This research used a survey design (N ¼ 227) to investigate Scottish people's support or opposition to independence from Britain. It was hypothesised that political attitudes towards supra-national bodies are not a direct function of the degree of ingroup (Scottish) identification, but are moderated by the extent to which the expression of ingroup identity is seen as being undermined within the larger entity. This feeling of identity undermining is assumed to arise from perceptions of incompatibility with the outgroup and ingroup powerlessness within the common group. The results provided support for these hypotheses. Only for those participants who had high feelings of identity undermining did identification lead to stronger separatist attitudes. Moreover, incompatibility with the outgroup and ingroup powerlessness predicted feelings of identity undermining while this latter mediated their impact on attitudes to being part of Britain. These findings underline the importance of taking into account (a) the contents ascribed to identities and their relations, and (b) the practical ability to pursue a way of live based on these contents in order to understand the way identity processes shape attitudes towards superordinate groups.

Of bikers, teachers and Germans: Groups’ diverging views about their prototypicality. British Journal of Social Psychology, 43, 385–400] have shown that ingroup members often tend to judge the ingroup as more prototypical of the superordinate group than other subgroups. In this paper, we argue that, in addition to the motivational processes that have been posited to explain this phenomenon, prototypicality judgments may vary according to instrumental considerations. In particular, those who believe their ingroup interest to be undermined by remaining part of the common group will downplay ingroup’s prototypicality as a way to sustain their separatist position. In a first study (N = 63), we found that Scottish respondents who support Scottish independence judged the Scots to be less prototypical of Britain than the English, as compared with Scots who do not support independence. In a second study (N = 191), we manipulated the rhetorical context within which prototypicality judgments were made. Results showed that the pattern found in study 1 only applied when the issue of independence was made salient. When the issue of the importance of Scottish history in Britain was made salient, the opposite pattern appeared, i.e. supporters of independence judged the Scots more prototypical than the English compared to non-supporters. These results were also interpreted in instrumental terms. [author's abstract

The impact of identities encompassing all human beings (e.g., human and/or global identities) on intergroup relations is complex, with studies showing mostly positive (e.g., less dehumanization), but also negative (e.g., deflected responsibility for harm behavior), effects. However, different labels and measures have been used to examine the effects of these all‐inclusive superordinate identities, without a systematic empirical examination of the extent to which they overlap or differ in their sociopsychological prototypical content. This study examined whether different labels activate the same contents in laypeople's conceptualization. Two hundred and forty‐eight participants openly described one of six labels: “All humans everywhere”; “People all over the world”; “People from different countries around the world”; “Global citizens”; “Citizens of the world”; and “Members of world community.” Results from quantitative content analyses showed that the different labels activated different thematic attributes, representing differences in their core prototypical meaning. We propose that a general distinction should be made between labels that define membership based on human attributes (e.g., biological attributes) and those that evoke attributes characteristic of membership in a global political community (e.g., attitudinal attributes), as their effect on intergroup relations may vary accordingly.

In this paper, I raise the question of whether psychological citizenship (i.e. the subjective sense of being a citizen) is necessarily intertwined with a sense of national identity in our contemporary world. First, I argue that psychological citizenship is always dependent upon a sense of shared identity with the community (be it national or other), and I explore some of the reasons why this is the case. Second, I argue that such sense of shared identity can nevertheless sometimes remain implicit so that in order to assess its impact one may need to look beyond people's explicit statements of identification. Third, I turn to the more specific question of national identity and argue that such identity presents particular characteristics that make it consonant with the notion of citizenship (and thus able to sustain a subjective sense of citizenship) in ways that other identities might not always be. Finally, I compare a psychological citizenship based on national identity to one which would be based on a ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ identity. I argue that, whilst the former constitutes a pervasive social psychological reality, doubts can be raised as to whether this is the case for the latter, and thus as to whether it can form a credible alternative to national identity as the psychological substrate of citizenship. I conclude with some reflections concerning what different approaches of social psychology can bring to the study of the psychological aspects of citizenship. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.