Uncertainty, entitativity, and group identification
Hogg and colleagues test uncertainty-identity theory, whose claim is that identifying with a group is a way of resolving uncertainty about oneself. The mechanism is that a group supplies a description of who you are and how to behave, so the more uncertain a person feels, the more attractive group membership becomes. The refinement the title carries is entitativity, the degree to which a group looks like a coherent entity rather than a loose collection: clear boundaries, shared attributes, common purpose. The prediction is that uncertainty pushes people towards the groups that score high on that, because a vague group resolves nothing. This is the vault's reference for why uncertainty produces attraction to tightly defined and often extreme groups rather than to groups in general. Written without an abstract, from the title and public accounts of the theory.
Hogg and colleagues test uncertainty-identity theory, whose claim is that identifying with a group is a way of resolving uncertainty about oneself. The mechanism is that a group supplies a description of who you are and how to behave, so the more uncertain a person feels, the more attractive group membership becomes. The refinement the title carries is entitativity, the degree to which a group looks like a coherent entity rather than a loose collection: clear boundaries, shared attributes, common purpose. The prediction is that uncertainty pushes people towards the groups that score high on that, because a vague group resolves nothing. This is the vault's reference for why uncertainty produces attraction to tightly defined and often extreme groups rather than to groups in general. Written without an abstract, from the title and public accounts of the theory.
Written from the the paper's title and public accounts of the theory it tests.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Hogg, M. A., Sherman, D. K., Dierselhuis, J., Maitner, A. T., & Moffitt, G. (2007). “Uncertainty, entitativity, and group identification.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 43(1), 135-142. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.008
Where we use it
- Cliques Are a Stress Response, Why We Belong
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.008
DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.008