People hold multiple self-categories whose relationship structures shape identification.

Evidence

A key feature of contemporary and classic theories of social identification is the idea that individuals can flexibly categorize themselves as members of various social groups (for recent reviews, see Dovidio & Gaertner, 2010; Yzerbyt & DeMoulin, 2010). When asked to respond to the statement “Who am I?” (Kuhn & McPartland, 1954), people often generate a lengthy list of groups that serve to define who they are. Although social identity researchers have recognized that a multiplicity of self-categories can exist for any single individual, theory and research has only recently addressed the interrelationships between multiple self-categories and the consequences that these relationships have for shaping social identification processes (Crisp & Hewstone, 2007; Roccas & Brewer, 2002; Schmid & Hewstone, this volume) and intergroup relations (Brewer & Pierce, 2005; Crisp, Hewstone, & Rubin, 2001; Lau & Murnighan, 1998, 2005; Schmid & Hewstone, this volume). Individuals’ representations of their identities can involve perceiving some groups as isolated from other groups while perceiving other sets of groups as being highly overlapping (Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Of primary interest in this chapter are nested category contexts, where two categories are salient, but one category is perceived to be a subset of a larger superordinate category. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 659

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core construct of ‘nested categorization’ — one social category perceived as a subset of a superordinate one.
• XREF: connects to: Mixed individuals shift identification within a single social domain. — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or…, 79; Everyone holds multiple identities with relative privilege or discrimination — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1165