Intergroup theories isolate single motives that actually operate together.

Evidence

Although the accumulated research within social psychology has provided the field with many good theories of how individuals react and behave in group contexts, we know relatively little about how these individual-level behaviors contribute to larger patterns of group behavior (e.g., intergroup segregation, status hierarchies, group formation). To understand these patterns of group behavior, psychologists have focused primarily on the psychological needs that individuals attempt to satisfy through their group memberships. For example, according to social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979), individuals are hypothesized to associate themselves with groups that compare positively to other groups as a means of bolstering self-esteem. Other theories, such as optimal distinctiveness theory (ODT; Brewer, 1991), focus on individuals’ desires for inclusion and distinctiveness from others as predictors of group identification. Although social-psychological research has advanced our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of group identification, the work is limited by the tendency for researchers to focus on single motivations as opposed to multiple motivations operating simultaneously. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 812

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the single-mechanism flavor of Allport’s contact hypothesis and other clean individual-level accounts the reader is reassessing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 812