Ipseity: Using the Social Identity Perspective As a Guide to Character Construction in Realist Fiction

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Loughborough University Institutional Repository Ipseity: Using The Social Identity Perspective as a Guide to Character Construction in Realist Fiction Dr. Luke Stott Loughborough University Supervisors: Dr Kerry Featherstone Dr Brian Jarvis 0 Contents Preface: 2 Ipseity: 10 Introducing The Social Identity Perspective: 166 Using The Social Identity Perspective in Ipseity: 186 Further Social Identity Perspective Applications and Areas for Research: 205 References: 228 1 Preface Instead of studying, for example, how the psychology of personality limits and prevents real social and political change, we should be studying how political and ideological changes create new personalities and individual needs and motives.1 The above quotation is from social psychologist Professor John Turner, who is one of the two theorists, the other being Henri Tajfel, most responsible for the Social Identity Perspective, the principle subject of this thesis. The Social Identity Perspective is an approach to Social Psychology that incorporates two sub-theories: Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory and Turner’s Self-Categorization Theory. This thesis is based upon using the perspective for the purposes of creating more realistic and believable fictional characters in realist fiction. For the purposes of this thesis Pam Morris’ definition of realism will be used, that being, ‘any writing that is based upon an implicit or explicit assumption that it is possible to communicate about a reality beyond the writing.’2 According to both theories, individuals can develop two principal identities: the personal self, which is to say a collection of idiosyncratic qualities that define them as a unique individual, and a collective self (or social identity) that encapsulates the status and characteristics of the social groups they belong to in opposition to other social groupings. Turner theorised that the personality of a human being is heavily influenced by their social context at an unconscious level. This influence can be made manifest by their parents, by their school friends and work colleagues, by their romantic partners, and especially by the collective cultural expectations native to the area they choose to reside in. Turner put forward the concept that our personality and actions are therefore influenced by society at the level of how the individual defines himself or herself. This occurs without agency on the part of the individual. These social belief systems therefore mould what the individual thinks, their actions, and their motivations. The origins of the social identity lie in the group mind perspective, as pioneered by Gustave Le Bon, privileged the social over the individual and Le Bon reduced the individual group member to a coded response to societal belief systems. The group mind is a reference to a state of consciousness wholly separate from the mind of the individual. Le Bon’s 1885 text The Crowd is of significance to the theorist interested in the Social Identity Perspective, and indeed the social 2 psychologist, because it appears to be, according to Giles and Turner, the first major text on inter-group behaviours.3 Some psychologists initially rejected the idea of social groups as influential on the personal self. This is summed up by psychologist Gordon Allport who, in 1924, argued that, ‘there is no psychology of groups which is not essentially and entirely a psychology of individuals.’4 The conclusion of the Second World War and subsequent Nuremberg trials sparked renewed interest in the field of social psychology and a wave of new theorists such as Stanley Milgram, Philip Zimbardo, Solomon Asch, and Serge Moscovici began to conduct studies into such topics as external influences, minority influence in groups and conformity. It was their work that inspired Henri Tajfel and his colleague John Turner to produce first the Social Identity Theory and then the Self-Categorization Theory that together form the Social Identity Perspective. The Social Identity Perspective and in particular Self-Categorization Theory operates between the two extremes of the individual and the group mind and instead relies on the interactionist approach proposed by Solomon Asch, Kurt Lewin, and Muzafer Sherif. The interactionist approach focuses on clarifying how the self- concept within the individual is socially structured. Social Identity practitioners Brewer and Gardner (1996) suggested that there were three types of self-concept: the individual self which consists of attributes and personality traits that differentiate us from other individuals, the relational self which is defined by our relations with significant others, and finally the collective self which reflects our membership of social groups.5 What this means is that there are multiple facets of the self-concept that are relevant to an individual’s identity at any one time. Therefore it is possible to be simultaneously defined as a happy individual (an example of individual self- concept), a brother (a relational self-concept) and a British citizen (a collective self- concept) along with the expectations that those definitions bring. According to Tajfel and Turner, how a person behaves depends on which self-concept is most salient (the identity that the individual is most aware of and therefore most influenced by) to a particular social situation.6 At, for example, a sister’s birthday party, the most salient self-concept may be that of the ‘brother’ whereas in the crowd at the Olympic Games the self-concept most salient may be the collective self-concept (their nationality) and so on and so forth. Once we have identified which self-concept is most salient we can then examine how this identity influences the individual’s behaviour in line with 3 preconceived expectations and group norms (referred to as ‘prototypicality’7). In short when the individual’s ‘happy’ self-concept is salient they will adopt a set of behaviours that are expected by society of an individual who assumes this identity i.e. they may be smiling, generous, excited, care-free etc. The individual thus conforms to those group norms and, by extension, preconceived expectations without which others would be unable to identify them. Identity is after all a dialectical process. To be able to identify oneself as ‘happy’ makes an assumption that those to whom we are presenting this identity share a similar understanding of what it means to be ‘happy’ and can thus make a positive identification. The self-concept of ‘happy’ therefore becomes a signifier for a collection of preconceptions of society. This function works in much the same way as Iris Murdoch suggested language works in her novel Under The Net where language is reduced to a series of signifiers that allow meaning to be exchanged between individuals.8 This is the basis of what became known as the Social Identity Theory - of which Self-Categorization Theory is an extension. The Social Identity Perspective focuses upon how these self-concepts and their resultant behavioural expectations come to be adopted by the individual. The salient aspects of these theories will be considered at greater length in the following chapters. Subsequently, their usefulness to the writer of realist fiction will be made clear through the application of theory to practice in the course of this thesis. By definition the central aim of a writer working in the realist fiction tradition is to create a work of fiction that adheres to the real world as closely as possible through construction of plot, character, environment and so on. Indeed the literary critic Ian Watt in his work The Rise of The Novel suggested that a work of fiction if it was to be considered an example of formal realism would take steps to address, ‘the particularisation of time, place and person, to a natural and lifelike sequence of action, and to the creation of a literary style which gives the most exact verbal and rhythmical equivalent possible of the object described.’9 By adopting the principles proposed by social psychology, principles with empirical support, the writer may be able to produce a work of fiction much closer to reality than is otherwise possible and just as importantly, be able to avoid some of the pitfalls of falseness that may hinder the writer in their attempt at creating successful realist fiction. Therefore if the author is to create realistic characters, environments and plots, that the audience find believable and empathetic then the self-conceptualisation of characters becomes extremely 4 important. The audience are trained through their exposure to human interaction to identify and act upon certain behaviours and infer an emotional reaction and vice versa. By engaging with these behaviour producing self-concepts, and more importantly the social expectations assigned to them, the author can create realistic and three-dimensional characters that conform to reader expectations and are therefore more realistic in their portrayal of the complexities of the human condition. By way of an example of how The Social Identity Perspective can aid the writer we may surmise that if a narrative includes, as the creative segment of this thesis does, a character breaking the law then the author must first put in place social conditions that justify the motivation of the character to perform that behaviour. For the purposes of authorship if the social conditions (the character’s distinguishing features such as race, age, background, occupation etc.) prevalent in the fiction are carefully and deliberately crafted then the reactions, motivations, interactions, and actions of the fiction’s characters will conform to a reader’s ‘real world’ expectations as Turner suggests in the prefatory quotation. The difference between real life social psychology and fiction is that the author can change the political and ideological landscape to craft a desired reaction from their characters. It is the argument of this thesis therefore that Social Psychology is an extremely useful tool for the writer of realist fiction.

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