Most work on social identity, defined as one's sense of self derived from membership to social groups, focuses on a single identity and its behavioral consequences. But a central insight of social identity theory is that people belong to multiple social groups, derive self-esteem from multiple identities and care to conform to the norms for those identities. However, very little work has turned its attention to understanding when and how multiple social identities interact. We motivate hypotheses with a framework that extends a social identity model to include multiple identities.
Using a longitudinal sample (
Despite incentives to do otherwise, we find that beliefs about university norms differ depending on the respondent's political identity. We interpret this as a spillover effect of attitudes from one identity to another.
We relate our results back to a model of social identity, to the literature on spillovers where such psychological spillovers are hard to empirically identify, and to methods for future work on identity and spillovers.