How social identity shapes the working self-concept

• We were interested in testing the principle of functional antagonism. • When ingroups were salient, participants increased endorsement of group traits. • This effect mainly emerged for ingroups with high psychological utility. • The impact of personal traits, however, did not diminish during ingroup salience. • We did not find evidence for functional antagonism, but rather for adaption. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o This research investigates the process by which salient ingroups alter the working self-concept. The antagonism account, exemplified by self-categorization theory, contends that when ingroups are salient, the collective self defines the self-concept whereas the individual self recedes. In contrast, an adaption account argues that the individual self operates as a stable source of self-definition. While the working self-concept may flexibly incorporate aspects of salient ingroups, attributes that define the individual self are always actively represented. We also considered the ingroup's psychological utility as a moderator of its influence on the self-concept. To directly test these hypotheses, we manipulated the salience of an ingroup previously rated as either low or high in psychological utility and asked participants to classify traits as self-descriptive or not. When ingroups were made salient, participants increasingly endorsed ingroup traits as self-descriptive. Critically, this effect mainly emerged for groups with high psychological utility. Contrary to the antagonism account, but consistent with the adaption account , the impact of individual self-traits on the self-concept did not diminish as a result of ingroup salience. The self-concept has been described as complex and dynamic: a " continually active, shifting array of available self-knowledge " (Markus & Nurius, 1986, p. 957). At any particular time, only a small part of what people believe and know about themselves may be accessible (Higgins, 1996; McConnell, 2011). People can hold varied representations of themselves in the working self-concept — they can define themselves in terms of unique traits, dyadic relationships, or social group memberships. While scholars recognize that different self-representations may coexist within the same person, there is less agreement on the structural and functional relations between them (Sedikides & Brewer, 2001). The current research focuses on the relation between the individual self and the collective self. The individual self, or personal identity, refers to aspects of the self-concept that differentiate the person from others (Brewer & Gardner, 1996). The collective self, or social identity, refers …