Robber's Cave Experiment: Personal Versus Social Identity

Briefly discuss the self and self-knowledge, including the idea of personal versus social identity. Also, define self-esteem and the perspectives on self-esteem presented in your text (such as whether high self-esteem is always beneficial, gender differences in self-esteem, and self-evaluations)

Self knowledge is nothing more than an individual knowing and understanding their “true” self. When I say “true” self, there is an intertwined meaning of not only the person knowing of themselves, but it also involves the vision of how others view you. However, the “true” self may not be what is always represented to others. Our inner thoughts, feelings and beliefts serves as the engine to having self-knowledge. There are case that our self knowledge

Tell what happened in the study and explain its significance. What implications might this study have for diversity and interaction/integration across racial, ethnic, gender, and class?

Muzafer Sherif was a psychologist that studied the psychological understanding of groups and their members. The realistic conflict theory was one of his biggest contributions towards understanding group conflict. The Robber’s Cave experiment put Sherif theories to the test, given twenty boy, all from white middle class backgrounds. During this experiement, the twenty boys were broken into two group, each not knowing the existance of one another. Within these ingroups, they developed their own norms and attachments to other group members by sharing the experiences of activities together. They even went as far as to naming their prospective groups the Rattlers and the Eagles. Once the competition stage stated, the two groups were brought together to compete against eachother for varies prizes only to the winners. When each group became aware of one another, they immediately started stragtigizing ways to ensure that they become the winners in competion. However, over time these groups started escalading the level of competions to the point that they started to get physical. During the cool of period, each group classified their own ingroup as the favorable one while giving reasons to dislike the outgroup. With this experiment alone, Sherif was able to prove that conflict amougst groups can lead to prejudice attitudes and discriminatory behavior. Using this example, one can easily see how prejudice can be manifested just because one belongs to a certain ingroup. Rather it be racial, ethnic, gender or class, by belonging to a particular group, one becomes to favor their group while totally discrediting outgroups. (Mcleod