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Winnifred R. Louis and Deborah J. Terry
School of Psychology, University of Queensland

'Acting for Women: A Social Psychological Approach to Women's Political Decisions and Identity'

In this paper, we present a social psychological analysis of decision-making for political attitudes and behaviour. We are interested in predicting women and men's views and actions across a range of issues, from willingness to attend Australia Day celebrations to support for greater police powers in the 'war on terrorism'. To that end, we focus on the relationship between identity processes and decisions to act in a political context.

The theoretical context for our research is a social psychological framework called social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). In this paper, we emphasize three aspects of our approach: (1) the self who acts is socially defined; (2) the social self can be constructed from multiple group identities; (3) the possible group identities can reinforce each other or conflict, with important implications for political attitudes and behaviour. We analyse a sample of 220 psychology undergraduates, looking at the importance of gender, race, religion, political affiliation, and age; associations between these identities; and the relationship between identities and political attitudes and actions.

The self who acts is socially defined. Social identity theorists (Tajfel and Turner, 1979; see also, Terry and Hogg, 1996) argue that there is a qualitative change in people's decision-making when they think of themselves as group members, compared to unique individuals. When women identify with women as a group, they make different kinds of decisions than when they think of themselves only as individuals. Research in the social identity tradition has shown that identification changes people's evaluations of the cost and benefits of conflict choices and pro-group actions (see e.g. Louis and Taylor, 2001). For example in the present study, women who were more strongly identified as Australians were more likely to intend to challenge critics of Australia's national values. Their intentions to act were associated with the belief that this behaviour would benefit not only Australians as a group, but also themselves personally. When people identify with a group, benefits and costs to the group are seen as having implications for the self and can influence political attitudes and choices.

The social self can be constructed from multiple group identities. People can define themselves in terms of many different groups – occupational, racial and gender categories for example. Social and political influences interact with personality variables to influence the probability that particular identities will be salient in self-definition. Group membership becomes meaningful for people when they see membership as associated with differences in important outcomes. However, it is satisfying to identify with groups that produce personally important positive outcomes but threatening to identify with groups that produce personally important negative outcomes. For disadvantaged groups, the trade-off between 'making sense' of the world and feeling safe can produce contradictory tendencies to identify (e.g., because being a woman has important consequences) and to disidentify (because the consequences are threatening). In the present study, for example, men who have strong power motives have high gender identity (social dominance orientation; Sidanius, 1993), but women with strong power motives have weaker gender identity.

Group identities can reinforce each other or conflict. The relationship among the group identities themselves will vary depending on social and political factors such as relative group power. Returning to psychology undergraduates' perceptions of their group identities, we show that whereas for women, political identification reinforces the importance of gender, and forms a distinct association independent of an Australian-White-Christian identity cluster. For men however, right-wing political identity, Australian national identity, and racial identification reinforce the importance of gender, overlapping with the Australian-White-Christian troika.

Conclusions and implications for political action. The decision-making self is socially constructed. This construction through social identification draws on a range of possible group memberships, and these group memberships vary in whether they reinforce or inhibit each other. We believe the psychological processes we describe contribute to the factionalism that often divides disadvantaged groups. For those who are members of the multiply-defined high-power minority (Australian-Christian-White-Male-Right-wing) each group identification reinforces the others, so that pro-group activism may be reinforced from multiple identities and group memberships. By contrast, those who are advantaged on some dimension but disadvantaged on others may be inhibited from identification, not empowered. Implications for feminist theory and activism are discussed.

References
  1. Louis, W. R., and D. M. Taylor (2001). 'Understanding the September 11th terrorist attack on America: The role of intergroup theories of normative influence.' Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2(1), 87-100.
  2. Sidanius, J. (1993). 'The psychology of group conflict and the dynamics of oppression: A social dominance perspective.' In S. Iyengar and W. J. McGuire (eds.), Explorations in political psychology (pp. 183-219). London: Duke University Press.
  3. Tajfel, H., and J. C. Turner (1979). 'An integrative theory of intergroup conflict.' In W.G. Austin and S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33-47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.
  4. Terry, D. J., and M. A. Hogg (1996). Group norms and the attitude-behavior relationship: A role for group identification. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 776-793.
  5. Dr. Winnifred Louis is a social psychologist working at the Centre for Research on Group Processes in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Her interests focus on identity and decision-making in conflict, and extend more broadly to the social psychology of power and intergroup relations. As a PhD student at McGill University in Montréal, Canada, she studied men and women's reactions to discrimination and privilege; English-French political and ethnolinguistic behaviour; and language retention and identification among the Inuit in Arctic Québec. In Queensland, she presently holds a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, working in collaboration with Dr. Deborah J. Terry. Current projects concern the relationship of national, religious, political, and gender identification and behaviour; rural-urban relations and gun control; prejudice towards Asians; attitudes towards asylum seekers; and peace activism and the 'war on terrorism'.

<wlouis@psy.uq.edu.au>