Naomi Ellemers

Who they are

Naomi Ellemers is a social psychologist. Her work on this site is the 1999 paper written with Paulien Kortekaas and Jaap W. Ouwerkerk, published in volume 29, issues 2 and 3 of the European Journal of Social Psychology.

Key papers

• Ellemers, N., Kortekaas, P., & Ouwerkerk, J. W. (1999). Self-categorisation, commitment to the group and group self-esteem as related but distinct aspects of social identity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29(2-3), 371-389.

In an experiment with 119 participants the authors varied the group's relative size, its standing and whether membership was chosen or assigned. They report that the three aspects loaded as separate factors and responded differently to those manipulations. Self-categorisation shifted only with the group's relative size, and group self-esteem only with its standing. Commitment depended on both standing and how membership was assigned, and only commitment carried through to a measure of own-group preference.

Key ideas

The paper's proposal is that research on social identification should score self-categorisation, commitment and group self-esteem separately, because they are related but distinct. A blended score would not show which of the three responds to a given feature of a group.

The proposal is one of the positions in the measurement literature on group identification, alongside the five-component hierarchical multicomponent model published in 2008.

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