Salient group membership makes people treat the group’s fate as their own

Evidence

Among group-based approaches, Intergroup Emotions Theory (Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000; Smith, 1993, 1999) follows the Social Identity Theory approach in taking the notion of a socially extended self as its starting point. When a group membership is salient, people think of themselves as interchangeable members of the ingroup, rather than in terms of their unique personal identities. This “depersonalization” process in turn makes group membership function in all the ways that the psychological self does, as several studies have demonstrated. For example, people tend to think of themselves in terms of attributes that characterize the entire ingroup (Smith & Henry, 1996). That is, the person responds to the world in terms of a collective rather than an individual self. Importantly, this makes the group play a role in the regulation of emotional responses. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2262

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘depersonalization’ in the Intergroup Emotions Theory sense — not the clinical sense — as group-membership-based self-representation that makes collective identity function like the psychological self.
• XREF: connects to: Moral reactions to suffering shift when one’s own group is the responsible party. — Emanuele Castano, On the Perils of Glorifying the…, 16; Self-categorization at group level makes members feel ingroup wrongdoings as their own. — Michael T. Schmitt, Daniel A. Miller, Nyla R. Branscombe, and Jack W. Brehm, The Difficulty of Making Reparations…, 14