Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Social identity — the psychology of group membership — social identity and self-categorization theory, how people categorize themselves and others and when a group identity becomes salient, identification and its measurement, in-group bias and intergroup relations, rivalry, recategorization and common in-group identity, group-based emotion, crowds and fandom. What a group is, as ontology, is social-ontology; here it is how people come to see themselves and act as members (ADR-062).
7 of 1352 THEORY documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| THEORY-1111 | Spectators’ identification with football clubs varies on two independent axes, how central the club is to the self (hot or cool) and whether the tie rests on local tradition or on market consumption, giving supporters, followers, fans and flâneurs; and commodification since the late 1980s has shifted identification from supporters towards flâneurs | Giulianotti (2002), LIT-1150, read from the author’s pre-review text. Four ideal types: supporters (traditional/hot: kin-like, topophilic, obligatory), followers (traditional/cool: nested, mediated allegiances), fans (consumer/hot: non-reciprocal intimacy, authenticated by consumption) and flâneurs (consumer/cool: cosmopolitan window-shoppers of clubs). Hypercommodification is said to move identification from supporter towards flâneur, while the spectacle flâneurs consume depends on supporters. Proposed: a conceptual classification with no data, and a trend claim that is asserted, not measured. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1112 | Perceiving people as a group entity, rather than as members of a common category, requires detecting or inferring collective intentionality among them; similarity, and categorization into an equivalence class, yields interchangeable members but not a group | Skorich (2025, v2 2026), LIT-1765, a preprint. Categorization with accentuation makes members interchangeable, not one, since a category is a set and a set is internally differentiated. Groups such as orchestras and families need no similarity. Groups are holistic entities perceived from cues to shared mental states, much as faces are perceived from configuration. Reported support: four experiments under review in which groups defined by a mental state (a chosen T-shirt colour; seeing the duck or the rabbit) drew more favouritism and tracking than groups defined by a physical property. Proposed: the argument is conceptual and the evidence is unpublished. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1113 | In team-sport fandom, perceived rivalry intensity lowers fans’ sense of being respected by the rival’s fans but raises their sense of in-group distinctiveness and cohesion, and these gains run through the perception that the rivalry is reciprocated, not through disidentification with the rival | Berendt & Uhrich (2016), LIT-1147: an SEM of 571 Bundesliga stadium attendees. Rivalry intensity: public collective self-esteem relative to the rival’s fans −.31. Perceived distinctiveness +.27, cohesion +.20, and regard from other clubs’ fans +.09, with direct paths null and indirect effects via perceived reciprocity .18–.20. Disidentification carries almost none. Proposed: one cross-sectional sample, a single-item predictor, a new reciprocity scale, and causal order assumed by the model. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1114 v2 | Which self-category a person uses, what it means and who in it is most typical vary lawfully with the comparative frame of reference: a grouping of self with others becomes salient as the differences within it shrink relative to the differences between it and the rest of the frame (metacontrast) and as those differences match expectations about the category, and as it does, self-perception is depersonalized | Self-categorization theory as restated by Turner, Oakes, Haslam and McGarty (1994), LIT-1794, and reviewed by Hornsey (2008), LIT-1742. Personal and social identity are levels of self-categorization. Salience is perceiver readiness times fit, comparative fit being the metacontrast ratio. The level, kind, content and prototype structure of self-categories shift with the comparison set: Americans read as less aggressive beside Iraq than beside the Soviet Union, and a group’s extreme members become more prototypical in an intergroup context. Proposed: every result in the record comes through the theory’s authors, reported without data, and the account’s stronger claim, that the self is generated rather than stored, is not part of it. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1115 | A we-identity, being one of us, can arise through mutual individualization, in which members grasp one another as non-substitutable and complementary, without depersonalization, as in long friendships and romantic partnerships; so depersonalization is not necessary for a we-identity | León (2023), LIT-1721. Self-categorization theory claims depersonalization as “the basic process underlying group phenomena”, for groups of any size, friendship groups included (Turner et al. 1987, pp. 50, 103, as quoted), and phenomenologists have taken it as the account of the “we”. But close relationships yield we-identities while their members grasp each other as non-substitutable, and relationship research on couple resilience finds the “we” more adaptive the more differentiated the “I”. Proposed: the argument is conceptual, and the cited evidence was not analysed by the source or read here. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1116 | Football fans can identify with a superordinate community of fans across clubs and countries, a European fan community, alongside their club identity rather than in place of it; that identification goes with particularized trust in foreign fans and cross-border viewing, and is independent of attitudes to the sport’s governing institutions | Biel (2026), LIT-1133: a four-country quota survey of 3,685 fans. Club, national and European fan-community identification average 6.1, 5.6 and 5.3 of 10. The European item loads on its own factor in a two-factor solution. It goes with trust in a European fan from elsewhere (b = .34), viewing of foreign leagues, positive views of fans and attachment to Europe, and not with critique of football governance. Proposed: single items, a Heywood case in the factor solution, percentages whose denominator does not match the analysed n, and cross-sectional associations. | Proposed |
| THEORY-1352 | In Van Lange and Bergmann’s model, human cooperation is readily sustained between individuals, above all in dyads, through precise reciprocity, empathy and a partner who cannot be excluded at no cost, and is fragile between groups: categorization alone yields mistrust and in-group favouritism by bounded reciprocity, observed out-group favouritism hardens it into distrust, and only negative interdependence, real or perceived, turns that into costly competition, aggression and hate, so that the processes that build in-group cooperation can fuel intergroup conflict | Van Lange and Bergmann (2026), LIT-2002, read in NOTE-1537. A Perspective: a staged model drawn from the authors’ selection of the literature on social dilemmas and intergroup relations, with no new data and no pooled effect sizes. Proposed because the stages are proposed and not tested together. The refinement that matters to the record: lower cooperation between groups does not need conflicting interests, and harm to the out-group does. | Proposed |