Diversity in the person, diversity in the group: Challenges of identity complexity for social perception and social interaction

Social psychological research is increasingly coming to grips with the complexity of social identity within the individual, both from the perspective of perceivers trying to form impressions and make judgments about multiply categorizable targets, as well as from the perspective of actors using their different self-aspects as a framework for guiding their interactions with the social world. I review several contributions to the effort to better understand these issues and then explore some of their possible implications for understanding the nature and consequences of diversity within the group. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The importance of social categories in guiding social cognition and behavior was recognized decades ago by seminal figures in social psychology (Allport, 1954; Sherif, 1948; Tajfel, 1974). Since then, research on social categorization and associated phenomena such as stereotyping and intergroup conflict has flowed in a steadily increasing stream, attesting to the theoretical centrality and practical significance of these issues. Much of the social psychological research that has been conducted in this tradition has focused on one identity dimension at a time (e.g., race or sex or nationality) and has assumed the existence of distinct, discrete categories within a given dimension (e.g., clearly defined racial groups) rather than overlapping, blended, or ambiguous categories. In addition, researchers often tend either to adopt the perspective of the observer, asking how social categories are imposed on target persons in the course of social perception, or they adopt the perspective of the actor, asking how categorical identities are claimed or disavowed in the course of self-perception, and how these identities influence subsequent selfregulation. These research traditions have yielded undeniably rich and diverse insights into the dynamics of social categorization, but the picture they have produced has not fully come to terms with some of the inherent complexities of social categorization. In recent times, researchers have begun to turn their attention more explicitly toward the multifaceted nature of social identities. The diversity of identity, within the individual, has been increasingly recognized and investigated, both from the perceiver’s and the actor’s perspectives. The impact of a group’s diversity on group dynamics and productivity has also been increasingly recognized in recent years, but the issue becomes more complicated when one recognizes the diversity that resides within the individual members comprising the group. In this article, I review some of the recent research and theory bearing on the diversity of identity, considering its implications both for individuals and groups. As will become clear, many key issues remain ripe for empirical exploration. artment of Psychology, Northwestern University, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2710, USA. s, Ltd. Received 1 April 2009 Accepted 9 April 2009 2 Galen V. Bodenhausen DIVERSITY IN THE PERSON For fairly obvious reasons, researchers interested in racism often conduct experiments in which a target’s apparent race (and/or the perceiver’s race) varies, while other aspects of the person are ignored or held constant. By focusing on this single identity dimension, the overarching role of race can be discerned and evaluated. Similar approaches have been taken in research on sexism, ageism, and other forms of identity-based prejudice, with many valuable insights accruing. However, these approaches ignore the inherently multifaceted nature of social identity. By arranging experimental manipulations so that only one specific social category is salient, researchers bypass fundamental questions about how the multiplicity of social identity might be spontaneously navigated in the absence of direct experimental cueing. Fortunately, other research approaches have more to say about this issue, and a picture is emerging of the factors that determine when and how particular identities become focal and how they function in relation to one another. The Complexity of Identity The idea that an actor’s identity is not stable but rather shifts across time was a central feature of the dramaturgical perspective advanced by the advocates of symbolic interactionism (Burke, 1945; Goffman, 1959). One particular variant of this approach, role theory (e.g., Stryker, 1968; Stryker & Serpe, 1982), proposed that each social identity an individual possesses exists in a hierarchy of salience; the actual momentary salience of any given social role is assumed to dictate its power to guide and constrain behavior, and as salience shifts, behavior shifts in a corresponding manner. From this perspective, the diversity of the person resides in the repertoire of social roles and identities occupied by the individual. In more recent decades, the dynamics through which different social categories become self-defining have been conceptualized most influentially by self-categorization theorists (SCT; Turner, Hogg, Oakes, Reicher, &Wetherell, 1987; Turner, Oakes, Haslam, &McGarty, 1994). Although framed in terms of how the categorization of the self changes across situations, the theory assumes corresponding patterns in the categorization of others. Its key insight is that social identities come spontaneously into focus in a given situation to the degree that they provide a contextually meaningful framework for defining it as an intergroup situation. The contextual meaningfulness of social categories is postulated to depend on the degree to which they provide comparative fit (by accounting for patterns of similarity and difference across individuals; e.g., Wegener & Klauer, 2004) and normative fit (by aligning observed behavior with the norms associated with particular groups; Oakes, 1987). Other variables that can contextually influence patterns of categorization include the relative distinctiveness of a given identity (e.g., Nelson &Miller, 1995) and the extent towhich activating a categorical identity can satisfy momentarily influential personal goals and motives (e.g., Mussweiler, Gabriel, & Bodenhausen, 2000). All of these perspectives emphasize dynamic and flexible shifts in the salience of social categories across time, with their influence on behavior waxing and waning correspondingly. A given individual’s identity can shift across distinct dimensions (e.g., sex versus ethnicity versus nationality, etc.) as well as along a more ‘‘vertical’’ dimension, as emphasized in SCT (i.e., personal level, subgroup level, ‘‘basic’’ group level, superordinate group level). Consider Barack Obama. He can potentially be categorized as male, a US citizen, a politician, Christian, etc. Within any of these categories, relatively more inclusive or exclusive bases for categorization exist (e.g., for the geopolitical identity ‘‘US citizen,’’ we could think of ‘‘Chicagoans’’ as a more exclusive subtype for him and ‘‘North Americans’’ as a more inclusive one). In theory, all of these different ways of categorizing Obama could be relatively independent of one another, but in practice they clearly are not. For one thing, any of the seemingly distinct, independent bases for categorization can serve to define a more exclusive subtype of another category (e.g., ‘‘Black Americans’’ or ‘‘AmericanMen’’). Penner and Saperstein (2008) reported evidence showing that perceived race—a category often thought of in biologically essentialist terms (Hirschfeld, 1996)—is determined to a noteworthy degree by a person’s social status. That is, the racial categories ascribed to others, and the racial categories that are self-ascribed, can change as a function of changes in an individual’s social status, as marked by membership in categories like ‘‘prisoners’’ and ‘‘the unemployed.’’ Thus, conceptually orthogonal identity dimensions can interact to determine social categorization. Much more research needs to address the general psychological principles governing such interactions, although as reviewed below, many interesting clues are already available. The diversity of the person is greatly expanded beyond his or her basic repertoire of identities by the many potential interactions among these roles. It is evident not only in shifts in categorization across time but also in contemporaneous influences and intersections of identities that can modify their basic characteristics. Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 40, 1–16 (2010)