Ingroup attachment strength declines as category size grows, though context can reverse this.

Evidence

This linking of category self-definitions to an enhancement motivation is another striking precursor of later thinking on the nature of social identity, as will become apparent. Three other aspects of Allport’s treatment of ingroups are worth mentioning. One is that Allport wanted to stress that the content of people’s ingroup identifications matters. In one example he argues that two people identifying with the same national ingroup could have very different conceptions of what that ingroup signifies, one adopting a much more inclusive and heterogeneous categorization than the other. The second aspect concerns Allport’s distinction between ingroups and reference groups. In common with two other social psychologists of that era (Sherif & Sherif, 1964), Allport observed that people’s awareness of their group membership(s) (ingroups) does not always coincide with their desire for those group memberships (reference groups). In other words, it is possible to know that one belongs to a group and yet to feel more or less attached to that group. Finally, Allport suggested that ingroup significance – or “potency,” as he called it – tended to decline with increasing size and inclusiveness of category memberships. He showed a figure consisting of a series of concentric circles with the “family” at the center and “mankind” as the outermost ring (see figure 5.1 of Gaertner & Dovidio’s ch. 5, below). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 425

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes ingroups (mere awareness of membership) from reference groups (desired membership), a conceptual split worth keeping.
• QUESTION: Allport’s concentric-circles model — potent ingroups shrink as categories widen — is the same intuition lurking in modern experiments on identity breadth; worth chasing.
• XREF: connects to: Attachment and glorification form two distinct latent factors — Sonia Roccas and Yechiel Klar and Ido Liviatan, The Paradox of Group-Based Guilt: Modes…, 58; Cachet diffuses along association chains but evaporates under lower-class adoption — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 212