ABSTRACT
This Part focuses on issues of group identity with an emphasis on the way that people identify with their nations. The bulk of research over the past several decades was spurred by Tajfel’s social identity theory (SIT). Key issues are questions of universality of ingroup favoritism, the relevance of small group research for national identities, and pathways to developing more general theories of national identity. These issues are taken up in this part of the book. An early study of ethnocentrism (1968) in a simulated setting provides evidence for the question of universal biases and related questions involving types of roles as well as heretics, and renegades. A mid-career review article (1994) treats the issue of extrapolating from groups to nations, concluding that social-psychological analyses provide important insights on national identifications and collective actions. A current paper (2022) takes a next step in theory development by exploring interactions among individual, group, and collective units of analysis. Interestingly, the three papers are separated by roughly a quarter of a century due in part to tracking the evolution of relevant research in the intervening years. The research reached a point where the prospects for multi-level theories are in sight.
