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Social identity theory matters because it explains group conflict and prejudice that individual personality alone cannot, showing how belonging to a group changes how members see themselves. Tajfel proposed that part of a person's self-concept comes from the social groups they belong to. People are motivated to see their own group, the in-group, more favourably than other groups, the out-group, to maintain a positive social identity. For example, imagine two teams of strangers randomly split into 'Group A' and 'Group B' with no other differences between them: members still start rating their own group's work more favourably than the other group's. In practice, this in-group favouritism can occur from minimal group membership alone, without any real conflict of interest or prior history between the groups.

Tajfel's minimal group paradigm (dividing people into groups using entirely trivial, arbitrary criteria) demonstrated in-group favouritism, such as splitting participants by a coin toss or a preference for one abstract painting over another. Even with no history, competition, or face-to-face contact between members, people still allocated more resources to their own group than to the out-group. Social identity theory explains this through three processes: categorisation (sorting people, including yourself, into groups), identification (adopting the group as part of your own self-concept), and comparison (favourably comparing your in-group against relevant out-groups to boost self-esteem). Picture hospital staff informally divided into 'medical' and 'surgical' teams: even without any real disagreement, each side can start to favour its own team's opinions in a meeting. In practice, this mechanism helps explain how ordinary intergroup friction, such as between different specialties or wards, can arise even without any genuine conflict of interest.

• Social identity theory describes three sequential processes by which group membership shapes the self. Which process follows categorisation and identification?
• Tajfel's minimal group experiments assigned schoolboys to groups on a trivial basis. Which basis was used in the best-known version of that study?
• A striking finding of the minimal group studies was that participants sometimes chose an option giving their own group less in absolute terms. Why did they do so?
• A member of a low-status group individually leaves it to join a higher-status group rather than trying to improve his own group's standing. Which strategy does the theory call this?

• Realistic conflict theory, hostility from genuine competition over scarce resources, unlike social identity theory's favouritism from group membership alone.
• Allport's contact hypothesis, reducing existing prejudice through structured contact, rather than explaining why in-group favouritism first arises.
• Minimal group paradigm, the specific experimental method showing favouritism from trivial, arbitrary group divisions, whereas social identity theory is the broader explanatory framework.
• Stereotyping, a cognitive shortcut applied to individuals based on group membership, unlike social identity theory's focus on self-concept and group esteem.

• Real ability was deliberately not the basis for assignment.
• Social background was deliberately not the basis for assignment.
• That process concerns performance improving in the presence of others.
• That process concerns reduced individual effort in a group task.
• That process concerns loss of individual identity in a crowd.

• Name the learning, social or research principle being tested before reading the options.
• Identify the antecedent, behaviour, consequence or cognitive process in the vignette.
• Compare the direction of effect with the nearest competing principle.
• Apply the same rule to a new example to confirm that the answer transfers.