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MARK BENNETT delivered the Michael Argyle Lecture at the Society's 2004 Annual Conference.
THE structures and processes underlying the self and human identity are as fundamental to psychological inquiry as it is possible to imagine. These topics have occupied social psychology's centre stage for a century, but, interestingly, the same cannot be said with respect to developmental psychology. Despite significant early statements from Baldwin (1895), James (1890), Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) on the origins and development of self and identity, relatively little work has addressed children's identities.
For the most part, developmental studies of self and identity have examined the personal self - the self defined by idiosyncratic features, such as personality and abilities. The social self- defined through group memberships - has been largely neglected (Bennett & Sani, 2004). This omission is both curious, given that children are de facto members of many social groups (families, the national group, ethnic groups, religious groups, etc.), and important, given that one's social identity 'creates and defines the individual's place in society' (Tajfel & Turner, 1979, pp.40-11).
For some years now I have been interested in developmental aspects of social identity. In work with Fabio Sani I have addressed three themes: (a) children's conceptions of social identities; (b) contextual variation in the specific content of identities; and (c) subjective identification with collectivities. In what follows I will sketch our work in each of these areas.
Developmental variations
People's understanding of social identities can be based on many types of information. For instance, nationality might be conceived in terms of place of birth, passport held, place of domicile, psychological properties, values, beliefs, culture, and so on. Clearly, adults may draw on any, or indeed all, of these different characteristics in conceptualising nationality. However, we suggest that children's conceptualisations of social identities are likely initially to be quite limited and may undergo substantial elaboration with increasing age.
Infants clearly differentiate between individuals on the basis of social categories such as gender, ethnicity and age (see Ruble et al, 2004), but not until later do they come to attach particular meanings and attributes to these categories. In our work we have looked at children from five years to adolescence and have addressed a hypothesised shift from conceiving of...