Social attraction also occurs because one’s ingroup prototypes are generally more favorable than one’s outgroup prototypes thus, liking reflects prototypicality and the valence of the prototype. Another aspect of social attraction is that outgroup members are liked less than ingroup members outgroupers are very unprototypical of the ingroup. Likewise, less prototypical members are unpopular and can be marginalized as undesirable deviants. Furthermore, because within one’s group there is usually agreement over prototypicality, prototypical members are liked by all they are popular.
Feelings are governed by how prototypical of the group you think other people are, rather than by personal preferences, friendships, and enmities liking becomes depersonalized social attraction. Social categorization affects how you feel toward other people. In this way, self-categorization produces normative behavior among members of a group. When you categorize yourself, you view yourself in terms of the defining attributes of the ingroup (self-stereotyping), and, because prototypes describe and prescribe group-appropriate ways to think, feel, and behave, you think, feel, and behave group prototypically. You can also depersonalize ingroup members and yourself in exactly the same way.
Prototype-based perception of outgroup members is more commonly called stereotyping you view them as being similar to one another and all having outgroup attributes. Rather than seeing that person as an idiosyncratic individual, you see him or her through the lens of the prototype the person becomes depersonalized. The process of categorizing someone has predictable consequences. In this way, prototypes are context dependent. Ingroup prototypes can therefore change as a function of which outgroup you are comparing your group to. Thus, prototypes not only capture similarities within the ingroup but also accentuate differences between a person’s group and a specific outgroup. Overwhelmingly, people make binary categorizations in which one of the categories is the group that they are in, the ingroup. If someone says to you, “Norwegian,” what comes immediately to mind is your prototype of that national group. Prototypes maximize entitativity (the extent to which a group is a distinct entity) and optimize metacontrast (the extent to which there is similarity within and difference between groups). Human groups are social categories that people mentally represent as prototypes, complex (fuzzy) sets of interrelated attributes that capture similarities within groups and differences between groups. Recently, theorists have argued that in some cultures, social identity rests more on networks of relations within a group and is thus associated with the relational self. Personal identity is tied to the personal self and associated with interpersonal or idiosyncratic individual behaviors social identity is tied to the collective self and associated with group and intergroup behaviors. Social identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of the attributes of specific groups to which one belongs (e.g., male, nurse, Hindu).
Personal identities are definitions and evaluations of oneself in terms of idiosyncratic personal attributes (e.g., generous, shy), and one’s personal relationships (e.g., X’s friend, Y’s spouse). People have a repertoire of different ways to conceive of themselves they have many different identities that can be classified as personal identities or social identities. Social identity theory has developed to become one of social psychology’s most significant and extensively cited analyses of inter-group and group phenomena, for example, prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, cooperation and competition, conformity, norms, group decision making, leadership, and deviance. The two most significant are the social identity theory of intergroup relations and the social identity theory of the group, the latter called self-categorization theory. Originating in the work of Henri Tajfel in the late 1960s and collaboration with John Turner in the 1970s, social identity theory has a number of different conceptual foci. I t defines group membership in terms of people’s identification, definition, and evaluation of themselves as members of a group (social identity) and specifies cognitive, social interactive and societal processes that interact to produce typical group phenomena. Social identity theory explains how the self-concept is associated with group membership and group and intergroup behavior. Social Identity Theory Definition and History