ABSTRACT
The two terms that Jane Austen pairs in the title of her celebrated novel Pride and Prejudice have become a kind of shorthand in the social sciences in discussions of human behavior and belief, as is apparent from numerous recent studies that include these terms in their titles. 1 Not surprisingly, the work of social scientists can, in turn, illuminate Austen’s novels. In particular, the concepts of social identity theory, which first found systematic expression in the writings of Henri Tajfel and John Turner and which have recently seen a resurgence due to the neuroscientific study of intergroup relations, can be of assistance when analyzing the behavior of Austen’s characters. Focusing on Pride and Prejudice, I will analyze her characters in terms of the binaries of in-group and out-group, high- and low-status group, and high-group and low-group identification, as well as the group-motivated responses of identity threat and categorization threat.
