Social Identity Complexity: Antecedents and Consequences

在美国，关于多元文化主义的辩论通常几乎完全围绕种族/民族差异展开。虽然种族认同在心理上和社会上都是非常重要的，但种族是个人唯一重要的群体成员身份的情况很少。作为一个庞大而复杂的社会的成员，美国人在许多有意义的社会维度上被区分或细分，包括性别和性取向、生活阶段（如学生、工人、退休人员）、经济部门（如技术、服务、学术、专业）、宗教、政治意识形态和娱乐偏好。每一种划分都为共同的身份和群体成员提供了基础，这可能成为社会认同的重要来源。此外，大多数这些差异都是交叉的，即个人可能在一个维度上拥有共同的群体成员资格，但在另一个维度上属于不同的类别。因此，拥有多个群体成员减少了一个人的社会世界被简化为一个群体内群体外群体的可能性。这个拟议的研究项目的目的是确定一个人对他或她自己的多个群体成员和社会身份的认识如何有助于整个社会对多样性的容忍和接受。借鉴社会身份复杂性理论（Roccas & Brewer, 2002），一个由五组研究组成的项目，采用相关和实验方法，将评估社会身份复杂性的前因，并检验增加社会身份复杂性将增强对包容性、优越社会类别的认同，以及随后对优越群体内差异和多样性的接受这一假设。

In the United States, the debate over multiculturalism is usually cast almost exclusively in terms of racial/ethnic differentiation. Although ethnic identity is both psychologically and socially highly significant, it is rarely the case that ethnicity is the only significant group membership that an individual has. As members of a large and complex society, Americans are differentiated or subdivided along many meaningful social dimensions, including gender and sexual orientation, life stage (e.g., student, worker, retiree), economic sector (e.g., technology, service, academics, professional), religion, political ideology, and recreational preferences. Each of these divisions provides a basis for shared identity and group membership that may become an important source of social identification. Further, most of these differentiations are cross-cutting in the sense that individuals may share a common ingroup membership on one dimension but belong to different categories on another dimension. Hence, having multiple group memberships reduces the likelihood that one's social world can be reduced to a single ingroup-outgroup distinction. The purpose of this proposed program of research is to determine how an individual's awareness of his or her own multiple group memberships and social identities contributes to tolerance and acceptance of diversity in the society as a whole. Drawing on a theory of social identity complexity (Roccas & Brewer, 2002), a program of five sets of studies employing both correlational and experimental methods will assess the antecedents of social identity complexity and test the hypothesis that increasing social identity complexity will enhance identification with inclusive, superordinate social categories and consequent acceptance of difference and diversity within the superordinate group.