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Henri Tajfel's Social Identity Theory Analysis

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Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory hypothesizes that if someone wishes to boost their self-image, based on either personal or social identities, they try to build up their self-esteem. This implies that to be able to feel important and needed in their society, they can improve their self-esteem through personal or group accomplishments. The cognitive process of social categorization establishes the social identity theory. Many social aspects were formed by this theory, such as: stereotyping, favoritism and ethnocentrism. Social identification underlines these attitudes due to social categorization, which can cause competitive behavior. Cialdini et al. validates this paradox by testing the social identity theory on collage football advocates. After a winning football game, it is more prone that the advocates would be seen wearing their team jerseys contradictory to if they would have lost. This is because people want to have the feeling they belong to a group. If your football team wins, your self-esteem automatically increases which is preserved by social comparison, which is when the profit of being part of a group is bigger than then profit of not being part of a group. In order to increase our self-image we heighten the status of the group to which we belong. For example, Germany is the world cup champion in football. We can also increase our self-esteem by holding prejudice against the out-group, for example, Brazil is not as good …show more content…

As Cialdini et al. and Henri Tajfel demonstrated, the roles of social categorization in group behaviors and the differences between social categorization and social comparison, can be used to justify how we construct individual identities and group identities concerning “in” and “out” groups through the social identity theory. It can also express why prejudice exists in all human

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