Who Is This "We"? Levels of Collective Identity and Self Representations

Abstract

Cross-cultural perspectives have brought renewed interest in the social aspects of the self and the extent to which individuals define themselves in terms of their relationships to others and to social groups. This article provides a conceptual review of research and theory of the social self, arguing that the personal, relational, and collective levels of self-definition represent distinct forms of self-representation with different origins, sources of self-worth, and social motivations. A set of 3 experiments illustrates how priming of the interpersonal or collective "we" can alter spontaneous judgments of similarity and self-descriptions.