Introduction: what is a psychological group?

The social group is a fundamental but currently neglected topic in social psychology. Group affiliations are a universal feature of human social life. With only the rarest exceptions all human beings live in groups and act as group members. Moreover, the latter may be true psychologically even when an individual chooses to live in physical isolation. Group memberships are basic determinants of our social relations with others (whether positive or negative), our attitudes and values, and the social norms and roles that guide our conduct. In a larger sense, they are vehicles of culture, ideology and social and historical change. A social psychology without an adequate analysis of the group concept is, to a very real extent, like Hamlet without the prince. This chapter considers the problem of psychological group formation. What are the minimal conditions for a collection of individuals to constitute a psychological group – not a sociological, political, biological or some other form of group, but a state of affairs where they feel themselves to be and act as a group, where there is some kind of psychological acceptance of the group membership? The chapter will review some research and outline some tentative hypotheses on the topic.

There is a reasonable descriptive consensus in social psychology about the important empirical features of psychological group membership. There are three: firstly, there is the perceptual or ‘identity’ criterion: that a collection of people should define themselves and be defined by others as a group; they should share some collective perception of themselves as a distinct social entity, of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’.