3 Acting Like an Individual versus Feeling Like an Individual

ion. (p. 51) With this statement, Turner et al. (1987) were distancing themselves from the group mind idea, originally put forward by Le Bon (1896) and McDougall (1921) at the turn of the twentieth century to explain crowd behavior. Turner et al. took pains, in their original theory and elsewhere, to explain that depersonalization is not like a group mind, not an altered state of consciousness, in which the individual is lost and the collective takes over. It is simply a redefinition of identity in more inclusive terms. The individual level of self-categorization is “the subordinate level of personal self-categorizations based on differentiations between oneself as a unique individual and other ingroup members that define one as a specific individual person (e.g., in terms of one’s personality or other kinds of individual differences)” (Turner et al., 1987, p. 45). People categorize at this level when their status as a unique individual is made salient, again by their own motives and predilections and/or by the context in which they find themselves. When people self-categorize at the individual level, they think of themselves in terms of the qualities that differentiate them from other ingroup members. They think and act as unique individuals. The individual level of self-categorization seems reassuringly familiar to most self researchers, especially as compared to the collective level; it reflects how Western psychologists (not to mention laypeople) typically think about self-functioning. However, the formulation offered by selfcategorization theory diverges somewhat from the received view. Specifically, categorization at the individual level still involves viewing the self within a social context – that of one particular ingroup. One’s relation to that ingroup determines the properties of the self that come to the fore. Therefore, just as one has many collective self-categories, for all the groups to which one belongs, one has many individual self-categories, 03-Postmes-3346-03.qxd 11/2/2005 7:19 PM Page 39