Introduction
These myopic errors can be overcome if one regards the social contructionist view of psychology as a spatially as well as historically definitive set of meaning making practices. Psychology is closely aligned to the hegemonic structure of the society itself and therefore the domain of psychology has to be confined within particular systems of representation, rather than universal generalizations, to construSocial Identity theory is perhaps the most widely accepted cognitive theory of group behaviour in social psychology in the globalised age of cross-cultural interaction. Initiated by Tajfel in 1974, this theory has gained a wider scope through the intercultural studies conducted in contemporary western academia in the recent times. However, the universality of the social identity theory is still undermined by the hegemonic white centrality of the discourse as the acceptability of the theory across a wider array of cultural groups is still debated by theorists like Brown, Feather, McAuliffe and Lopez-Saez. (Yuki, 2003, p. 166) The discourses of social psychology is indeed contaminated by dominant North American perspectives and generalised to determine the behavioural and cognitive patterns of other cultures across the globe. However, this ready generalization posits the danger of being myopic because the scholar may be aligned to a certain ideological framework and unconsciously or deliberately omit any culture specific characteristics prevalent in those foreign cultures. In this juncture, it is increasingly necessary to assess how social identity theory can just as well be applicable to diversified cultural landscapes. Speaking of diverse cultures, Australia is a land characterized and inhabited by a complex heterogeneous demography, where both white individualist and aboriginal collectivist cultures coexist side by side. The essay would examine in detail how the social identity theory can be applicable in the Australian context and how far it can explain the disparities in the communicative framework between the aboriginal and non-aboriginal cultures.
Discussion
Social Identity theory presents a comprehensive perspective of how social groups behave in a given geopolitical landscape and of the cognitive processes inherent in exchanges and communications between these groups. Triandis delineates the aspects of the self in social psychology. He comes up with the notion of a subjective culture in which a group of people belong ‘who speak a common language’ and ‘live in adjacent locations during the same historical period’. (Triandis, p. 507) However, while some aspects of the self is universal, others are specific to the sociocultural reality of the time in which the self is present. He differentiates between there kinds of self, which are the private self (the cognition of personal needs and personal behaviours), the public self (cognitions regarding the generalized other’s view of the self) and the collective self (cognitions regarding an image of the self that is found in some specific collectives like family, friends, co-workers etc) Tajfel’s theory concludes that an individual chooses ingroups that maximise his or her positive social identity. But his formulation also emphasies an individualistic culture, because in many collectivist societies people do not have the choice of an in-group. In societies such as aboriginal Australian tribes, the individual is integrated into the framework of the society through a process of depersonalization.
ct an empirical category of a ‘socially accountable psychology’. (Riggs, p.2) In the Australian context, the understanding of culture is closely related to the concepts of race, ethnicity and gender. Riggs points out the ways in which white systems of representation construct the reading of ‘culture’ in Australia. However, the privileges of whiteness is perhaps already much discussed in the social sciences, but it may be useful to note how the white constructs differential categories based on race and acquires certain privileges over non-whites in the Australian context, and also the corollary discriminations faced by the non-white collective. Moreover, while there are discriminations within the white demographic based on gender and class, it will be in the essay’s interest to follow a singular understanding of white culture. This will be useful to construct a binary reading of white and non-white cultures.
In case of a society where cultural groups ultimately define the subject, the behavioural patterns of the group is also in turn shaped by the cognitive representations of the subjects within a shared social category. (Yuki, 2003, p. 166) The social identity theory tries to simply suggest that the subject is psychologically inseparable from the group. Individual subjects come to regard themselves as interchangeable parts of a larger collective than as unique subjects characterized by differences. This consideration of semblance over difference is what drives an individual towards social identity. Cross cultural research is of the opinion that individualism is the basis of social psychology in the European ‘white-centric’ cultures while the self is defined in more of a collectivist framework in the Eastern, African, Latin American and Australian aboriginal societies. (Jetten, Postmes & McAuliffe, 2002, p. 189) The term ‘tribe’ that is attributed to these societies itself bears a collective notion of co-existence and the identity of the individual is increasingly determined in relation to the group in these collectivist societies.
