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是关于种族/民族分化的。尽管种族认同在心理和社会上都具有很高的意义，但很少有种族是个人拥有的唯一重要的群体成员。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(例如，学生、工人、退休人员)、经济部门(例如，技术、服务、学术、专业)、宗教、政治意识形态和娱乐偏好。这些划分中的每一个都为共享身份和群体成员身份提供了基础，这可能成为社会认同的重要来源。此外，这些差异大多是交叉的，在某种意义上，个人可能在一个维度上共享共同的集团成员资格，但在另一个维度上属于不同的类别。因此，拥有多个群组成员身份可以降低一个人的社交世界被简化为单一的内部群组-外部群组区分的可能性。这项拟议的研究计划的目的是确定一个人对他或她自己的多重群体成员身份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。基于社会认同复杂性的理论(Roccas&Amp；Breyer，2002)，一个由五组研究组成的项目将使用相关和实验方法来评估社会认同复杂性的前因，并检验这一假说，即增加社会认同复杂性将增强对包容性、上级社会类别的认同，并随之而来接受上级群体中的差异和多样性。

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.