Social Identity Theory

The concept of identity has become widespread within the social and behavioral sciences, cutting across disciplines from psychiatry and psychology to political science and sociology. Introduced more than fifty years ago, identity theory is a social psychological theory that attempts to understand person's identities, their sources in interaction and society, their processes of operation, and their consequences for interaction and society from a sociological perspective.

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only White people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed to challenge the logic of Western society? In this probing volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields.

The Science of Identity Crisis Explained: Erikson’s Theory, Identity Formation, Self-Discovery, Social Media Influence, Career Uncertainty, Relationships, and Finding Purpose in a Changing World is a powerful and accessible guide to understanding one of the most important psychological challenges of modern life. In a world defined by constant change, endless options, and digital self-presentation, many people struggle with confusion about who they are and where they are going. This book breaks down the science behind identity formation and identity crisis, offering readers a clear ...

In 2014, Francis Fukuyama wrote that American institutions were in decay, as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups. Two years later, his predictions were borne out by the rise to power of a series of political outsiders whose economic nationalism and authoritarian tendencies threatened to destabilize the entire international order. These populist nationalists seek direct charismatic connection to “the people”, who are usually defined in narrow identity terms that offer an irresistible call to an in-group and exclude large parts of the population as a whole.

In this book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a 'heavy' and 'solid', hardware-focused modernity to a 'light' and 'liquid', software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of...

You don’t become yourself in isolation. Every word you speak, every role you play, every expectation you sense from others—these are not background noise. They are the very forces shaping your identity. What if the person you believe yourself to be is, in large part, a reflection of the social world around you? This is the powerful insight at the heart of George Herbert Mead’s work—and it changes the way you see everything. In George Herbert Mead for Beginners: How We Become Ourselves Through Others, complex ideas are stripped down to their essence and brought to life through clear,...

This book examines how authority in the United States is organized, how it shifted over time, and why the system now feels unstable and adversarial regardless of which party holds power. It is not about elections or candidates. It is an examination of how the system itself works and how it drifted away from the balance it was designed to maintain. At its core, the book focuses on federalism.

This is a book about ideas. Specifically, this is a book about the evolution of a certain set of ideas, and how these ideas have come to dominate every important discussion about race, gender, and identity today. Have you heard someone refer to language as literal violence, or say that science is sexist? Or declare that being obese is healthy, or that there is no such thing as biological sex? Or that valuing hard work, individualism, and even punctuality is evidence of white supremacy?

Comparing Erik Erikson: How His Theory of Psychosocial Development Aligns With and Differs From Piaget, Freud, and Modern Developmental Psychology offers a clear and comprehensive guide to understanding one of the most influential developmental theories of the past century. This book places Erik Erikson’s psychosocial model in conversation with the work of Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, attachment researchers, social learning theorists, and modern developmental psychologists. Through accessible explanations and practical insights, readers gain a full picture of how emotional, cognitive, and ...

What if the life you’re chasing was never truly yours to begin with? Look closely at your desires. The promotion you want. The recognition you crave. The lifestyle you admire. The relationships you pursue. They feel personal—deeply personal. Yet beneath the surface, something far more powerful is at work. You are learning what to want by watching others. And once you see this, you begin to notice it everywhere. This book pulls back the curtain on one of the most overlooked forces shaping human behavior—and it changes the way you understand yourself, your relationships, and the world ...

Pioneers of Human Behaviour: Henri Tajfel A Gateway to His Life, Theories, and Legacy What makes human beings draw a line between “us” and “them”? Henri Tajfel, one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century, transformed how we understand prejudice, identity, belonging, and group conflict. Shaped by wartime Europe, Holocaust loss, refugee work, and a lifelong refusal to reduce social injustice to psychology alone, Tajfel showed that the roots of discrimination can begin far earlier than hatred. This concise yet powerful volume traces Tajfel’s life from ...

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST A transgender reporter's "powerful, profoundly moving" narrative tour through the surprisingly vibrant queer communities sprouting up in red states (New York Times Book Review), offering a vision of a stronger, more humane America. Ten years ago, Samantha Allen was...

What if everything orthodox psychology understands about selfhood is built on a critical epistemological illusion? In a challenge to Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Kohut, the architect of Self Psychology, this multidisciplinary research argues that the ego—therapy’s dogmatic mediator—is not the reality tester, but the delusion maker. The ego is a pathological artifact of mirroring. Grounded in the lived reality of Panmodal Aphantasia (absence of mental representations across all modalities), this book proves that the self emerges even without reflection, autopoietically—...

In American Awakening, Joshua Mitchell compares today’s secular politics of identity - skin tone, gender, and sexuality - to the religious awakenings of America’s past. The book asks where the clerisy of identity politics came from, how identity politics claimed a death grip on liberalism, and how can it be defeated.

Who—or what—really shapes history? For centuries, modern thought has described the world as a system—structures, laws, and impersonal forces organizing social life. But what if this perspective misses the most decisive element? Subjectology: Sociology of Social Subjects offers a bold and original answer: history is not driven by systems alone, but by subjects. Individuals, societies, nations, and civilizations are not passive components of a structure. They are subjects that act, decide, remember, and transform reality. From Thomas Hobbes to contemporary debates on artificial ...

On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan J. Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered.

What if topology were not about objects, but about transformations? Not about space, but about the conditions under which identity persists? This book invites listeners into a radical rethinking of mathematics—not as a solemn march of proofs, but as a living practice of imaginative stability, structural openness, and conceptual play. Moving through classical theory, unresolved conjectures, and emerging landscapes of abstraction, this work reframes topology as a mode of thought that thrives on deformation, ambiguity, and partial knowledge.

An exploration into the curation of the self in Western civilization from Da Vinci to Kim Kardashian. In a technologically-saturated era where nearly everything can be effortlessly and digitally reproduced, we're all hungry to carve out our own unique personalities, our own bespoke personae, to...

Bloomsbury presents Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory by Marquis Bey, read by Savannah Beckford Nonbinary Life is an invitation to imagine the possibilities of life outside of gender. To write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, and to love without regard for gender is to lead a non-binary life. In...

When studying social work, it can be difficult to find the time to step back and think about what it actually means to be a social worker. Now in its third edition, How to Be a Social Worker critically examines the knowledge base of social work and encourages you to explore how your own values...