Social Identity Theory and the Formation of Stereotypes

The sociocultural approach in psychology rests on a simple but powerful claim: human behavior cannot be fully understood by looking only at biology or individual cognition. People are profoundly shaped by the groups they belong to, the cultures they grow up in, and the social situations they encounter. Social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the late 1970s, is one of the cornerstone frameworks of this approach because it explains how simply belonging to a group can transform how we think, feel, and act.

Tajfel and Turner argued that a person's self-concept has two components. The first is personal identity, which includes individual traits such as being funny, tall, or hardworking. The second is social identity, which is derived from the groups we belong to, su