T&T Clark Social Identity Commentary on the New Testament

J. Brian Tucker, Aaron Kuecker, J. Brian Tucker, Aaron Kuecker

• Publisher: T&T Clark
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780567693310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Critica e interpretazione biblica

The T & T Clark Social Identity Commentary on the New Testament is a one-of-a-kind comprehensive Bible resource that highlights the way the NT seeks to form the social identity of the members of the earliest Christ-movement. By drawing on the interpretive resources of social-scientific theories-especially those related to the formation of identity-interpreters generate new questions that open fruitful identity-related avenues into the text. It provides helpful introductions to each NT book that focus on various social dimensions of the text as well as a commentary structure that illuminates the text as a work of social influence. The commentary offers methodologically informed discussions of difficult and disputed passages and highlights cultural contexts in theoretically informed ways-drawing on resources from social anthropology, historical sociology, or social identity theory. The innovative but careful scholarship of these writers, most of whom have published monographs on some aspect of social identity within the New Testament, brings to the fore often overlooked social and communal aspects inherent in the NT discourse. The net result is a more concrete articulation of some of the every-day lived experiences of members of the Christ-movement within the Roman Empire, while also offering further insight into the relationship between existing and new identities that produced diverse expressions of the Christ-movement during the first century. The SICNT shows that identity-formation is at the heart of the NT and it offers insights for leaders of faith communities addressing these issues in contemporary contexts.

Chapter 1

A Genealogy of Social Identity Theory

A. Sue Russell

Introduction

Social identity theory (henceforth SIT) has become one of the most prominent theories to explain intergroup interaction and social identity within the field of social psychology. It has been used to understand conflict, promote change and peace, promote healthy intergroup relationships and, in the commentaries in this volume, to bring new insights to the biblical text. However, theories are not developed in an intellectual vacuum but build upon the work of others, being influenced both by the personal experiences of the researcher and by the political and social environments in which they are created. New theories often arise because of the failure of other theories to answer questions that are relevant to the researcher and society as a whole. Understanding the intellectual, social, and historical context of a theory helps us understand the concepts on which it was developed, questions it was designed to answer, and new areas of inquiry. Furthermore, understanding what questions it answers can also lead us to discover questions that have been left unanswered. This opens up possibilities for new directions and insights that can be gained from building upon a theory.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief genealogy of SIT and the advances it made within the field of social psychology. This genealogy is neither linear nor ahistorical, but rather it highlights the intellectual and social environment in which the theory was born and the antecedents that were either rejected or built upon in the development of SIT. As in any good genealogy, there are stories and circumstances that directed the inclusion of one theory over another, twists and turns that finally led to the birth of SIT. I first discuss the history of social psychology and its development as a modern academic discipline in North America, as well as changes that laid the foundation for the development of SIT. I then discuss the history of the development of this theory in Henri Tajfel’s research. I conclude by briefly outlining the basic components of this theory and their current use in the study of intergroup relations.

Roots of Social Identity Theory

The roots of social identity are firmly embedded in the development of the field of social psychology. As a field, social psychology seeks to understand the relationship of an individual’s mind and behavior in a social group. Social psychology’s own history ebbs and flows in its emphasis on the individual or the collective as the center of study, and as such its developments are highly influenced by the prevailing Zeitgeist of the day. The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of the main theoretical perspectives and ideas that influenced the development of social psychology as a discipline. It will focus on the ideas that shaped Tajfel’s development of SIT as well as the unanswered questions that this theory sought to address.

This section will trace the beginnings of SIT by first looking at the development of the study of social aspects of being human. Then it will discuss the development of social psychology as a discipline. And finally, it will discuss how the Second World War brought changes to the discipline that laid the foundation for Tajfel’s creation of SIT.

The Study of the Social

The foundation of social psychology can be traced to the study of social aspects of humans during the Enlightenment. There was optimism in human progress, and the shift from religious to scientific authority led to greater study of the human condition as part their social world. Democratization and Darwinistic thought on human progress led to studies that sought to understand human action in a social context.

