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LIT-1765: Reconceptualizing Individuals, Categories, and the Social Group: Self-Categorization Theory 2.0

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1295) from the PsyArXiv preprint, v2; worth reading as a sympathetic insider's critique of self-categorization theory that quotes the 1987 book's chapter 3 assumptions and hypotheses verbatim with page numbers, so it stands in for the unread book's core statement. It argues that categorization yields interchangeability, not a group entity; that meta-contrast is computationally intractable as a basis for entity formation; and that groups are perceived from cues to collective intentionality. Unreviewed; its key experiments are under review. Source of THEORY-1112.
Tagssocial-identity, social-science, social-ontology, cognition
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1295 — Reconceptualizing Individuals, Categories, and the Social Group: Self-Categorization Theory 2.0
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-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

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Skorich, D. P. (2025; version 2, 2026). Reconceptualizing individuals, categories, and the social group: Self-categorization theory 2.0. PsyArXiv preprint. doi:10.31234/osf.io/h7s9p_v2.

Read in full in NOTE-1295.

Why this is here

Turner et al. 1987 (LIT-1723) cannot be read. This paper takes “the plain language reading” of that book’s chapter 3, and of Oakes’s chapter 6, as its definition of the theory, and quotes the book’s assumptions and hypotheses with page numbers (pp. 42–56). It is the record’s closest lawful access to the book’s own words. It is also the strongest critique the record holds of meta-contrast, the mechanism behind THEORY-1114.

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