La. Jackson et al., ACHIEVING POSITIVE SOCIAL IDENTITY - SOCIAL-MOBILITY, SOCIAL CREATIVITY, AND PERMEABILITY OF GROUP BOUNDARIES, Journal of personality and social psychology, 70(2), 1996, pp. 241-254
Three experiments examined 5 hypotheses of social identity theory (H.
Tajfel and J. C. Turner, 1979) concerning social mobility and social c
reativity strategies and how permeability of group boundaries affects
strategy use. As predicted, members of negatively distinctive in-group
s distanced themselves psychologically from the in-group(social mobili
ty), rated the distinguishing dimension as less undesirable (social cr
eativity), and rated the in-group more favorably on other dimensions (
social creativity) than did members of nondistinctive in-groups. Also
as predicted, social creativity strategies were more likely to be used
when group boundaries were impermeable rather than permeable. Permeab
ility effects on social mobility strategies were more complex than pre
dicted. Additional findings shed light on relationships among identity
-enhancement strategies and on how dimensions are chosen to flatter a
negatively distinctive in-group.