nucleation

LIT-1794: Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-28 (NOTE-1284) from a scan of the published article supplied by the owner; worth reading as the shortest statement, by its authors, of self-categorization theory's view of the self: personal and social identity are equally authentic levels of self-categorization, salience is readiness times fit (metacontrast and normative fit), and the level, kind, content and prototype of self-categories vary with the comparative frame. It goes on to speculate that the self is generated in context rather than stored. A theoretical paper whose evidence is the group's own studies, reported without data. Source of THEORY-1114.
Tagssocial-identity, social-science, self
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1284 — Self and Collective: Cognition and Social Context
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1114 — 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

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Turner, J. C., Oakes, P. J., Haslam, S. A. & McGarty, C. (1994). Self and collective: Cognition and social context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20(5), 454–463. doi:10.1177/0146167294205002.

Read in full in NOTE-1284, from a scan of the published article supplied by the owner.

Why this is here

The theory’s short statement on the self, companion to the book (LIT-1723). Its thesis, that the self is not a fixed structure but a categorization made afresh relative to the comparison at hand, is a claim about what a self is and bears on the record’s self topic and on the variability that CASE-104’s fans show.

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