Who is this "We"? Levels of collective identity and self representations.

Cross-cultural perspectives have brought renewed interest in the social aspects of the self and the extent to which individuals define themselves in terms of their relationships to others and to social groups. This article provides a conceptual review of research and theory of the social self, arguing that the personal, relational, and collective levels of self-definition represent distinct forms of selfrepresentation with different origins, sources of self-worth, and social motivations. A set of 3 experiments illustrates haw priming of the interpersonal or collective we can alter spontaneous judgments of similarity and self-descriptions. Until recently, social psychological theories of the self focused on the individuated self-concept—the person's sense of unique identity differentiated from others. Cross-cultural perspectives, however, have brought a renewed interest in the social aspects of the self and the extent to which individuals define themselves in terms of their relationships to others and to social groups (Markus Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, Markus Singelis, 1994; Trafimow, Triandis, Triandis, 1989; Turner, Oakes, Haslam, Brewer, 1991). In other words, individuals seek to define themselves in terms of their immersion in relationships with others and with larger collectives and derive much of their self-evaluation from such social identities (Breckler Greenwald & Breckler, 1985). The motivational properties of collective identities are systematically documented in Baumeister and Leary's (1995) comprehensive review of the evidence in support of a fundamental need to belong as an innate feature of human nature. All of the theories mentioned above draw some kind of distinction between the individuated or personal self (those aspects of the self-concept that differentiate the self from all others) and a relational or social self (those aspects of the self-concept that