Surrealism - social indentity in-groups and out-groups.

The social indentity theory states that we base who we are depending on the group membership(s) that we belong to. Back in 1979 Taijfel proposed that the social group we belong to is a key source of our self-esteem and pride in ourselves. Being apart of a group is what gives us a a sense of belonging to the social world which is what forms our social indentity.

Along side forming our social indentity we also try to increase our self-image, we do this by enhancing our group status we belong to. A lot of the time when increasing our self image we will put down and discriminate against other groups. These groups are known as the 'out-group' as they are the group that we don't belong to. Because of this we then divide the population in to 'them' and 'us', 'them' being the out-group and 'us' being the in-group. This is known as social categorization, that means that we put people in to social groups based on our opinions due to our social status. The hypothesis of social indentity theory suggests that the in-group will always try and find negatives to do with the out-group as that helps to build the in-groups self-esteem.