Human behavior in all its multiplicity

Issue 20: Highlights from our first twenty columns; key principles of identity; Jay on the 'You Are Not So Smart' podcast; and our research round up

This is the twentieth(!) issue of our newsletter, so we thought we would take a quick look back at some of the ground we’ve covered. One of our goals all along has been to show how looking at the world through the lens of social identity can help make sense of a tremendously wide range of human behavior.

Identity is fundamental to human psychology and, as such, influences everything we do—from how we understand the people and events around us up through how we mobilize for change and improve our societies. In the wise words of John Turner and his colleagues:

“Reality is always interpreted from the perspective of a socially defined perceiver. The fact of self, therefore, makes the study of cognition necessarily social psychology. All cognition is social cognition”.