Managing one's social identity: Successful and unsuccessful identity management.

This work explores the motivational dynamics of social identity management. Following social identity theory, we hypothesized that a threat to a positive social identity elicits specific negative emotions (i.e., outgroup-directed anger) and motivates identity management. Successful identity management restores a positive social identity and decreases outgroup-directed anger. However, when a successful identity management is blocked (e.g., because of limited cognitive resources), identity management will be unsuccessful and outgroup-directed anger will remain at a higher level. This effect of unsuccessful identity management on outgroup-directed anger should be particularly strong for group members who highly value their group (i.e., high group-based self-esteem). A negative comparison outcome is discrepant with these group members’ positive view of the ingroup, and therefore, unsuccessful identity management should especially elicit negative emotions (i.e., anger) towards the threatening outgroup. Two studies tested these predictions. Study 1 (N=110) showed that participants’ outgroup-directed anger increased when threatened under cognitive load. Study 2 (N=99) demonstrated that this was particularly true for participants high in groupbased self-esteem. The results’ implications for research on the motivational processes underlying social identity management are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This work investigates the motivational dynamics underlying social identity management based on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Social identity theory predicts that people like to see themselves and to be seen by others positively (Taylor & Brown, 1988). As membership in social groups contributes to people’s self-esteem, group members are motivated to see their ingroups and thereby their social identity as positive. However, negative comparison outcomes can threaten positive social identities. Successful social identity management counters the threat imposed by negative comparison outcomes and thereby reduces negative feelings like outgroup-directed anger. But, being cognitively busy or distracted may prevent successful social identity management, thereby causing the threat to seem especially effective. Unsuccessful social identity management, which does not counter the threat to one’s positive social identity, may maintain high levels of outgroup-directed anger. In the present work, we explore motivational aspects of social identity management. In two studies, we examined the consequences of blocking social identity management. Based on the assumption that identity management requires cognitive resources (Gilbert, Giesler, & Morris, 1995), we inhibited successful identity management through cognitive load after confronting group members with social identity threat. We predicted and tested in Study 1 that cognitive load would lead to high levels of outgroup-directed anger, because group members under cognitive load cannot counteract the negative comparison outcome. In Study 2, we tested the prediction that for group members who highly value their group, outgroup