Brewer, M. B. & Gardner, W. (1996). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71(1), 83–93.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
León (NOTE-1309, fn. 14, 25) cites it for the relational self, the level between self-categorization theory’s personal and social identity, where close-relationship we-ness lives.
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Brewer 2007 (NOTE-1290), by the paper’s first author, restates its framework (pp. 2–3, 14): three levels of self-representation, individual, relational and collective, as “three separate systems with different identity properties, locus of agency, and motivational concerns”; the relational self personalized, the collective self depersonalized; and the 1996 paper’s suggestion that the opposed needs of optimal distinctiveness operate at the individual and relational levels too. Missing still: the paper’s experiments (priming “we” and their effects on self-descriptions and social comparison), the bases of self-worth and frames of reference it assigns each level (both as the LIT’s summary describes it), and its data.