ABSTRACT
Individuals see themselves not only as autonomous individuals, but also as partners in relationships and as members of groups. One’s ‘self’ includes both an ‘individual identity’ and a ‘social identity’, the latter being derived from emotionally significant relationships, groups or categories to which one sees oneself as belonging (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Thus an individual may see herself as female, a member of a married couple, mother of a son, a member of the Muslim religion, and so on. Social identity becomes part of the knowledge structures of the self-system.
