Group identity is malleable and its salience can shift.

Evidence

Allport also clearly recognized how group affiliation affects the ways in which people value others and how individuals differ in their identification with their group (Brown & Zagefka). He remarked that “the sense of belonging is a highly personal matter. Even two members of the same actual in-group may view its composition in widely divergent ways” (p. 36). Moreover, he illustrated how the salience of group identity is alterable – how categorization can become recategorization – and how people can be members of multiple categories and possess multiple identities (Gaertner & Dovidio). For example, he wrote that “in-group memberships are not permanently fixed. For certain purposes an individual may affirm one category of membership, for other purposes a slightly larger category” (p. 35). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 111

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Connects to social identity theory and recategorization research (Gaertner & Dovidio’s common ingroup identity model), and to the malleability-of-identity theme in later social psychology.
• DEFINE: Defines the concept of recategorization and the flexible, purpose-driven nesting of ingroup memberships.

Related

• Group membership salience shifts flexibly across contexts and individuals (similarity 0.93)
• Group identity is flexible and memberships can be recategorized (similarity 0.90)
• People differ in how they integrate their multiple group memberships into self-identity. (similarity 0.85)
• Collective identity shifts personal goals toward the group’s welfare (similarity 0.84)
• Group behavior arises from depersonalized self-representation as interchangeable category exemplars (similarity 0.83)
• Salient group membership makes people treat the group’s fate as their own (similarity 0.83)
• Broadening the definition of ingroup reduces intergroup bias (similarity 0.83)
• Ingroup attachment strength declines as category size grows, though context can reverse this. (similarity 0.83)
• People represent their group memberships as arranged in overlapping or nested structures (similarity 0.83)
• Knowing one belongs to a group differs from identifying with it (similarity 0.83)
• Recategorizing group boundaries can expand ingroup identity from us-them to we (similarity 0.83)
• Ingroup membership is a shifting, context-dependent self-definition tied to self-enhancement (similarity 0.82)
• People vary in how much their multiple group memberships overlap cognitively (similarity 0.82)
• People derive self-worth from group membership and denigrate outsiders to protect it (similarity 0.82)
• In-group identity is defined only through contrast with out-groups (similarity 0.82)