THE GRAND ILLUSION OF SOCIAL IDENTITY

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.

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?