During the eighteenth century, there were several types of studies that anticipated research that would later fall under the category of social psychology. For instance, researchers in Scotland sought to understand interpersonal relationships and national stereotypes. In Germany, France, and Britain, theories were developed to understand the relationship between the mind and society (Jahoda, 3). These studies were numerous and created in Europe the intellectual milieu in which social psychology was birthed. Although there were numerous studies that provide important antecedents for social psychology, I limit my discussion to those that most directly influenced the development of social psychology.

Before the Enlightenment, the individual was viewed as a constituent of some social group and was viewed in relationship to that group (Gergen, 137). Some trace the beginning of social psychology to Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 work, The Crowd, which provided a rich description and classification of crowds and the effects that they had on the individual. He proposed that the power of the masses was akin to a hypnotist with crowds highly susceptible to suggestion and influence. Le Bon emphasized the stark contrast between behavior of an individual when alone and their behavior when in a crowd. He concluded that the two phenomena, the individual and the crowd, had to be studied as two distinct entities (Farr, 45). The emphasis of one or the other of these two entities in social psychology would ebb and flow throughout the development of the field.

Another person who had a profound influence on the direction of social psychology was Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). His ten-volume work Volkerpsycholgie (folk or social psychology) is credited with distinguishing social psychology as a distinct branch of psychology. Wundt’s research focused upon language, religion, myth, custom, and magic, which are now what modern social scientists consider the province of other disciplines, such as linguistics, anthropology, and sociology.

Like Le Bon, Wundt considered the community the starting point in social psychology, rather than the individual, for it was communities of individuals that created language, art, etc. (Farr, 25, 26). For Wundt, social psychology was the field that studies the community. Since his work was not translated into English, it did not impact the direction that American social psychology would take in the future although his work influenced several prominent scholars in other disciplines, including Franz Boas in the American anthropological tradition, Bronisław Malinowski in British social anthropology, and Èmile Durkheim in sociology (Farr, 32). One student whom Wundt influenced was G. H. Mead.

Mead’s contribution to social psychology was the study of the relationship of the individual mind in relationship to society (Farr, 54). According to Robert Farr, Mead demonstrated the dialectical nature of the relationship between self and society. Mead did not view the individual and society as two separate entities, but he viewed individualization as the outcome of socialization and not its antithesis (Farr, 45). Mead proposed that consciousness of self was a social construct wherein the self both interacts with others and is formed in relation to others. Farr notes that for Mead, “Consciousness is thus an inherently social process” (Farr, 67). In Mead’s view, the individual cannot be understood apart from the social relationships in which they are embedded, and he proposed that the basic unit to study this relationship was the communicative act. Later researchers coined the phrase “symbolic interactionism” to describe his theory. Today the theory is more closely associated with sociology, but according to Farr, symbolic interactionism reflected the social side of social psychology (Farr, 126).

Birth of a Discipline

The early twentieth century marked several turning points in the development of the discipline of social psychology. First, the locus of work in social psychology shifted to North America as a result of the First World War in Europe. The second was that research began to shift from groups themselves to individual behavior in the presence of groups. And third, social psychology was established as an experimental discipline. While much of the early work was focused on individual behavior in the presence of others or a social group, what emerged from the North American context was social psychology theory focused on the individual and his or her behavior.

American psychologist Norman Triplett is credited with the first empirical social psychological study, which laid the foundation for how social psychology studied the social aspects of individual behavior (Kruglanski and Stroebe, 4). His study in 1898 sought to find out how an individual’s behavior changed in the presence of other people. In his experiment, Triplett had boys and girls pull in fishing line with a reel as fast as possible. He discovered that when they were in the presence of others, they pulled in the line faster than when they were alone (Triplett “Dynamgenic Factors”). Although many would claim that Triplett did not view himself as a social psychologist, his study focusing on behavior of individuals in the presence of a group is considered the antecedent to the types of research in the development of social psychology.

Most historians agree that Floyd Allport was the most influential person in shaping the trajectory of the discipline of social psychology, particularly in the United States (Farr, 106). The publication of Allport’s textbook Social Psychology in 1924 had multiple effects on the research agenda and development of social psychology in the United States until the end of the Second World War. The first impact of the text was its focus of the individual as the locus of social behavior. Until this time, the group or crowd was sui generis, and individual actors could only be understood in terms of the overall social patterns of which they were a part (Gergen, 138). However, starting with Allport, the American a priori assumption was that the individual was endowed with fundamental psychological processes; therefore the study of social behavior consisted of examining the changes in these processes in the context of others (Gergen, 138). For Allport, the study of social psychology was the study of the psychology of an individual in relationship to social stimuli—other people. Group behavior was essentially individual behavior in the context of other people. “I believe that only within the individual can we find behavior mechanism and consciousness which are fundamental in the interactions between individuals” (Allport, 4). There was no psychology of groups that was not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals.

