Social Identity Theory's Self-Esteem Hypothesis: A Review and Some Suggestions for Clarification

Abstract

Distinctions are made between global and specific, personal and social, and trait and state self-esteem, and these are used to structure a review of over 40 studies concerning social identity theory's hypothesis that (a) intergroup discrimination elevates self-esteem and (b) low self-esteem motivates discrimination. It is observed that researchers have tended to employ measures of global personal trait self-esteem in their investigations of this self-esteem hypothesis, and it is argued that measures of specific social state self-esteem are more consistent with social identity theory's assumptions. Although no convincing evidence is found for the self-esteem hypothesis in its full and unqualified form, it is argued that this is due to a lack of specificity in its formulation and it is suggested that a more qualified and specific version of the hypothesis may be more appropriate.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 688 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.