are symbols of Frenchness correct, or is it some prejudice in my ordinary
process of thinking? Or is it simply the performance of the writing?
