The Social Identity Graph

Principles of Social Transformation

There is a hidden organizing system behind social networks that delineates their boundaries, opportunities for growth, and logic of attraction and repulsion of both people and content. This system is the social identity graph.

Its origins go back a long way, to work done by Henri Tejfel, John Turner in the 70s and 90s. It is buried in various forms in the work of psychologists, sociobiologists, evolutionary biologists, evolutionary psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural theorists, psychotherapists, and philosophers.

Here are some of the abilities the social identity graph gives you:

1. The formation of social connections turns out to be driven by a social identity graph (SIG).
2. SIG gives you a theory of social discovery (“meeting people”) by framing social bonding as a species of social-group formation powered by the desire for a distinctive positive self-concept in relation to Others.
3. SIG provides a generalized model of social organization at different scales, that accommodates the variation of differences in group size (from couples to groups), and relationship type (sexual to platonic).
4. SIG extends the general information concept of ‘relevance’ to salience (relevance + social emotional significance), which is the kind of relevance-on-steroids that drives social sharing, fashion, crazes, and ‘fake news’
5. Social networks tend to be unconscious of SIG, while being structurally limited by it in fundamental ways; understanding SIG gives you understanding and control of how different social networks form and die.

Seven Propositions

1: Evolutionary group selection underlies social discovery

The urge for social discovery is rooted in the ‘group selection’ instincts of the eusocial human mammal.

When we encounter ‘others’ from our own species we instinctively try to bind to available social group identities that we think will enhance our standing in the social group.

Social identity is constitutive of self: it’s what survives, develops, evolves; it’s the answer to, who am I?

2: Develop & maintain a distinctive, positive self-concept at individual & group level

The user motivation for social discovery is the need…

1. to develop and maintain…
2. a positive self-concept (identity; who am I?)…
3. by achieving a positively-valued distinctiveness…
4. for their own group compared to other groups.

• Group identities can be any level of social organization: couples, small groups, tribes, nations, societies…
• The individual is the minimum case of the group.

3: Distinctive positive self-concept is achieved in relation to Others

The positive self-concept is achieved by

1. getting accepted into social groups with positive and distinctive social identities (or creating them),
2. gaining popularity, reputation, and influence among the group’s members (positive),
3. competing with, envying, or attacking threats (negative)

The composite of all positive and negative self-identity concepts is called the ‘self image’.

4: ‘Projection’ of self-image is the basis of individual & group attraction and aversion

Feelings of attraction and aversion are caused by ‘psychological projection’.

Projection happens in response to self-image problems.

Types of self-image problem:

1. Things you don’t or wouldn’t accept about yourself (shadow)
2. Things you would miss or fear you miss in yourself (persona)

5: Projection is how we expand self-concept through identification with or against others.

We like the qualities in the other that we want or miss in ourselves (persona)—“opposites attract”.

We hate the qualities in the other that we wouldn’t accept in ourselves (shadow).

In outward-facing cases, we like others who hate the same qualities in others (mutual shadow), e.g., racists amplify; egotists conflict.

Projection is the basis of social empathy as well as its opposite, hatred.

6: The effect of Specialness, Kindness, & Physical Beauty

Romantic connections emphasize three additional factors:

1. Specialness: ‘distinctive and successful’ (relative to the available population; a benign example is the way beards go in and out of fashion)
2. Kindness: drawn directly from imitation of parental nurturing. Fitness for parenthood, family, and in-group nurturing. Lovers’ babytalk is an extreme example of this.
3. Physical Beauty: primordial genetic quality indicated by facial symmetry, physique, health, and fitness.

7: Self-transformation is how we evolve

Evolution of the self follows the same pattern everywhere.

• You are homo duplex, a creature of two worlds, the individual and the group.
• To have fully meaningful lives, you must find and love people whom you would be willing to give up some portion of yourself.
• To fully evolve, you must find your true self by transcending your tribe through wider and wider identification of self with other.
• This pattern is is enshrined in nearly all cultures as the ‘monomyth’: discovering that you are alone and abandoned by the people you thought you belonged to; the struggle to discover who you really are and who or what you belong to by giving up your earlier self; answering the call to help a new people (your new social group identity), and through sacrifice, becoming a leader among them. This is the heart of culture, religion, and civilization. At the primitive level, this is the family and the tribe; at the most enlightened level, this is all humanity.

Next: The Meaning of Life