The second impact Allport had on American social psychology was that it was behaviorist. Research focused on discovering changes in individual behavior in different social contexts rather than the psychological processes influencing that behavior. According to Allport’s reasoning, ultimate reality was expressed in behavior and only individuals behave, thus reinforcing an individualist perspective (Farr, 108). Allport did analyze institutions in society such as the family, the church, politics, and economics, but only in terms of how the actions of individuals were influenced by these institutions (Farr, 108). For Allport, it was the behavior of individuals, not a crowd or group mind, that resulted in social action.

The third direction that Allport set for American social psychology was that behavior was studied experimentally. His experiments sought to discover causal linkages between environmental stimuli and the resulting behavior. He limited his experiments to those that could be conducted in a laboratory setting in which individuals were exposed to various social stimuli. This also served to reinforce the perception that social behavior processes were individual processes that changed in response to, or were evoked by, social stimuli (Kruglanski and Stroebe, 4).

The emphasis on the individual in American social psychology reflects the social and political contextual environment in which Allport conducted research. Reacting against the “group mind,” the study of the individual promoted the ideals of democracy in which individuals were independent moral agents and responsible for their own actions. Specifically, individuals affected by social stimuli were still autonomous moral agents (Farr, 109). For Allport, the world became better when individuals became better and more independent (Farr, 109). Allport laid both the theoretical and the analytical foundations for the expansion of social psychology in the years leading up to the Second World War.

Laying the Foundation for Social Identity Theory

Social psychology grew in prominence in the United States during the Second World War when social psychologists and sociologists were able to apply their disciplines in real-world situations. They were conscripted to apply their studies to the war effort, including selection of officers, wartime morale, and the use of propaganda to influence behavior. These efforts brought a new perspective on how social and psychological studies could influence human behavior as social psychological theory was applied to social problems in order to create changes in behavior (Kruglanski and Stroebe, 3).

The Second World War and the conditions that followed also had a major impact on the development and direction of social psychology well into the 1970s in two ways. First, it brought a number of prominent scholars in social psychology from Europe to the United States. The rise of Nazism and anti-Semitic action in Germany and other countries led many academics to escape persecution. They brought perspectives from European research into an intellectual conversation that had been dominated by individualism and behaviorism in the United States (Turner and Giles, 10).

Kurt Lewin was one of the prominent social psychologists who immigrated to the United States during this time of global strife. Lewin’s approach to social psychology established it as a cognitive science by seeking to understand the mental processes of social behavior within groups (Gergen, 142). The “Gestalt group,” as Lewin and his students were called, reacted to the behaviorism of American social psychology and brought a cognitive emphasis into social psychology (Farr, 8). Gestalt psychology’s focus was not on the observer or what the observer saw in the behavior of the actor. Instead, it sought to understand a person’s behavior based on what the person perceived. These theorists studied how behavior changed in the environment as the person perceives it, highlighting “what is believed to be” rather than “what is.”

Along with a shift toward cognitive studies, Lewin also brought a shift toward locating the individual within the “psychological life-space,” which included the group or perceived group. Therefore the group, either real or perceived, was part of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: How to Use the Book
• 1 A Genealogy of Social Identity Theory
• 2 Matthew
• 3 Mark
• 4 Luke
• 5 John
• 6 Acts
• 7 Romans
• 8 1 Corinthians
• 9 2 Corinthians
• 10 Galatians
• 11 Ephesians
• 12 Philippians
• 13 Colossians
• 14 1 Thessalonians
• 15 2 Thessalonians
• 16 1 Timothy
• 17 2 Timothy
• 18 Titus
• 19 Philemon
• 20 Hebrews
• 21 James
• 22 1 Peter
• 23 2 Peter
• 24 1 John
• 25 2 John
• 26 3 John
• 27 Jude
• 28 Revelation
• Copyright